Organization Studies

Age, as an embodied identity and as an organizing principle, has received scant attention in organization studies. There is a lack of critical appreciation of how age plays out in organizational settings, the material and discursive dynamics of age practices, how age discourses impact on the body, and how age and ageing intersect with other identity categories. This is curious since age works as a master signifier in contemporary society and is something that affects us all. In this introductory essay, we show how the papers in this special issue redress this lacuna by enhancing and challenging what we know about age and organizations. We also set out an agenda for stimulating research conversations to bring an age-sensitive lens to organizational analysis. We structure our analysis around two focal points: age as an embodied identity, and the symbolic meanings of age within organizing practices. In doing so, we aim to provide a catalyst not only for research on age in organizations but also about the aged nature of organizing.

This article contributes to the study of gendered ageism in the workplace by investigating how the routine of day-parting in broadcasting participates in the social construction of an ideology of ‘youthfulness’ that contributes to inequality. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the final judgment of an Employment Tribunal court case where the British public service broadcaster, the BBC, faced accusations of discrimination on the basis of both age and gender. Three interrelated findings are highlighted. First, the ideology of youthfulness was constituted through discursive strategies of nomination and predication that relied on an inherently ageist and sexist lexical register of ‘brand refreshment and rejuvenation’. Second, the ideology of youthfulness was reproduced through a pervasive discursive strategy of combined de-agentialization, abstraction and generalization that maintained power inequality in the workplace by obscuring the agency of the more powerful organizational actors while further marginalizing the weaker ones. Third, despite evidence that the intersection of age and gender produced qualitatively different experiences for individual organizational actors, in the legitimate and authoritative version of the truth constructed in the Tribunal’s final judgment, ageism discursively prevailed over sexism as a form of oppression at work. These findings support the view that the intersection of age and gender in the workplace should be explored by taking into account different levels of analysis – individual, organizational and societal – and with sensitivity to the context. They also suggest that the notion of gendered ageism is still poorly articulated and that the lack of an appropriate vocabulary encourages the discursive dominance of ageism over sexism, making the intersection of the two more difficult to study and to address.

Generations, and generational categories, offer a means of organizing our understandings of age and age-related issues. Particularly within practitioner-orientated debates, differences between generations are highlighted as creating tensions which organizations must address. In contrast, we offer a critical interrogation of generations and unpack the implications of particular constructions. Specifically we examine the discursive construction of generational issues in United Kingdom online news about age at work, focusing on baby boomers and the lost generation. We highlight the discursive work involved in constructing each generation as entitled to work and how responsibility for employment issues is variously positioned. These interrelated concerns develop into a debate about consequences, as different versions of the future are constructed. In contrast to essentialized understandings, our study shows how generations and generational categories are constructed and organize understandings of age at work. We further highlight how the constructions of generational differences and tensions become enrolled to legitimate age-related differences with regard to work. Such insights are essential to further our understandings of age-related issues in contemporary organizing.

This article explores the role of calculative technologies, such as taxation, accounting and actuarial practices, in constructing ‘age’ in contemporary society. It argues that retirement income programs built on these technologies attempt to construct specific relations not just between the individual and other generations, but between the individual and herself at other stages of life. Retracing the series of Canadian attempts to secure income for the elderly over the course of the 20th century, the paper shows how calculative technologies have been used to connect responsibility for the elderly to the political rationalities of the day. This genealogy allows us to recognize how the present Canadian retirement income system, with its public and private programs addressing different subsets of the population, is contingent on neoliberal rationalities of governance. These demand the alignment of the individual with the goals of the capital markets, and seek to achieve this through a distributed agency that encourages the investment of individual savings in retirement income products. The paper argues that this distributed agency is perpetually incomplete, and that uncertainty is necessary in order that the individual be constantly remade as an investor.

Older people are encouraged into self-employment as a means to extend their working lives; however, both age and gender are thought to constrain the capacity of individuals to take on an enterprising identity. This paper explores the narrative identity work of women over 50 contemplating a move into self-employment. It reveals how they negotiated a provisional self-employed identity in relation to an aged identity, an enterprising identity and an identity as organizational outsider. It discusses the implications of contrasting forms of engagement with these identities for the subsequent enactment of participants’ business plans. The paper briefly considers the implications of its findings for the following areas: enacting and realizing provisional identities; the relationship of self-employment to enterprise; and a process-based conceptualization of age.

This paper is based on a series of ‘anti-narrative’ interviews designed to explore the ways in which lived experiences of age, gender and sexuality are negotiated and narrated within organizations in later life. It draws on Judith Butler’s performative ontology of gender, particularly her account of the ways in which the desire for recognition is shaped by heteronormativity, considering its implications for how we study ageing and organizations. In doing so, the paper develops a critique of the impact of heteronormative life course expectations on the negotiation of viable subjectivity within organizational settings. Focusing on the ways in which ‘chrononormativity’ shapes the lived experiences of ageing within organizations, at the same time as constituting an organizing process in itself, the paper draws on Butler’s concept of ‘un/doing’ in its analysis of the simultaneously affirming and negating organizational experiences of older self-identifying LGBT people. The paper concludes by emphasizing the theoretical potential of a performative ontology of ageing, gender and sexuality for organization studies, as well as the methodological insights to be derived from an ‘anti-narrative’ approach to organizational research, arguing for the need to develop a more inclusive politics of ageing within both organizational practice and research.

Based on fieldwork in residential homes, arrangements for the care of older people are examined with reference, primarily, to Deetz’s theory of ‘corporate colonization’. Extending this theory, it is argued that grouping such people in care homes can result in a form of social segregation, one that reflects the management of the aged body in relation to normative constructions of dependence. Focusing on the experiences of residents, the everyday effects of narratives of decline on disciplining the lives of older people are assessed, with this analysis taking recourse to the work of Foucault (1979). The result is the identification of three related concepts at work in the colonizing process of the aged body: (i) appropriation of the body – the physical and social practices involved in placing older people in care homes; (ii) separation from previous identities – how a range of new subjectivities are produced in the process of becoming a ‘resident’; and (iii) contesting colonized identities – the ways in which residents can attempt to challenge normative concepts of managed physical and mental decline. Overall the disciplining of the body is theorized not only as an adjunct to the notion of corporate colonization but also, more generally, as a prominent and powerful organizing principle of later life.