Demographic ageing and rapid digital transformation are reshaping labour markets worldwide. Policy agendas increasingly promote active ageing, lifelong learning and digital upskilling as responses to longer working lives. Yet less attention has been paid to how digitalisation may reconfigure inequalities in later-life employment. Older workers are not a homogeneous group: their experiences differ according to gender, class, health, disability, migration background, education and occupational sector. Technologies such as algorithmic management, AI-assisted recruitment, digital monitoring and platform labour may interact with these inequalities in ways that deepen exclusion, create new opportunities or generate different forms of adaptation and resistance.
Research on ageing, digital labour and workplace inequality has often developed along separate trajectories. Bringing these fields into dialogue is increasingly important as digitally mediated employment expands within societies characterised by population ageing and extended working lives. Examining these developments requires attention to the relationship between labour-market institutions, organisational practices and workers’ lived experiences, as well as to the policies and regulatory frameworks shaping digital transitions.
This Collection welcomes interdisciplinary research examining how digitalisation transforms opportunities, risks and inequalities in later-life work. Rather than treating technology as inherently empowering or harmful, it seeks to explore how its effects vary across social groups, employment settings, sectors and national contexts.
We invite papers engaging with topics including, but not limited to:
- Algorithmic management and age-based inequality — task allocation, performance evaluation, scheduling and employment decisions
- Artificial intelligence in recruitment and career progression — age bias, automated selection and workplace assessment
- Platform work and older workers — access, precarity, flexibility and occupational transitions
- Digital monitoring and workplace control — surveillance, autonomy, privacy and worker well-being
- Technostress, digital skills and adaptation — changing job demands, confidence, exclusion and worker responses
- Reskilling, lifelong learning and digital inclusion — access to training and inequalities in learning opportunities
- Intersectional inequalities — interactions among age, gender, class, disability, ethnicity, migration status and health
- Organisational practices and inclusive workplaces — job design, workplace support and age-inclusive digital transformation
- Policy, regulation and labour-market reform — protections, digital inclusion strategies and sustainable extended working lives
- Comparative and cross-national perspectives — differences among welfare systems, labour-market institutions and digital labour regimes
We welcome perspectives from sociology, labour economics, social policy, organisational studies, psychology, gerontology, political science, employment relations and critical digital studies. Qualitative, quantitative, comparative and mixed-methods research is encouraged, alongside theoretically innovative and policy-oriented contributions.
Submissions should engage directly with the social, economic, organisational or policy implications of digitalisation for later-life employment. Studies concerned solely with technical system design, or with ageing outside work and employment contexts, fall outside the Collection’s scope.
We particularly welcome research that examines how digital transformation intersects with broader structures of inequality, authority and participation, and that contributes to more inclusive, equitable and sustainable futures of work in ageing societies.
This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 8 – Decent Work and Economic Growth and SDG 10 – Reduced Inequalities.
