Retirement: Institutional Pathways and Individual Trajectories in Britain and Germany

Since the 1970s people have retired increasingly early across advanced societies. Parallel to this trend, numerous institutional early retirement pathways evolved, such as bridge unemployment and pre-retirement schemes. This article compares retirement in Britain and Germany to show how individuals progress through these institutional retirement pathways. The analysis uses longitudinal data and recent innovations in sequence analysis to capture the sequential nature of retirement as a series of transitions over time. As expected, prominent institutional retirement pathways are mirrored in individual retirement trajectories. Beyond these expected patterns, there are pronounced regularities in individual retirement trajectories outside of explicit institutional pathways. The \'institution of the family\' is an additional powerful force in structuring women\'s retirement. Access to advantageous institutional retirement pathways is stratified by gender, education, income, and health. The article concludes that specific population groups, particularly women, are systematically excluded from protective institutional early retirement pathways in Britain and Germany.Retirement, Aging, Life Course, Sequence Analysis, Germany, Britain, Gender

New Life for Old Ideas: The "Second Wave" of Sequence Analysis Bringing the "Course" Back Into the Life Course

In this article the authors draw attention to the most recent and promising developments of sequence analysis. Taking methodological developments in life course sociology as the starting point, the authors detail the complementary strength in sequence analysis in this field. They argue that recent advantages of sequence analysis were developed in response to criticism of the original work, particularly optimal matching analysis. This debate arose over the past two decades and culminated in the 2000 exchange in Sociological Methods & Research. The debate triggered a 'second wave" of sequence techniques that led to new technical implementations of old ideas in sequence analysis. The authors bring these new technical approaches together, demonstrate selected advances with synthetic example data, and show how they conceptually contribute to life course research. This article demonstrates that in less than a decade, the field has made much progress toward fulfilling the prediction that Andrew Abbott made in 2000, that 'anybody who believes that pattern search techniques are not going to be basic to social sciences over the next 25 years is going to be very much surprised" (p. 75).sequence analysis; optimal matching analysis; life course; longitudinal data analysis

Estimating the Relationship between Time-varying Covariates and Trajectories: The Sequence Analysis Multistate Model Procedure

The relationship between processes and time-varying covariates is of central theoretical interest in addressing many social science research questions. On the one hand, event history analysis (EHA) has been the chosen method to study these kinds of relationships when the outcomes can be meaningfully specified as simple instantaneous events or transitions. On the other hand, sequence analysis (SA) has made increasing inroads into the social sciences to analyze trajectories as holistic “process outcomes.” We propose an original combination of these two approaches called the sequence analysis multistate model (SAMM) procedure. The SAMM procedure allows the study of the relationship between time-varying covariates and trajectories of categorical states specified as process outcomes that unfold over time. The SAMM is a stepwise procedure: (1) SA-related methods are used to identify ideal-typical patterns of changes within trajectories obtained by considering the sequence of states over a predefined time span; (2) multistate event history models are estimated to study the probability of transitioning from a specific state to such ideal-typical patterns. The added value of the SAMM procedure is illustrated through an example from life-course sociology on how (1) time-varying family status is associated with women's employment trajectories in East and West Germany and (2) how German reunification affected these trajectories in the two subsocieties

Life Course Trajectories and Wealth Accumulation in the United States:Comparing Late Baby Boomers and Early Millennials¹

Millennials are often assumed to be economically worse off than pre-vious generations because of more precarious employment and unsta-ble family lives. Using sequence analysis and unconditional quantile decomposition, we analyze the work and family trajectories of late baby boomers and early millennials and relate them to wealth holdings at age 35. We find that the poorest millennials have less wealth than their baby boomer counterparts, but the wealthiest millennials have more. Millennials are less likely to enter high-status occupations and are more likely to work in low-skilled service jobs, and family trajectories show a strong decline of traditional early marriage and parent-hood; however, changes in life course trajectories cannot account for the increase in wealth inequality. Instead, the distribution of wealth has become more unequal because the economic returns to typical middle-class trajectories have increased, while the returns to typical working-class trajectories have stagnated or declined.</p

Do economic globalization and industry growth destabilize careers? An analysis of career complexity and career patterns over time

We analyze the impact of economic globalization and industry growth on the complexity of early work careers in Germany. We conceptualize complexity as the absolute number of employer changes, the regularity in the order of job changes, and the variability of the durations spent in different employment states. Results from empirical analyses based on the German Life History Study ( N = 5453) show only a small increase in the complexity of work careers over the last decades, but there was a shift in the prevalence of different career patterns. This suggests that effects of globalization might be counteracted or modified by other social changes that affected work careers in Germany during the last 60 years. In particular, we consider the possible impact of educational expansion, labor market restructuring, and women’s increased employment. We find no evidence that industry-specific economic globalization impacts the complexity of work careers, but we find a U-shaped relationship between industry growth and career complexity. Careers are slightly more complex in industries with high or low industry growth. We conclude that, while there has been a shift in career patterns over time, the impact of globalization on career stability is possibly overestimated