Dissertation_Paula Aleksandrowicz_12 ... - Jacobs University

Those interviews, which were originally conducted for the ActivAge project, together
with the gathered material (a.o. collective agreements), will only serve as auxiliary for my
analysis of firm-level interviews.
3) secondary analysis of national and international official statistics on employment,
retirement and demographic developments (from OECD and Eurostat);
4) literature and document analysis (scholarly literature; policy documents including
commissioned reports, legal acts, drafts of law and press releases; daily press),
scholarly literature comprising the results of national and international public
opinion surveys on individual retirement preferences.
I decided to utilise qualitative methods for my research topic as they are well-suited for
explorative analyses of new phenomena (Flick et al. 2003: 24, 25), and as such I regard the
comparison of practices of Polish and German companies in view of pension reforms. With
relation to my topic, I was interested in the mechanisms of translation of legislative
regulations into company law and practices, and the interrelations between the employee
representatives and management in that process. In particular, I wanted to investigate
whether the personnel policy of firms in Germany and Poland has reacted to the changed
legislatory framework with regard to early retirement and has created opportunities for older
applicants to enter the company and opportunities for older workers on-the-job to remain in
it until standard retirement. I assumed that those mechanisms and processes were contingent
on the institutional framework. That called for a holistic, qualitative research perspective.
Furthermore, I wanted to find out whether there are certain, nation-wide types of reactions
to those reforms, or whether those types follow other dividing lines (e.g. branches).
Qualitative methods allow an unravelling of stereotypes and discriminative practice which
in quantitative accounts may be hidden behind replies in line with social desirability.
In distinction to analyses of the European Foundation (e.g. Taylor 2006), I did not look
after already developed, ´good practice´ age management policies. Rather, I sought to find
out under what conditions such policies can be developed, and what are the conditions
which thwart the development of such policy.
I was not interested in how frequently one type of reactions occurs but what the possible
range of reactions is. Therefore, comparative case studies were the method (or approach) of
choice. They make an in-depth understanding of the analysed topic possible and generate
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