This chapter explores the role played by volunteering in the lifecourse transition from paid work to retirement. As life expectancy rises, the increasing proportion of over-50s in the UK population is challenging the persistent negative stereotypes that signal both older age and retirement as a withdrawal from active life. Many people are now retiring with good levels of health, education and disposable incomes, as well as having outlooks and expectations regarding this phase of life that are different from their predecessors. In this context, volunteering has been promoted in public policy discourse since the early 1990s as a desirable pathway into retirement, which can bring well-being benefits to the individual as well as allowing them to continue contributing to social and economic life.

Despite the promotion of volunteering, various surveys have found that volunteering rates decline post-retirement for both men and women. However, such surveys, although telling us much about broader trends in civil society participation across age cohorts, are arguably limited in their ability to capture the complexity of a great many older lives these days as they negotiate multiple demands on their time and resources. This chapter seeks to go some way towards fleshing out this complexity by drawing on recent work in human geography on the relational geographies of ageing, which foregrounds the concepts of linked lives and non-linearity in life transitions. Drawing on detailed interviews with older volunteers across a number of organisations in mid-Wales, we consider how decision-making in the retirement transition is narrated by these individuals through reference to their relations and connections with other people, places, organisations and events throughout the lifecourse.

Retirement transitions

As discussed by Ian Rees Jones and colleagues (2010), there have been dramatic changes in the perceptions and experiences of the retirement process from the early 1990s onwards. This has been linked in part to a movement away from mandatory retirement ages, as well as greater flexibility on retirement age for some workers across a range of economic sectors (Rees Jones et al 2010). Focusing on the UK context, Blaikie (1992) noted the growing ‘fragmentation’ associated with retirement as an increasingly less consolidated phase of the lifecourse, while Higgs et al – writing a decade later – talk about the growing recognition of ‘multiple pathways‘(2003: 765) into (early) retirement.