Using data from the European Social Survey fielded in 2010/11, this study presents new evidence on retirement preferences in Europe. It investigates retirees' preferred and actual ages of retirement, focusing on the retirement window 1995–2011. Moreover, it reports on the prevalence of mismatch in the form of involuntary retirement (retiring earlier than preferred) and involuntary work (retiring later than preferred). The study identifies substantial shares of retirees who are affected by a mismatch between their preferred and actual ages of retirement. In the majority of the countries analysed, at least 30 per cent of retirees would have preferred to continue working past the age at which they retired, while in a number of countries sizeable shares of retirees report involuntary work. The risk factors for involuntary retirement include the experience of late-career job loss, unemployment, job exits for health reasons and, in the case of women, working in higher-status occupations. The risk factors for involuntary work include fatherhood and, in the case of women, part-time work. As a result of rising actual ages of retirement, the risk of involuntary retirement has decreased for more recent retirement cohorts, while due to pension reforms that have tightened eligibility rules for early retirement, men's risk of involuntary work has increased. However, involuntary retirement is still more prevalent than involuntary work.

With the increase of childlessness in European societies, its consequences have become a matter of concern. Studies in this field, however, have concentrated on what childless people lack and need in terms of social, financial and moral support. In contrast, this article focuses on what childless people give to their families, friends, unrelated others and to society at large. Using 2004 data on social support and financial transfers given and received by people aged 50 or more years in ten European countries from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the analyses show that the support networks of childless older people tend to be somewhat weaker than those of parents and that links with members of the younger generations in the family are stronger for parents than for those without children. The results also indicate, however, that the differences in transfer behaviour between parents and childless adults are small, and that the support networks of the childless are more diverse than those of parents, and characterised by stronger links with ascendants and lateral relatives and with non-relatives. Moreover, people without children tend to be more intensely involved in charities and comparable organisations.

In this introductory article for the special issue on Childlessness and Intergenerational Transfers, we first discuss the prior research literature and then overview the presented contributions. Up to now, childless older adults have been treated for the most part as both homogeneous and a problematic group. This does not do justice to the different pathways to childlessness: there are those who actively forgo having children, those who defer births so long that they involuntarily become childless, and those who are not fecund or lack a partner. It also neglects the changing social profile of the childless, e.g. the shift from less educated to more highly-educated women. Most importantly, it fails to recognise what childless older people give to others. The studies presented here aim to redress these two deficits in previous research. They examine how the consequences of childlessness are mediated by the pathways to and motivations for being childless and by factors such as gender, education and marital history, and they also examine what childless older adults provide to their families and to society at large. Such adults establish strong linkages with next-of-kin relatives, invest in non-family networks, and participate in voluntary and charitable activities, and broadly do so to a greater extent than older people with surviving children.

The sociology of ageing has often turned to general sociology in search of useful theoretical approaches, but there has been little cognitive influx back into general theory. By this one-sided relation, the sociology of ageing has typically constituted itself as an applied field. It can be argued, however, that the problems of an ageing society bring forth not only a new topical area but also a challenge for some of the foundations of sociological theory, which were largely laid before these problems became visible. The paper deals with some of the systematic issues that arise in this respect. It takes as its point of departure that modern society has been theoretically conceived as a ‘work society’. If social life is structured around work and its organisation, how can we theoretically cope with a situation in which a large (and still growing) part of the population has left the domain of formally organised work? This question is discussed on three levels: (I) the structure of social inequality (e.g. welfare classes instead of production-based classes); (2) cultural meaning structures (e.g. leisure instead of productivity and achievement); and (3) socialisation (e.g. biographical anticipation and reminiscence instead of a ‘situational’ orientation).

The analysis of modern-age stratification systems must be based on the social organisation of work. This requires a theoretical approach that takes into account the structure of economic production, but also the fact that work is a meaningful activity of human beings within their life-world. The task therefore consists of integrating ‘materialist’ and ‘interpretive’ approaches to social reality. This integration is attempted in an examination of the special problems encountered by workers in the second half of their work life, as created by the ‘construction of ageing’ in the industrial firm. Existing approaches drawn from industrial sociology, stress structural features of the production process, whilst labelling theory stresses culturally induced age labels. Both are one-sided. A more comprehensive approach has to conceptualise the industrial firm as an actor with strategies based on economic rationality and as a life-world constituted by what is taken for granted by its members. The final section applies this framework to an empirical case study.