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Many governments world-wide are promoting longer working life due to the social and economic repercussions of demographic change. However, not all workers are equally able to extend their employment careers. Thus, while national policies raise the overall level of labour market participation, they might create new social and labour market inequalities. This paper explores how institutional differences in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan affect individual retirement decisions on the aggregate level, and variations in individuals’ degree of choice within and across countries. We investigate which groups of workers are disproportionately at risk of being ‘pushed’ out of employment, and how such inequalities have changed over time. We use comparable national longitudinal survey datasets focusing on the older population in England, Germany and Japan. Results point to cross-national differences in retirement transitions. Retirement transitions in Germany have occurred at an earlier age than in England and Japan. In Japan, the incidence of involuntary retirement is the lowest, reflecting an institutional context prescribing that employers provide employment until pension age, while Germany and England display substantial proportions of involuntary exits triggered by organisational-level redundancies, persistent early retirement plans or individual ill-health. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Faced with demographic ageing, European policy makers since the mid-1990s have taken a turn from fostering early retirement to promoting longer working life by reducing early exit incentives and facilitating work continuation. However, it remains open whether these reforms are yet reflected in the retirement plans and preferences of future pensioners’ cohorts. Using most recent data on desired retirement ages from the fifth wave of the European Social Survey (2010/11 wave), this paper empirically investigates how far current policy reforms are in line with the retirement age preferences of older workers aged 45 and over. Results show that older workers approaching retirement ages still intend to retire before the politically envisioned age of 65, and in many cases also before nationally defined standard retirement ages. Despite visible progress in implementing active ageing measures, the challenge of motivating older workers to continue working until or even beyond retirement ages thus remains. At the same time, there are regime-specific problem groups that face difficulties in adjusting to the active ageing paradigm of longer working life. Especially in countries with little employment support, those with unstable work careers, employment interruptions and few financial resources are at a high risk of being crowded out from late career employment and thus from the possibility of ensuring a decent standard of living in old age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article suggests a multidimensional globalization measure, encompassing economic, (socio)technological, cultural and political dimensions of global change. This measure builds on previous work by Dreher, Lockwood and Redoano, the OECD and Kearney, but extends it by additional dimensions and indicators that represent central facets of a genuine sociological concept of globalization. The article first describes in detail the multidimensional nature of the globalization process and then develops an overall sociological index of globalization, which the authors call GlobalIndex. This index covers the development of globalization in 97 different countries from 1970 to 2002. Using the GlobalIndex, the authors describe the development of globalization on a worldwide scale as well as for different country contexts. Finally, they include the GlobalIndex as an explanatory variable in two micro-level longitudinal analyses of labour market transitions during the early career period in Germany and the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profound social and economic transformations have taken place over the last two decades in modern societies. These changes are often referred to as globalization. The aim of this article is to examine whether processes of globalization have produced increasing convergence of employment-related aspects of national-level welfare regimes, industrial relation systems and mid-career employment paths among a set of industrialized nations. A theory of convergence is developed to explain the coercive-isomorphic and mimetic-imitation effects of globalization, followed by potential reasons for growing divergence. The study concludes that globalization has produced 'converging divergences' and not resulted in a simple convergence based on neoliberal and market employment- related policies that leads to a rise of patchwork careers for all employees. Rather, it has served to intensify existent differences between industrial relations in the welfare regime clusters of countries and accentuated within-country occupational class, educational and gender inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]