Page 90 - IJPS-9-2

International Journal of

Population Studies

REVIEW ARTICLE
Active aging and alternatives to age-based

retirement

Alfredo Alfageme*
Department of Philosophy and Sociology, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, Spain
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Active Ageing and Educational Gerontology)

Abstract

For several decades, proposals have been made to redistribute social transfers (mainly
pensions) and the time people spend on training and work (paid or otherwise)
throughout the life course, in line with an analytical perspective that considers the life
course as a whole, not just certain stages or transitions. One recent proposal, known
as temporary leave (TL), would provide the opportunity to take temporary periods
of voluntary paid exit from work over the life course, in exchange for a proportional
delay in the age of retirement. This paper discusses the suitability of TL as a social
policy for aging European societies.

Keywords: Caring; Life course; Lifelong learning; Retirement; Temporary leave; Work

1. Introduction
*Corresponding author: In recent decades, the change in demographic aging and life expectancy patterns, the
Alfredo Alfageme
(alfageme@uji.es) blurring of boundaries between the life-course stages (education/training, work, and
retirement), and the acceptance of egalitarian ideologies in today’s European societies
Citation: Alfageme, A. (2023). have all prompted the defense and development of proposals for redistributing the time
Active aging and alternatives to
age-based retirement. International spent in paid work throughout the adult life course (Eurofound, 2012, 2016). From a
Journal of Population Studies, sociological perspective of aging, and bearing in mind the risk of social exclusion that can
9(2): 84-90.
https://doi.org/10.36922/ijps.482 arise when a paid worker finally retires on the grounds of age, Guillemard (1992) argued
that the retirement pension, the transfer designed to cover non-working time, should
Received: May 2, 2023 not necessarily be accumulated at the end of people’s lives, but could be redistributed
Accepted: July 5, 2022 in different stages of the life course. The idea was first put forward by Riley (1979) in
Published Online: July 21, 2023 more general social and gerontological terms, as she proposed abolishing periods for
education, work, and leisure differentiated on the grounds of age to give people the
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s).
This is an Open-Access article opportunity to combine the three aspects throughout the entire life course. However,
distributed under the terms of the these ideas have never been developed in specific or practical ways.
Creative Commons Attribution
License, permitting distribution, and The life-course perspective, fundamental to this study, recognizes the centrality of
reproduction in any medium, which work and the role of institutions in the definition of an age-based life course, which
provided that the original work is
properly cited. has led to a three-way division of life into the stages of education, work, and retirement
(Henretta, 2003; Settersten, 2006; Guillemard, 2009), and the inherent inertia of these
Publisher’s Note: AccScience
Publishing remains neutral with institutions has led to a structural lag which continues to the present day (Moen, 2016).
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional This paper aims to argue that new life-course policies are needed to replace age-
affiliations. based retirement, and it is structured as follows. Three sets of reasons why the traditional

Volume 9 Issue 2 (2023) 84 https://doi.org/10.36922/ijps.482