Blended Work and Employment Participation of Older Workers: A Further Discussion

In the context of population aging and related policy aims to prolong working lives, it is highly important to get a better understanding of factors that may stimulate or rather inhibit prolonged employment. Dropkin and colleagues (Dropkin, J., Moline, J., Kim, H., & Gold, J. E. (2016). Blended work as a bridge between traditional workplace employment and retirement: A conceptual review. <it>Work, Aging and Retirement</it>. doi:10.1093/workar/waw017) present blended work as a form of work that may help to extend the working lives of older workers, particularly among knowledge workers. Although the article provides a description of the literature on blended work and older workers, limited connection is made to the retirement literature. In this article, I describe theory and empirical findings on antecedents of retirement timing and link it to the notion of blended work. Furthermore, I argue that both characteristics of blended work and characteristics of older workers should be taken into account when formulating concrete predictions about its impact on the timing of retirement. I conclude this article by discussing potentially fruitful directions for future research.