Sidesteps? Career choices, normativity and individual agency in late life unemployment

As populations age, the contemporary labour markets are facing a rapidly growing paradox. While political efforts are increasingly encouraging workers to extend their working lives, ageism, deeply manifested in everyday encounters and practices, hinders these efforts. Workers nearing retirement age face situations where they are systematically categorised as “too old”, and denied access to employment, training, promotions, and job mobility. This encourages individuals to exit the labour market rather than to continue their careers. These conditions place older workers in a paradox; on the one hand, workers are expected to continue working longer and, on the other, excluded from adequate opportunities to do so.

Despite the changing political environment, the chrononormative life-course is slow to change. People nearing retirement age are often slowly orienting themselves towards retirement days, however, unemployment near retirement disrupts these plans and forces individuals to make career decisions that dictate the course of their working lives. Throughout the life-course, individuals engage in various sets of age normative behaviours that inform us when is the right time to do things and in which order, such as to enrol in education, start a family, work, or to retire. These normative behaviours are further enforced by institutions and practices ensuring that individuals continue following the established, standardized life-course. Working life comprises a large part of this life-course, generally set between the ages of 18–65 years. Individuals within that age range are subjected to a duty to work, a norm that dictates individuals capable of working should remain active and in employment. However, experiencing unemployment near retirement breaks the standardized life-course, as older workers experiencing ageism have longer unemployment periods and face difficulties getting re-employed. Deviating from age specific norms, such as duty to work, may result in individuals feeling out of place, creating a need to explain their behaviour against the standard of correctness. Unemployment in late working life thus easily becomes the least desirable career option for many, shadowed by loss in income and pension, precarity, experiences of ageism and the need to explain one’s unemployment status.

Approaching age, life-course and ageism as social constructs, my focus in this dissertation is on the dynamics of unemployment, ageism, and individual agency in late life unemployment. Through a scoping review and three qualitative longitudinal sub-studies, I investigate experiences and encounters with ageism over time and how and why individuals experiencing unemployment near retirement often come to perceive exit from the labour market as the least problematic career option. With these overarching questions, this doctoral dissertation seeks to answer, what are the roles of age(ism) and temporality in career decisions during late life unemployment.

The research is based on a review article and three empirical studies. The three latter are based on qualitative longitudinal research conducted over a three-year period during which 40 Finnish workers aged 50-67 years were interviewed multiple times following a job loss from the state-owned postal service, totalling at 183 audio-recorded interviews. Using qualitative longitudinal methodology and discursive approaches as the guiding framework, these total to four scientific publications, each investigating and contributing to the overarching and central questions.

The first publication is a comprehensive review article that scopes the existing discursive research on ageism in working life. Following an established protocol for scoping reviews, it maps the field of ageism studies since the coinage of the term and tracks the emergence, popularity, and trends of discursive gerontology in the research realm. Addressing the lack of unified definition for ageism, the article analyses 39 research articles with discursive approach to ageism in working life, and summarises previous research on experiences of ageism, social construction of age and ageism, and strategies to combat ageism. The second publication starts the empirical research that addresses the gaps in the field identified in the scoping review. It is a methodological exploration that sheds light on the contributions of qualitative longitudinal methodology on ageism research and policy. Deconstructing the widespread assumption that people sharing the same age are homogenous, this article investigated ageism in the lived experiences of becoming unemployed after a long career among four individuals of the same age (58 years). Using researcher-constructed case profiles and case histories, the publication demonstrated how career decisions in late life unemployment and experiences of ageism differ between individuals, questioning the use of arbitrary age limits in policymaking.

The third publication examines older jobseekers’ everyday interactions with the labour market and how older jobseekers develop discursive strategies over time in response to ageism. Using a relational typology for identifying social agency as the guiding framework, the publication analysed qualitative longitudinal interview accounts with 18 jobseekers narratively. The analyses identified various discursive strategies individuals developed through trial and error in response to ageism over time. These strategies either helped jobseekers to adapt to ageism through internal negotiations or reworked the conditions of their employability.

The fourth publication investigates how unemployed individuals choosing early exit frame their career decisions. Questioning whether extending working life policies and practices support also individuals experiencing unemployment near retirement, this article shed light on the limbo between unemployment and retirement in late working life. The publication focused on the qualitative longitudinal interview accounts of individuals on the Finnish early exit scheme and used position theory informed narrative analysis to better understand the reasons why individuals continue to choose early exit despite political efforts to extend working life.

This doctoral dissertation integrates these study findings to answer the overarching questions and connects them to wider discussions on career choices, normativity, and individual agency in late life unemployment. Yielding novel information on the role of ageism in career decisions over time, I discuss how and why exiting labour market near retirement is constructed the least problematic option for individuals experiencing unemployment in late working life. Finally, I provide practical insights on how to combat ageism in late working life and produce policy recommendations on how to create more inclusive and flexible policies to support the extension of working life both in Finland and globally.