Population aging has prompted international governing bodies to recommend extending work careers and postponing retirement age. Retirement decisions cannot be fully reduced to either structural influences or individual agency. Older workers may face several limiting factors when continuing their careers beyond the official retirement age, including internalized attitudes towards aging at work. Our aim is to develop agency analysis that involves both structural and individual components to fully illustrate the heterogeneity of older workers and their retirement decisions. By studying qualitative interview data via thematic content analysis and a modality-based agency framework, we found that agency manifests in various different ways in older employees’ work exit accounts and that the relationship between individual agency and structures is complex. We conclude that agency analysis of aging employees offers insights into the complexity of the retirement process and may thus inform us about how to help extend work careers.

Background and Objectives This review investigates the contribution of discursive approaches to the study of ageism in working life. It looks back on the 50 years of research on ageism and the body of research produced by the discursive turn in social science and gerontology. Research Design and Methods This study followed the five-step scoping review protocol to define gaps in the knowledge on ageism in working life from a discursive perspective. 851 papers were extracted from electronic databases and, according to inclusion and exclusion criteria, 39 papers were included in the final review. Results The selected articles were based on discursive approaches and included study participants along the full continuum of working life (workers, retirees, jobseekers, students in training). Three main themes representing the focal point of research were identified, namely, experiences of ageism, social construction of age and ageism, and strategies to tackle (dilute) ageism. Discussion and Implications Discursive research provides undeniable insights into how participants experience ageism in working life, how ageism is constructed, and how workers create context-based strategies to counteract age stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. Discursive research on ageism in the working life need further development about the variety of methods and data, problematization of age-based labelling and grouping of workers, and a focus on the intersection between age and other social categories. Further research in these areas can deepen our understanding of how age and ageism are constructed and can inform policies about ways of disentangling them in working life.

Interest in ageism research has grown immensely since the term was coined. Despite methodological innovations to study ageism in different settings and the application of different methods and methodologies to the topic, qualitative longitudinal studies investigating ageism are still underrepresented in the field. Through qualitative longitudinal interview data with four individuals of the same age, this study explored the applications of qualitative longitudinal research on ageism, highlighting its potential benefits and challenges to the multidisciplinary study of ageism and to gerontological research. The paper presents four distinctively different narratives through which individuals “do,” “undo,” and “challenge” ageism in their interview dialogues over time. Doing this underlines the importance of understanding the heterogeneity and intersectionality among encounters, expressions, and dynamics of ageism. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential contributions that qualitative longitudinal research makes to ageism research and policy.

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