Dissertation_Paula Aleksandrowicz_12 ... - Jacobs University

job entrants and subsequently replaced by ´new´ cultural values as self-fulfilment, creativity
and freedom of choice.
I will distinguish between pull and jump factors as drivers for voluntary exit, and push
factors as motives for involuntary exit. Push factors can be of direct nature (labour
shedding, unemployment, ageism) or of indirect nature (subjective work burden, health
impairments, etc.).
The life course theory postulates the determination of individual life courses by
institutions. Institutional arrangements “built the tracks that individual trajectories are
bound to follow” (Mayer 2004: 162). Those arrangements are e.g. career ladders and tracks
of personnel development in firms, or the age and employment duration that is required for
the receipt of a social security benefit. Institutional contexts “narrow down to a large extent
which life avenues are open and which are closed” (ibid: 164). The individuals are however
not solely passive objects in the process of shaping their life courses, but also active agents
which influence and create life courses (ibid: 180). The power of the individual to plan and
live his life is pre-defined by institutions, inter al. by options offered by the welfare state,
but it is due to autonomous decisions of the individual how that presetting is integrated into
the life course (Leisering et al. 2001: 11, 14). In this respect, life course theory may be
linked up with the actor-centred institutionalism which states that the influence of actors by
institutions is a reciprocal process (see section 2.1.).
Based on the institutional theory and the life course approach and the push and pull
thesis, I derive hypothesis 4: Institutions matter and have an impact on individual life
courses and preferences as to the timing of the exit from the labour market.
Operationalisation: I will analyse with the help of statistical indicators at national level
how the employment rates of older workers, the average retirement ages, the take-up of
disability pensions and individual retirement preferences have evolved during times in
which substantial reforms were passed. In the firm-level section, I will also analyse the
change of retirement preferences of workers in the analysed firms based on the assessment
by the firm experts.
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