What We Need to Know About Retirement: Pressing Issues for the Coming Decade

Abstract

The current landscape of retirement is changing dramatically as population aging becomes increasingly visible. This review of pressing retirement issues advocates research on (1) changing meanings of retirement; (2) impact of technology; (3) the role of housing in retirement; (4) human resource strategies; (5) adjustment to changing retirement policies; (6) the pension industry; and (7) the role of ethnic diversity in retirement.

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What We Need to Know About Retirement: Pressing
Issues for the Coming Decade
Kène Henkens, PhD,1,2,3,* Hendrik P. van Dalen, PhD,1,4 David J. Ekerdt, PhD,5 Douglas
A. Hershey, PhD,6 Martin Hyde, PhD,7 Jonas Radl, PhD,8 Hanna van Solinge, PhD,1
Mo Wang, PhD,9 and Hannes Zacher, PhD10
1Department of Work & Retirement, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, The Hague. 2Department of
Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. 3Department of Public Health, University of Groningen, UMCG,
Netherlands. 4Department of Economics, Tilburg School of Economics and Management, Tilburg University, Netherlands.
5Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence. 6Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University,
Stillwater. 7College of Human and Health Sciences, Centre for Innovative Ageing, Swansea University, UK. 8Department of
Social Sciences, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. 9Department of Management, Warrington College of Business,
University of Florida, Gainesville. 10Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Germany.
*Address correspondence to: Kène Henkens, PhD, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, P.O. Box 11650, NL 2502 AR The Hague,
The Netherlands. E-mail: Henkens@nidi.nl; C.J.I.M.Henkens@uva.nl
Received January 31, 2017; Editorial Decision Date May 12, 2017
Decision Editor: Rachel Pruchno, PhD
Abstract
The current landscape of retirement is changing dramatically as population aging becomes increasingly visible. This review
of pressing retirement issues advocates research on (a) changing meanings of retirement, (b) impact of technology, (c) the
role of housing in retirement, (d) human resource strategies, (e) adjustment to changing retirement policies, (f) the pension
industry, and (g) the role of ethnic diversity in retirement.
Keywords: Life course, Older workers, Pensions, Retirement, Work
Time can be a powerful force that shapes careers and lives.
Yet, in a recent paper in Science, Quoidbach, Gilbert, &
Wilson (2013) demonstrated that people have fundamental
misconceptions about their future selves. Although people
realize that they have changed in important ways com-
pared to the past, when asked to consider their future they
expect to remain pretty much the same as they are cur-
rently. When it comes to the study of retirement, social sci-
entists are unlikely to fall prey to a similar “end of history”
illusion. Since the middle of the 20th century, there have
been too many changes in retirement and pension arrange-
ments for researchers to become complacent about a xed
future. In this essay, we engage jointly in a constructive pro-
cess of prospective thought in order to identify important
“need to know” questions for future research—specically,
questions that require answers to address the challenges of
an aging society for the coming 10years.
We focus our attention on the evolving landscape sur-
rounding retirement in the Western world, that is, the pro-
cess of withdrawal from paid work to a permanent state
without work, a period that some have referred to as the
“third age” of life (Gilleard & Higgs, 2005). The nature
of this transition has changed markedly both in terms of
timing and content over the past three decades (Wang,
2013) and, at least in this regard, the future will likely have
similar changes in store. Of course, the precise nature of
these changes offers the biggest challenge for social scien-
tists and policy makers. Esping-Andersen (2000) suggests
that in order to understand society we need strong “fog
lamps”—that is, intentional and purposeful empiricism—to
The Gerontologist
cite as: Gerontologist, 2018, Vol. 58, No. 5, 805–812
doi:10.1093/geront/gnx095
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“penetrate the dense fog of social transformation” (p.72).
The social and economic transformations surrounding
retirement are generally expected to be characterized by
longer lives, greater uncertainty and inequality surround-
ing public pension rights and levels, and the need to assume
greater labor market and savings risks over the course of our
lives—all changes that are likely to spill over to the retire-
ment stage. We will rst outline these changing forces and
then develop seven important questions for future research.
Changing Retirement Landscape
At the heart of debates on social security and pensions in
aging societies lie three factors that policy makers have to
deal with. The rst is that the length of life expectancy has
shown an almost constant increase over the past 160years
(Oeppen & Vaupel, 2002). And recent academic research
(Kontis etal., 2017) only reafrms these trends and they nd
that the progress comes from a decreasing trend of mortal-
ity at higher ages. Furthermore, projections by the United
Nations (2015) and other population-tracking agencies offer
no signs that this trend will stop anytime soon. In 1970,
men in OECD countries were expected to live 11 years in
retirement. By 2014, despite increasing retirement ages, the
retirement period in those same countries had increased to
18years. The corresponding gures for men and women were
15 and 22years, respectively (OECD, 2011). Asecond factor
that plays a role in the adaptation process is that errors in
judgment and planning have turned out to be substantial. As
Oeppen & Vaupel, 2002 note: “As the expectation of life rose
higher and higher, experts were unable to imagine its rising
much further.” Demographers and actuaries have in the past
repeatedly underestimated the increase in life expectancies
(Bennett etal., 2015; Olshansky etal., 2009; Oppers etal.,
2012), thereby leading to unpleasant surprises for pension
systems promising benets dened in terms of nal or aver-
age wages. Athird factor which plays a role in policy debates
is the fact that life expectancies have been shown to differ
substantially among sociodemographic groups as a function
of gender, education, lifestyle, and from one country to the
next. The variations in healthy life expectancy and disability-
adjusted life years are also substantial (Murray etal., 2015).
To deal with the dilemmas of a welfare state in an aging
society, the consensus view among policy makers appears
to be that credible and sustainable pension plans can only
be attained by raising the statutory retirement age, reduc-
ing benets, and shifting a considerable amount of nancial
risk onto the shoulders of individual citizens (OECD, 2011).
The increase in life expectancy makes pensions expensive,
the diversity in life expectancy across social classes leads to
perverse redistribution effects, and the underestimation of
increases in life expectancies has led to the underfunding of
pension funds and government programs.
These developments will also impact the labor market.
After decades in which workers and employers used the
exit route of early retirement (Blundell et al., 2016), current
retirement reforms force both social partners to adjust to
the idea of extending working life (Beehr & Bennett, 2015).
Such a fundamental policy shift is bound to lead to a rethink-
ing of the terms of labor contracts concerning pay, pension
rights, and employment protection. So far rms have sought
ways to shift risks by transferring them to employees, which
has resulted in shorter employment contracts, a decrease in
employment protection, and a closer relationship between
pay and productivity. A gradual rise in self-employment in
western societies is also a reection of this trend.
Finally, new generations of older workers will be more
demographically diverse than workers in the past. Ethnic
minorities and immigrants are becoming an increasingly
substantial segment of the population in advanced econ-
omies. But the members of these (minority) groups have
signicantly dimmer labor market prospects than natives
(Adsera & Chiswick, 2007) and these prospects will spill
over into having lower pension incomes.
“Need to Know” Questions
Against the background of these sociodemographic develop-
ments, future working lives are likely to be extended, and
individuals will have to deal with uncertainty and risks on
a much broader scale, assume new responsibilities and per-
haps take on new roles. Though retirement research attracts
the attention of an increasing number of scholars across the
world, the current literature has just started to offer insights
that reect on these future challenges. The goal of this paper
is to present forward-looking research questions that we—a
group of interdisciplinary scholars (sociologists, psycholo-
gists, and economists) coming from different countries—
perceive are in need of an answer in the coming decade. The
issues relate to retirement, both as a transitional process and
as a phase of life. We hope to offer thought-provoking and
inspiring topics that we believe are currently understudied
and that merit scholarly attention. Although we present this
paper as a consensus statement it should primarily be viewed
as an invitation to join in the scholarly conversation about
the future research on retirement. The topics discussed are all
linked with the macrolevel developments presented above.
As we will elaborate below, the prospect of increasing life
expectancy calls for research on the meaning of retirement,
technology and housing. Pension reforms merit research on
responses of employees and employers to these reforms and
the role of the pension industry in providing old age secu-
rity in an aging population. In view of the increasing demo-
graphic diversity, there is a clear need for research on how
migrant and immigrant populations fare in host countries.
What Is the Meaning of Contemporary
Retirement?
Great effort is expended by individuals, organizations, and
governments to accomplish occupational retirement. It has
become an aspirational status toward which people work
and save. But as a stage of life, what is it and what will it
be in the future? Unlike the fairly well specied adult roles
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for work and family, the role of retiree—if there indeed is
one—is vague; retirees report that freedom is retirement’s
great advantage (Ekerdt & Koss, 2016). Yet we assert that
retired life is not wholly improvisational, and that retirees
adopt lifestyles that give coherence, structure, and mean-
ing to their leisure. For social and behavioral scientists,
the identication of such lifestyles is interesting in its own
right. Such research can help answer important questions
about the emerging nature of contemporary retirement. In
particular, public pension expenditures for longer retire-
ment periods may require, in return, that this stage of life
acquires purposes beyond personal gratication, apply-
ing retirees’ reservoir of human capital to new roles and
responsibilities in communitylife.
Researchers typically assess retirement adjustment or
the quality of retired life using measures of emotions and
well-being (see for an overview: Barbosa, Monteiro, &
Murta, 2016; Van Solinge, 2013). Taking another direction,
adjustment can also be conceived as conformity to recog-
nized ways of conducting oneself as a retiree, responding to
cultural and moral guidance about time use, money, soci-
ality, and self-satisfaction. A“good retiree” perhaps seeks
continuity with longstanding roles, or attends to prescrip-
tive discourses about active aging or leisure consumption.
As members of moral communities, people abide by certain
standards in order to make their lives intelligible to them-
selves and to others (Katz & Laliberte Rudman, 2004).
Voluntarily or under constraint, retirees t themselves to
prevailing archetypes of retirement.
To unveil these meanings of retirement, we encourage
a three-stage research effort. First, there should be explor-
atory, interpretive research at multiple sites that aims to
distill a limited set of the common lifestyles or models for
retirement that retirees consciously follow (Hornstein &
Wapner, 1985). To suggest some examples, retirees may
claim to follow paths of self-gratication and leisure con-
sumption; of bodily tness; of altruism, service, or family
devotion; of self-development; of frugality owing to income
limitations; or of residual identication with work. Such
mental models should be identied among persons within
the rst years after retirement in order to keep the focus
on the experience of retiring rather than later life gener-
ally. Following this conceptual mapping, a second stage
would generate reliable and valid survey items that ask
people about the extent of their identication with or pref-
erence for various models of retirement (Hopkins, Roster,
& Wood, 2006). Third, these tools for the characterization
of retirement can be used to test theory-driven hypotheses
about the meanings of retirement, how they vary within
and between individuals. Perhaps certain models of retire-
ment beckon workers and motivate their preparation. Are
those models later adopted? Do retirement lifestyles evolve
with more extensive experience? And do lifestyle adoptions
differ by gender, social class, work history, health, person-
ality, and immigration status? Cross-national and regional
comparisons would be possible, as would temporal
comparisons to examine whether the nature of retirement
is changing among successive cohorts. Ultimately, we can
learn how former workers nd their way to coherent selves
within the open-endedness of retirement.
How Will Technology Shape the Retirement
Process?
Rapid advances in technology have changed the way peo-
ple live their lives and perform their work. Although some
studies have scrutinized the ways in which technology
use may benet or challenge the aging process (Charness
& Boot, 2009; Thompson & Mayhorn, 2012), it remains
unclear how technology will shape the retirement process.
This holds true for three specic topics.
The rst set of questions deals with the impact of tech-
nology on nancial preparation for retirement and asset
management during retirement. Given the rapid develop-
ment in mobile hardware and software (e.g., smartphones
and apps), personal nancial management has become
unprecedentedly convenient for individual users. Thanks
to the advancement of technology, transaction costs associ-
ated with investments (e.g., stock and mutual fund trading)
have decreased signicantly for individual investors. On
the one hand, it is conceivable that low transaction costs
will result in a larger nest egg for retirement saving. On the
other hand, easy access to ones’ nancial resources and low
transaction costs may also lure individual investors into
undertaking investment strategies that harm their long term
interest. There is abundant evidence (cf. Barber & Odean,
2008) that, on average, the most active traders underper-
form those who trade less. In general individuals choose
stocks that grab their attention, whereas professional trad-
ers are more likely to stay away from such stocks as they
consider a wider variety of stocks. Therefore, it is important
to understand the potential countervailing effects of these
technological improvements on how individuals monitor
and manage their nancial resources in a prudent manner in
preparation for retirement and during the retirement period.
The second set of questions concerns the impact of tech-
nology of working longer and facilitating a better work-life
balance. Technological innovations may provide individu-
als with more opportunities to work in a location- and
time-independent way, thereby making longer working
careers within reach. New questions arise regarding how
these blended work environments impact older workers’
productivity and job attachment and how they inuence
retirement timing and bridge employment (Zhan, 2016).
The impact of blended work may be highly dependent upon
how voluntary such arrangements are and the amount of
control employees actually have over their time and work
location (Damman, 2016). Future research might want to
study to what extent blended work is used by employers as
a means of pressure on employees to be always available.
A third set of questions concerns how technologi-
cal innovations may inuence retirement adjustment and
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retirement adjustment outcomes, such as retirees’ physical
and psychosocial well-being (Wang & Shi, 2014). Health
monitoring technology could increase surveillance over
peoples’ tness. In that respect this type of technology
can facilitate healthy retirement years. The trend toward
“eHealth” is likely to boost the effectiveness of preventive
care and improve physical well-being of older workers and
retirees. With respect to social integration of retirees, web
development has created more online spaces characterized
by open communication, information sharing, and virtual
communities. Previous research (Thompson & Mayhorn,
2012) has reported that these online virtual spaces can pro-
vide new opportunities for social connection and support
but they may also have unintended downside effects (e.g.,
online bullying). The extent to which these online spaces
are part of older workers’ and retirees’ lives, and the impact
they have on the quality of life is an intriguing eld of study.
What Drives Housing-related Decisions for a
RetiredLife?
Retirement sharply raises the potential for decision making
about where to grow older, a process that Granbom and
colleagues (2014) have called “residential reasoning.” Upon
retirement, the job no longer ties individuals and house-
hold members to a particular locale, though other factors
may. For many people entering retirement, their property
can be—next to pension savings—their biggest asset for
nancing later life. For these individuals, home equity can
be thought of as a hedge against the uncertain prospect of
weakening pension support in old age. Retiring workers
will also be thinking about the environments that could
best meet their present and future capacities. Increases in
longevity and decreases in morbidity mean that many indi-
viduals will spend more years living independently prior to
turning to an institutional setting. For these reasons, stud-
ies of decision processes about residence and relocation
would be an important complement to studies of decision
outcomes (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard
University, 2016).
Many housing options exist for retiring workers, includ-
ing living in a single detached or multifamily residen-
tial dwelling, a leisure community or congregate housing
arrangement, a shared arrangement with friends or family
members, or even living abroad or “on the road” in a mobile
home. Early choices to suit current desires or long-term
readiness will have important implications when it comes
to the need for later relocations and asset management.
Health-related declines and increasing reliance on sup-
portive care are two key motivators of housing relocation
decisions, with the objective of securing accommodations
that are congruent with one’s goals and requirements.
Moreover, as pointed out by Koss and Ekerdt (2016), the
relocation decision is one that older adults reect on fre-
quently, or as these authors suggest in their article—the hous-
ing decision “is common, continual, and forward-looking”
(p.7). In particular, residential decisions determine not only
where one will live and the type of accommodation one is
likely to inhabit but they also govern other critical quality
of life dimensions, such as proximity to friends and fam-
ily, nancial well-being, postretirement job opportunities,
and residential ease of use. Taken together, these factors
stand to have an appreciable impact on one’s level of com-
fort and psychological well-being during later life (Golant,
2015). Housing is a keystone for retired life, and people’s
reasoning about it as a developmental and nancial matter
deserves more research.
How Can Employers Make an Aging Work Staff
“Work”?
During the past few decades, researchers from various disci-
plines have generated insights that indicate that employers
are lukewarm when it comes to hiring and retaining older
workers (Eschtruth, Sass, & Aubry 2007; Hutchens, 1986;
Munnell & Sass, 2009; Van Dalen, Henkens, & Schippers
2009). This is an attitude that is connected to the percep-
tion that an aging work staff leads to an increasing gap
between labor costs and productivity (Conen, Henkens,
& Schippers, 2012). An often used strategy for managing
an aging work staff was to offer early retirement. Despite
pleas for “active,” “sustainable”, or “successful” aging, in
practice most employers remain passive when it comes to
designing policies to maintain and enhance older workers´
productivity. Here, the overarching question is whether
employers’ behaviors are going to change now the contours
of an aging work force become visible and real. Abetter
understanding of employer’s behavior is key to answering
this general question. Three interrelated research questions
seem pertinent.
The rst question examines employers’ responses to
changing government policies. Government policies typi-
cally focus on enhancing the prospects of older workers
by a combination of subsidies and regulations (e.g., sub-
sidies enticing rms to hire older workers; laws restricting
age discrimination). However, little is known about how
employers react to these external forces. Do organizational
policies and the organizational culture change as a result of
imposed government policies? Can legislative changes shift
stereotypical images of older workers and age norms that
function as barriers to extend working careers (cf. Oude
Mulders, Henkens, & Schippers, 2016)?
The second question examines the successful and unsuc-
cessful human resource (HR) policies for older workers. By
examining both good and bad management practices, one
might hope to distill evidence-based human resource manage-
ment (HRM) for an aging workforce. Furthermore, to date,
we do not know much about how HRM practices for older
workers impact overall organizational performance (von
Bonsdorff etal., 2016). Our lack of knowledge may be due to
the fact that HRM is a discipline that is split between academic
researchers who are interested in general and publishable
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insights and applied researchers, often in roles of practitioners
and consultants, who focus on best practices and who some-
times fall prey to the pitfalls of proselytism (Young, 2006). By
combining the insights offered by these two worlds, we can
advance academic research as well as offering evidence-based
guidelines on dealing with an aging work force. Practitioners
have deep knowledge and data about the inner workings of
an organization which academics generally lack and the lat-
ter have the knowledge of how to extract more and general
insights by pooling experiences across organizations.
The nal question is why organizations differ so widely
in their responses to an aging work force. Some insights into
this question have been gained through employer surveys
(e.g., Van Dalen, Henkens, & Wang, 2015). However, it is
important to go beyond descriptive studies that use mainly
sociodemographic predictors (Moen, Kojola, & Schaefers,
2016). A more rened analysis is required that should
include values and norms of the organizational culture and
climate. Looking at such factors would greatly enhance our
understanding of employers’ strategies.
How do Workers Adapt to Changing Retirement
Policies?
One of the more fundamental retirement reforms is the
substantial rise in public pension eligibility ages that has
been implemented or is currently considered in many coun-
tries (OECD, 2011, 2015). Most of such reforms have been
primarily driven by budgetary considerations to counter
the consequences of population aging. The psychological
and social impacts of these reforms are often considered
of secondary importance. However, this neglect may have
direct and indirect repercussions that spill-over to the eco-
nomic domain and two issues are particularly relevant.
The rst issue is how older workers adjust to sudden
policy changes that induce them to work longer. Empirical
research has consistently shown that a lack of control over
the retirement transition is among the most powerful pre-
dictors of reduced well-being and retirement adjustment
problems (Hershey & Henkens, 2014). There is some evi-
dence that for many, adjustment to working longer is not
an easy process (Fisher, Ryan, Sonnega, & Naudé, 2016;
Van Solinge & Henkens, 2017). However, insights into the
consequences of extended working lives is lacking for both
individuals and organizations. Given that poor adjustment
may have negative consequences for well-being and per-
formance at work, there is a clear need for research on the
individual, organizational and societal outcomes associated
with adjustment to longer workinglives.
The second issue is how retirement reforms interact with
other social policies. In many countries, there has been a
fundamental reorganization of the relationship between
formal, public care and informal, private care. Shifts from
professionals to volunteers are observed across national
contexts and in various types of public services, particu-
larly in long-term care and social work (Van Bochove,
Tonkens, Verplanke, & Roggeveen, 2016). As a result, a
growing number of workers in their sixties will experience
conicting demands tied to work and family roles. More
evidence is needed about the impact of extended working
life on informal caregiving, volunteering and other forms
of civic engagement, in order to understand the frictions
between requirements to work longer and the obligations
individuals experience in their social network.
How Does the Pension Industry Affect Our
Choices and OurLives?
Pension reforms worldwide are opening up more options
for pension participants to make individual choices to t
their preferences. The idea of citizens who are ready, will-
ing, and able to make their own pension choices diverges
strongly from the old idea whereby the state offers protec-
tion from cradle to grave. Most countries are in the process
of making this transition and citizens are discovering that
they have to adapt to the new pension policies that increas-
ingly shift risks onto their shoulders. In this changing pen-
sion landscape, rms and governments are designing choice
settings (i.e., “nudges;” Thaler & Sunstein, 2009) that are
aimed to serve both consumers’ interests as well as their
own. Three possible avenues of research are apparent.
First, it is important to understand the role pension
industries play in shaping rm-based and government poli-
cies. For example, Hyde and Higgs (2016) describe a num-
ber of global networks of knowledge-based experts who
share a common belief regarding the way in which late life
can be structured and nanced.
Second, research is needed on how pension industries
create and shape new narratives regarding why and how
working lives should and can be extended. The way that
policy options are presented and shaped is not neutral and
given the bounded rationality of people one has to be vigi-
lant about whose interests are served. As Bodie and Prast
(2012, p.307) make clear for the case of pensions: “rms
can and do exploit the predictable inconsistencies and
biases of their consumers.”
Third, studying relationships between actors in the pen-
sion industry and individuals managing their careers is of
increasing importance. Pension funds shape the retirement
opportunities for older workers and inform them over the
course of their careers about the nancial prospects of their
retirement savings. Studying the consequences of rebalanc-
ing the responsibilities of individual workers and pension
providers is highly topical, particularly with respect to
retirement savings and individual well-being. It is crucial
to identify social groups that have difculty in dealing with
these risks and develop adequate policy adjustments.
How Does Ethnic Diversity Shape Retirement?
Large-scale, border-crossing migration is a well-
documented feature of contemporary globalized
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societies. However, the long-term implications of mov-
ing to another country for the process of retirement
remain to be examined in greater depth. Some migrate
for reasons of better labor market prospects and some
out of clear necessity as in the case of refugees seeking
asylum. But how do they adapt and make arrangements
for retirement, and to what extent is a return to the
country of origin an extra option complicating retire-
ment planning? As noted by experts, not nearly enough
is known about older immigrants themselves (Warnes &
Williams, 2006). Treas (2015, p. 269) has noted the “lim-
ited attention to aging in the study of immigrants and to
immigrants in the study of aging.” The socioeconomic
and cultural integration of retired immigrants who are
no longer participating in society through paid employ-
ment can be regarded as a litmus test for the level of
social integration of immigrants in general, arguably one
of the key challenges on the current political agenda.
Advancing research on older immigrants is particularly
pressing for Western Europe, which currently witnesses
the rst massive wave of retirements among persons who
arrived as part of the large labor migration wave of the
1960s and early 1970s. On the one hand, more research
is needed on the living conditions and well-being of older
immigrants in afuent societies, looking at the whole
range of relevant outcomes from retirement processes,
health and income to happiness and identity. On the
other hand, it is necessary to document and explain the
extent of ethnic inequality in old age and its contribution
to overall social inequality.
Findings from existing research on ethnic inequalities
in old age (Ginn & Arber, 2001; Hogan & Perrucci, 2007)
are relevant to understanding the aging of immigrants,
because hindering factors such as racial discrimination
and lower educational attainment are often common
adversities to both older immigrants and native-born
ethnic minorities. However, immigrants face additional
challenges, such as language barriers, decits in social
capital, and legal restrictions that hamper their social
integration, health and economic outcomes. Crucially,
the international legal frameworks governing portabil-
ity of social benets still impose serious restrictions on
mobility (Holzmann & Koettl, 2014). Even immigrants
who arrived at a young age can suffer labor market dis-
advantages when they enter the workforce, which can
later spill over into retirement. National pension systems
differ starkly in terms of how benet calculations affect
migrants (Heisig, Lancee, & Radl, 2017; Meyer, Bridgen,
& Andow, 2013). Several dimensions merit additional
scholarly attention, including the social connectedness of
retired immigrants, their living arrangements, and their
attitudes towards the institutions found in their countries
of residence. Moreover, it is of interest to identify the
social ties that rst-generation immigrants maintain with
their countries of origin and whether those ties strengthen
after exiting work.
Conclusion
Our main motivation for developing this article lies in the
belief that innovative research agendas are needed—to bor-
row the metaphor of Esping-Andersen (2000)—because
they serve as strong fog lamps that penetrate the fog of
social transformation. The current landscape of retirement
is changing dramatically as population aging becomes
increasingly visible. The fog in this debate is in our opin-
ion not so much concentrated on the macrolevel discus-
sions related to the population aging process. Instead, it
is densely concentrated on how individuals will shape and
adjust their lives as social institutions are adapting to an
aging society. This adaptation process is often organized
top-down with governments and rms designing policies
based on assumptions about human actors that one does
not generally encounter in real life. Social scientists are well
advised to examine these assumptions by asking questions
about the inequality of capabilities and resources in our
aging societies.
Funding
This work was supported by a grant of the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Studies (NIAS, Wassenaar) and the VICI Research Grant
(grant number: 453-14-001) of the Netherlands Organization for
Scientic Research (NWO). This joint work was developed during a
stay at the NIAS in the period February to June 2016. The authors
were afliated as fellows and part of the International NIAS-theme
group on work and retirement.
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