Wyniki wyszukiwania - Biblioteka Nauki

1

Caught in a Matrix of Factors: A Pilot Study of Female Retirees Receiving Below-Minimum Pension Payments

100%

Bieńkowski S. , Życzyńska-Ciołek D.

Qualitative Sociology Review

|

2023

|

tom 19

|

nr 3

52-72

EN

Pension systems based on an insurance model were originally designed for male breadwinners who worked under permanent contracts without career breaks. Since their inception, women’s participation in the workforce has increased significantly, but on average, their employment career paths are still shorter and less linear compared to those that men enjoy. Demographic changes have prompted many countries to reform their pension systems to ensure long-term financial sustainability. And to varying degrees, such reforms also have looked to address the issue of short careers. In Poland, reforms introduced in 1999 brought about significant changes to the rules governing pension entitlement. That led to the emergence of a new category of retirees-those who had contributed to the pension system for a short period and consequently received very low pensions. This article provides an overview of an exploratory qualitative pilot study conducted in 2018 with nine women who were in receipt of benefits from the Polish universal pension system, which amounted to less than the so-called ‘lowest retirement pension’ being granted at that time. The analysis makes recourse to the concept of employment career and its connection to retirement to identify various life-course determinants that contributed to their situation. These factors include childhood and adolescent adversities that affected educational attainment; domestic and caregiving responsibilities coupled with cultural expectations and insufficient institutional support; the labor market situation, and the inability to document certain employment periods. The research material indicates that a significant portion of the work performed by the interviewees throughout their lives did not translate into a pension benefit, as it either involved unpaid domestic and caregiving duties; or work performed without formal contracts.

2

Illuminating Existential Meaning: A New Approach in the Study of Retirement

86%

Bengtsson M. , Flisbäck M.

Qualitative Sociology Review

|

2021

|

tom 17

|

nr 1

196-214

EN

Current discussions on the importance of retirement are largely built on statistical analyses of longitudinal data showing that well-being seldom changes from before to after entering retirement, but is rather mainly dependent on the individual’s social resource position. In contrast, qualitatively oriented researchers underline that the retirement process is a complex life transition that needs to be further illuminated. To do this, however, we need to advance new theoretical and methodological perspectives. In this article, an existential sociology approach is outlined, emphasizing the multifaceted spectra of lived experiences and meaning-making in the retirement process. The phenomenological approaches of existential sociology allow us to consider how the exit from working life is created in the processes of motion rather than as expressions of static positions. A merit of this approach is that retirement as an empirical case may say something general about being in transition as a basic social condition. In the article, we discuss how a socio-biographical methodology, based on longitudinal qualitative interviews, helps us capture how existential meaning is formed and reformed in the ambiguous situations which arise in similar life-course transitions. Theoretically, we especially draw on concepts from the existential anthropologist Jackson and the phenomenological tradition of existential philosophers such as Arendt and Heidegger.

3

Japan’s Approach to Retirement Reform: An International Perspective

86%

Higo M.

EXLIBRIS Biblioteka Gerontologii Społecznej

|

2020

|

nr 1 (18) /2020 Old age - international perspective – theory and practice

94-104

EN

Over the past few decades, most countries around the world have been pressured to reform their conventional retirement systems in our time of rapid population ageing. An effective retirement reform would enable workers to remain in the workforce beyond conventional retirement age for as long as they desire, without their opportunities and decisions being institutionally constrained, so as to help them to secure resources necessary to maintain their socioeconomic wellbeing in later life. Japan deserves special attention in this context; having gone through the world’s fastest population ageing during the 1970s and 1980s, today Japan is far ahead of the rest of the world in this demographic shift. Amid aa global search for effective retirement reforms, while an increasing number of countries across the world have come to adopt an ‘age-free’ a ‘hyper-aged’ Japan has to date taken what may be referred to as an ‘age-friendly’ approach particularly in its policy efforts in the areas of mandatory retirement and public pension programs. This approach seems to have yielded a positive outcome; over the past few decades, older workers’ labor force participation rates have been steadily on the rise, and today the rates are higher than those in most other developed countries. This approach also has remained notably cautious of calling for a drastic reform, such as privatization, to the traditional public pension programs. Japan’s ‘age-friendly’ approach to retirement reform may exemplify a unique and more viable variation of retirement reforms for some other countries. Nonetheless, a continuous, closer and critical analysis of the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of Japan’s approach is called for in order for other rapidly ageing countries to examine whether it is worthwhile for them to follow in the future.