Age at Work – the Great Unifier, the Great Divider
By Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin
What happens at work, and in workplaces, clearly has a lot to do with different jobs, occupations and class more generally, but workplaces are much more than that. Workplaces are also places of age, where age is “done”, is constructed and reconstructed, is experienced, celebrated and denied. At work, people are routinely assessed by age, sometimes in terms of being a certain number of years, more often through some form of cultural assessment of occupational or professional age – is this a young worker? An experienced professional of middle years? An older or simply an old worker? Are they ready for promotion or are they well past their ‘sell-buy date’? Just past it? Age is something other people have. These are some of the many issues around age, ageing and ageism that we explore in our new book, Age at Work: Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing.
So, how is age ‘done’ where you work? Or where you play? Or in other organizations you are a part of? When you go to work – or when before COVID you used to go to your workplace – what goes on in terms of age and ageing? Are there certain ways of being younger, of youth itself, that are favoured? Or is it the older, ‘more mature’ ages that are respected and seen as authoritative and the best? These may seem obvious and important questions to some, especially as you get older, yet strange and irrelevant questions to others. Work and being at work, and in other organizations, is much about age and ageing – and ageism too.
And all of this is heavily gendered. Women are still often valued for their physical appearance, which, according to current dominant beauty ideals, is assumed to deteriorate with age. Gendered ageing in organizations is often subject to double standards, with women experiencing triple discrimination by age, gender, and also “lookism”.
Age and ageing unite us all as people. We are all changing in terms of age all the time, if only gradually, and almost all of us have been disadvantaged by age in the past and face the prospect of being disadvantaged by age now or in the future. But age is also a great divider, sometimes drastically so, as when someone is “encouraged” to move on or ostracized simply because of their age. In this combination of uniting and dividing, age is a unique social division and social relation. Patterns of age inequality, sometimes extreme age inequalities, have clear material concrete effects. Also note that, in EU-wide surveys – the 2002 Discrimination in Europe report, and the 2015 Discrimination in the EU in 2015 report at least, age discrimination was reported at higher levels than for either gender discrimination or race discrimination. One reason is what can be called double ageism: that is, ageism towards both younger and older people, so ageism towards younger workers and ageism towards older, or old, workers.
Yet, paradoxically, one of the problems in highlighting age and ageism is that discussion very soon turns to the younger and the older. Now in part for economic reasons, there is almost an obsession in policy and research with approaching age at work through the idea of extending the paid working life of older people. Those of middle years, the normal and normalized adult worker, professional and manager, those who set the rules and norms of age and ageing, are simply left unmarked, unexamined, “untheorized”. Just as gender relations not only concern women, but also men and masculinities, and just as race and the perpetuation of racism is also about white people and whiteness, so age and ageism concern the missing middle. To examine this demands Critical Adult Studies, or CRAS for short – critically taking apart what is assumed to be the ideal age of workers and managers. Again, this ideally aged worker and manager is typically heavily gendered, so that women can be too young to be promoted, then immediately too old to be promoted.
So, age, gender, work and organization go tightly together. The mutual connections of age, work and organizations are also reproduced through everyday actions and interactions. Talk about age can be understood as doing “age work”, as part of contrasting orientations to age and ageing within organizations. In one multi-method study of workers and managers in the care, electronics, finance, and tourism sectors, the 53 interviews highlighted these main ways of talking about age at work: getting older and retirement seen as a positive; getting older and retirement seen as a negative; age seen as bodily limitations; age/generational diversity seen as strength of the workgroups; recognition of the absence of an age cohort; along with a deafening silence around age and ageing in a few cases. Age, ageing and ageism at work are certainly broad societal topics, but they also operate in the immediate, sometimes intimate and contradictory, everyday workplace talk. So, what form do the taken-for-granted ways of ‘doing’ age, ageing and ageism – the everyday age hegemony – take in your workplace?
These and other issues are explored in the new book, Age at Work: Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing by Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, with Richard Howson and Charlotta Niemistö.
Book details
Age at Work
Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing
Jeff Hearn & Wendy Parkin
November 2020 | 240 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
ISBN: 9781526427731
About the authors
