IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-319-08007-9_14.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Aging Entrepreneurs and Volunteers: Transition in Late Career

In: Aging Workers and the Employee-Employer Relationship

Author

Listed:
  • Susan Ainsworth

    (The University of Melbourne)

Abstract

Entrepreneurship and volunteering seem very dissimilar activities – one involves starting a business and the other giving freely of your time to benefit others. Yet both these forms of non-traditional employment can feature in late career transition as ways of continuing involvement in work. This chapter reviews theory and research on older people, entrepreneurship and volunteering including evidence on the characteristics and motivations of those who choose these two forms of activity, as well as consideration of the way policy, economic and institutional contexts constrain and condition these choices. Entrepreneurship is often associated with youth, yet those over 50 more frequently start new businesses, and appear to be more successful at surviving the critical first three years of operation than their younger counterparts. However, these new businesses often take the form of self-employment as a way out of unemployment, rather than growth-oriented enterprises that can provide jobs for others. As such, there is debate about the extent to which such ‘wage substitution’ enterprises should be supported by governments. Conversely, volunteering has become a normative role for older people: it is seen as a suitable way for them to use their skills and continue productive engagement with society. Yet there is evidence to suggest that retirement from full-time paid work does not lead to a substantial increase in volunteering. Theory and research exploring the relationship between paid work, volunteering and retirement is discussed as well as ways voluntary organizations could better attract and retain older volunteers.

Suggested Citation

  • Susan Ainsworth, 2015. "Aging Entrepreneurs and Volunteers: Transition in Late Career," Springer Books, in: P. Matthijs Bal & Dorien T.A.M. Kooij & Denise M. Rousseau (ed.), Aging Workers and the Employee-Employer Relationship, edition 127, chapter 0, pages 243-260, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-08007-9_14
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-08007-9_14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Muhammad Shehzad Hanif & Muhammad Imran Hanif & Yunfei Shao, 2018. "Contemplating the Antecedents of a Sustainable Work Life in an Emerging Economy: Lessons from Early Retirees in the ICT Sector of Pakistan," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(12), pages 1-21, December.
    2. Valerie Dawn Caines & Monique F Crane & Jack Noone & Barbara Griffin & Shiksha Datta & Joanne Kaa Earl, 2020. "Older workers: Past, present and future," Australian Journal of Management, Australian School of Business, vol. 45(3), pages 425-448, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-08007-9_14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.