Aging & Social Change: Twelfth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Self-employed entrepreneurs are more likely to continue working past retirement age compared to other workers in Europe. Self-employment may provide a suitable platform for continued work engagement for some workers while retirement ages are increased. Digitalization is likely to complicate the work force attachment of older self-employed by imposing new job-demands. Digitalization of services takes many forms: online bookings, online communications, social media presence, online adds and need for building and maintaining websites. Traditional non-digital businesses end up facing new job-demands; the need for acquiring new skills, knowledge, job planning, career planning and dealing with technology-induced interruptions and workflow intensification. There is little research on how older workers respond to digitalization and even less knowledge on implications for older self-employed workers specifically. This paper explores how older self-employed deal with new job-demands stemming from digitalization by studying what strategies they employ to deal with digitalization-induced job-demands and how digitalizationinduced job-demands shape their plans for withdrawing from work. The research uses multiple case study approach to sample different businesses that have adopted new digital technologies in their work processes. The cases are selected according to intensified new job-demand scale criteria: low (experiencing few new job-demands), medium (experiencing several new job-demands), high (experiencing most new job-demands mentioned in the criteria). The research builds a better picture of job-demands related to digitalization and their implications across a range of self-employed businesses and may identify successful strategies for older entrepreneurs to deal with these jobdemands.