This introductory chapter examines how digitalisation impacts older workers in European labour markets. It clarifies key terms—digitisation, digitalisation, digital economy, and digital divide—setting the stage for understanding how the digital transformation is reshaping work environments and older workers’ experiences. Drawing on secondary data, including Eurostat and European Commission statistics, policy analyses, and survey results, the chapter synthesises knowledge of workplace digitalisation, employment policies, and critical debates on digital inequalities. Findings reveal both opportunities (improved working conditions, technological inclusion, better health management) and challenges (skill gaps, cognitive demands, risk of job loss) for older workers. The chapter addresses academic debates on whether digitalisation empowers or disadvantages older workers, noting that rapid technological change can marginalise those without digital skills. It concludes that digitalisation profoundly transforms the labour market, and it identifies knowledge gaps in the area and introduces chapters of the anthology that aim to address these gaps.

This chapter provides a critical approach to researching inequalities relating to the impact of digitalisation for older workers. The concept of inequality and how it can be applied to digitalisation is discussed and two specific forms of inequalities—digital and age-based—are introduced. A scoping review of empirical research on inequalities relating to digitalisation and older workers is presented. This review shows that research concerning inequalities, digitalisation and older workers is limited both in terms of the number of published papers and in revealing the different forms of inequalities that are present within work organisations. Existing research only to a limited extent draws upon theoretical perspectives on inequality related to digitalisation and age, notably ignoring the important concept of epistemic injustice. Given the arrival of artificial intelligence and the context of extended working lives, the chapter concludes with a call for further research that will render digital and age-based inequalities visible.

The study of aging is continuing to increase rapidly across multiple disciplines. This wide-ranging series on International Perspectives on Aging provides readers with much-needed comprehensive texts and critical perspectives on the latest research, policy, and practical developments. Both aging and globalization have become a reality of our times, yet a systematic effort of a global magnitude to address aging is yet to be seen. The series bridges the gaps in the literature and provides cutting-edge debate on new and traditional areas of comparative aging, all from an international perspective. More specifically, this book series on International Perspectives on Aging puts the spotlight on international and comparative studies of aging.

Introduction: There are still knowledge gaps relating to the interaction between digitalization, organizational changes, and the aging of the workforce. This study examines the impact of digitalization on older workers in the financial sector in Sweden and the Czechia. The experience of digitalization by older workers in different countries and labor market sectors, and its fostering of insecurity and precarity through technostress, feelings of inefficacy and uncertain futures, is understudied.

Methods: Through interviews with men and women aged 50-64 who are employed in financial institutions in the Czechia and Sweden, the research explores organizational changes, including outsourcing and agile management, and their impact on the experiences of older workers at work.

Results: The findings reveal key differences in ongoing changes between the two countries, such as the prominence of agile management in Sweden and the absence of outsourcing in the Czechia. Despite these variations, digitalization narratives are remarkably similar, reflecting an international emphasis on efficiency and competitiveness. The study illustrates that digitalization can create precarious working conditions for older employees, including technostress, feelings of ineffectiveness and insecurity, and uncertainty about the future.

Discussion: The results emphasize the need for temporal analyzes and consideration of national conditions when understanding the multifaceted consequences of digitalization for the older workforce. Overall, the paper highlights the similarities and differences in organizational opportunities and challenges within and across national labor market contexts, providing valuable contributions to the ongoing academic debate on aging and digitalization in the workplace.

Åren 2017 och 2018 genomfördes närmare 11 000 medicinska åldersutredningar på barn som registrerats som ”ensamkommande” när de sökte asyl i Sverige. Verksamheten, som fortfarande pågår trots skarp kritik från forskare på etiska, medicinska och statistiska grunder, innebär att en sannolikhetsbedömning görs av hur nära personen har till myndighetsåldern med utgångspunkt i röntgen av tandanlag och knäleder. Den åldersuppskrivning som ofta blivit resultatet av bedömningarna bygger således på antaganden om en mätbar korrelation mellan biologiska processer och kronologisk ålder och synliggör att uppskattad biologisk ålder tillskrivs större trovärdighet än uppgifter om kronologisk ålder i till exempel pass och juridiska dokument från somliga länder. I detta kapitel diskuterar vi användningen av biologisk ålder vid bedömning av ensamkommande asylsökande unga och vi illustrerar konsekvenser av detta för ungdomarnas möjlighet till stöd inom ramen för socialt arbete.

Purpose The digital age requires people of all ages to communicate and organise their lives through digital technologies. The project EQualCare investigates how the growing population of older people living alone is managing this transition, how it shapes their (non-)digital social networks and what changes on a local level need to be brought about. This paper aims to give insight into the process of participatory action research (PAR) with older people in the community across four countries and reflects on experiences made by academic and co-researchers. Design/methodology/approach Following the emancipatory underpinnings of PAR, which aims to reduce inequalities through collaboration and co-design, EQualCare involved nine teams of co-researchers across Finland, Germany, Latvia and Sweden making older people the centre of policy development. Co-researchers were involved in formulating research aims, collecting data, reflecting on data, formulating and disseminating recommendations for local policy stakeholders. Findings Co-researchers' motivation to invest considerable time and effort was driven by a desire to create a more equal future for older people living alone. Moreover, they were keen to involve marginalised older people and became frustrated when this proved difficult. Power dynamics played a role throughout the process but became productive as roles and responsibilities were renegotiated. Doing PAR with older people can be emotionally challenging for co-researchers when negative feelings around ageing are encountered. Originality/value The paper advances understanding on the process of PAR in ageing research by reflecting on the social, cultural and political contexts of doing PAR with diverse sets of older people.

This article centres on emotions within the Swedish rescue services in terms of the concepts of emotional regime and emotional pasts, partly with a focus on the role of emotional pasts in emotional regimes, partly on how the (re)construction of emotional pasts relates to the organisation of the workplace. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with five female and 13 male firefighters in Sweden, aged 28-58. Results show that individual experiences are used as emotional pasts to define work situations in the present and that work teams, through informal conversations and formal debriefing, create stories out of central events, thus constructing shared emotional pasts. All in all, the analysis shows that temporalities and their narrative expressions are a vital part of how emotional regimes are sustained within the rescue services, which has implications for the understanding of the rescue services as an organisation.

In recent years, policies that extend the working life have been a key feature of European and other countries with post-industrialised economies. These policies focus on two dimensions of work and retirement which governments consider crucial to reform if pension systems are to be safeguarded in the context of ageing populations. First, legal and administrative reforms are pushing back the legal age of retirement thereby withholding pension rights until workers have reached a certain age. Second, defined benefit pensions, so-called because employees and employers know the formula for calculating retirement benefits in advance of paying them, are being phased out and replaced by defined contribution pensions, where the level of contributions, and not the final benefit, is pre-defined and no final pension promise is made. This shift results in the individualisation of pension benefits, since in most cases workers must build up sufficient contributions and invest in pension products on financial markets. The effect of this trend is that workers remain in the labour force longer in order to secure an acceptable pension benefit. Overall, the implementation of these two policies to extend the working life has produced the desired effect of retaining individuals longer in the labour market and easing the pressure on public pensions, as can be seen in data produced by Eurostat since the 1990s: the proportion of people aged 55 years or more in the total number of persons employed in the EU-27 increased from 12% to 20% between 2004 and 2019 (Eurostat, 2021).

This open access book addresses the important and neglected question of older workers who are excluded from the labour market. It challenges post-capitalist discourses of active ageing with a focus on restrictive end-of-career and retirement measures. The book demonstrates how a paradigm shift is generating real processes of exclusion for important sectors of the population. By providing strong empirical evidence from different contexts, the impact of different life course trajectories on the risks and the opportunities at the end of career are demonstrated. The organisation of workplace and institutional frameworks which reinforce inequalities are also presented. As such the book is an essential reading for students, academics and policy makers who seek to understand how exclusion processes operate to the disadvantage of older workers in the labour market. 

Transitions into precariousness and labour market exclusion in late professional career need to be understood from the perspective of individual biographies unfolding in relation to historical developments, social structures and social changes. The generation born in the 1950’s in Europe, now nearing retirement, has lived through periods of economic affluence and welfare state expansion, but also of macro-economic shocks, deindustrialization, and neo-liberal slimming of public social structures. These changes were concurrent with accelerated digitalization and restructuring of work organizations. This chapter illustrates transitions into unemployment and precariousness among older men in the context of economic downturn and organizational restructuring in a sector particularly exposed to the effects of neo-liberal globalization- the metal industry. We go on to show how in two different organizational-institutional realities countries, such as Portugal and Sweden these workers are exposed to different mechanisms that paved the way out of secure employment into insecure employment and precarious positions in the labour market.