Ageism in Work and Employment

Ian Glover, Mohamed Branine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367249151
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351735704
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2001. This collection of essays on the the subject of ageism in work and employment arose out of the international conference held at Stirling University in July 1996. The book addresses various topics within this issue including the problem and its causes; the experience and practice of age discrimination in employment; and remedies and prospects.

Part I
Introduction

1 Introduction: the challenge of longer and healthier lives

Ian Glover and Mohamed Branine

Introduction

The formal study of ageism and of age discrimination in employment is largely a product of the 1980s and 1990s. It tends to be characterized by diversity of researchers’ backgrounds and fragmentation between their areas of interest and also by neglect of a number of significant features and forms of the phenomena in question. In July 1996 a conference on Ageism, Work and Employment was held at the University of Stirling. It attracted researchers with backgrounds in economics, law, psychology and sociology and from business and management studies, comparative management, entrepreneurship, human resource management, international business, marketing, and physical education and sports studies. Three of the papers presented at the conference were among those published in a special issue of Personnel Review (Vol. 26, No. 4, 1997), another was published in the Human Resource Management Journal in 1998 and twelve of the conference papers, which have been revised, are among those in this volume.

Most academic and lay interest in ageism, work and employment is currently focused on the problems of older people and most of the contributions to the conference and to this book reflect this fact. However ageism is an intergenerational phenomenon which both affects and involves employable people of all ages, and we anticipate and expect that as interest in and knowledge of the subject grow, research and writing will become more cohesive. We also expect that age and its links with employment and work and its management will replace ageism as the main concern of researchers. Currently there are some quite transparent elements of rawness, narrowness and lack of sophistication in and around thinking about age, ageism, work and employment. For example the often rather irrelevant term elderly is still used more often than it ought to be.

In the rest of this chapter we do four things. First, in the first main section of it, we spell out our working definition of ageism along with the three most important aims of the book. In the second main section we discuss the nature and context of age discrimination by reviewing some relevant studies and ideas, mainly those that are related to labour markets, and we offer an idea for summarising them by describing the contrasting notions of commodification and greening. Then we focus on other aspects of ageism in work and employment, notably some of the links between age, politics and management; age, education and training; and age and employer initiatives. In the third main section we outline the organization and the contents of the sections and chapters of the book. Finally and in the conclusion to this chapter we briefly anticipate some of the arguments of the book’s final chapter by looking forward to the development of more constructive understanding, policies and practices regarding age, work and employment than have usually been apparent hitherto.

A definition and the aims of the book

We define ageism as unconscionable prejudice and discrimination based on actual or perceived chronological age. It occurs whenever a person’s age is erroneously deemed to be unsuitable for some reason or purpose. It can be used to the detriment of people of any age. Age discrimination is treated as a universal, highly variable and complex phenomenon affecting people everywhere and of all ages, not just older ones, and it is considered as occurring in all aspects of employment and human resource management, not only when people are recruited or when their employment is terminated by employers. It is often prevalent when jobs are either particularly scarce or plentiful, when employers tend to find it a convenient excuse for deciding not to develop or to discard staff, or for not employing people who lack ‘obviously’ suitable backgrounds in the first place.

In work and employment, we see age as variously associated with the kinds of image that employers, and work colleagues, want to present: the terms dynamic, experienced, lively, mature, sensible, smart, powerful, wise, and others, including the opposites of these, come to mind. Age can be involved with control of employee attitudes, behaviour and performance. It can be used positively to convey a sense of appropriateness and dignity to employees, to help match employee capacity and employee performance, in the exercise of discretion and the granting of autonomy, and in employee and organizational development. Age can also be used negatively and destructively. This happens whenever it is used to reduce the dignity of and the respect given to individuals, when performance evaluation is confused by inappropriate application of age-related opinions or information, when levels of autonomy and discretion, types of training provision and forms of work organization are not matched to age profiles in ways that optimise performance and development (Herriot and Pemberton, 1994).

Ageism is present at all stages of employment, not just in advertisements for posts, but also in organizational structuring, selection, deployment, task allocation, appraisal of performance and career planning, and in remuneration and employee benefits. It is present, too, in the selection or non-selection of individuals for particular kinds of training and development and in decisions about redeployment, promotion, demotion, termination and pension rights (Pilcher, 1996; Arrowsmith and McGoldrick, 1997; Itzin and Philipson, 1993).

In societies where people are living longer, healthier and wealthier lives, and when older people constitute higher proportions of populations, ageism against older people may become incompatible with general economic and social needs. Employers responding to demographic change can find themselves in the position of having to reconsider their recruitment, training and retirement policies whereby they can benefit from the knowledge and skills of all potential or existing employees regardless of age.

On the basis of our definition and our thinking about ageism we have organized this book to achieve three main aims. First, we seek to identify and discuss the nature and some of the main causes of ageism and age discrimination in work and employment in the UK and to a lesser extent elsewhere. Second, we aim to describe and explore the experience and practice of age discrimination in work and employment. Third, we aim to present, compare and contrast some of the main remedies which have been proposed and we do so the context of relevant economic, political and social trends.

Our main focus, as noted above, is on ageism and its effects on older employees, or would-be ones, although the chapters by Peter Herriot and by Karen Rodham are concerned with middle-aged and younger employees respectively. Discrimination against older people, say those over 40 and especially against those over 50 and 60, is currently much more prominent and the subject of much more public criticism than that against people between their middle to late teens and, say, their mid-thirties. Discrimination against young people with few or no qualifications has tended to be studied, but more often neglected, as an issue in its own right, partly because concerns about education and training tend to overshadow and to be confused with it. Also, discrimination against the young does not in general appear to have quite so final a quality as that against older people, until, that is, some of the young victims commit suicide as a result of being thwarted in their searches for adult roles and identities. In many countries older people, especially males, have lost their jobs both with and without the benefits of early retirement ‘packages’, and in many sectors younger people are no longer getting apprenticeships, training positions and junior types of job. Not least because both younger and older employees may be affected by ageist attitudes and behaviour, it is not usually helpful for one group to blame its misfortunes mainly on the other. Ageism is different from other ‘isms’ such as racism or sexism because it can affect anyone at one or more time in their life (see Bytheway, 1995).

Many of the more general arguments in this book are very relevant for understanding ageism directed at people of all ages and at all those in their twenties onwards whose employment experiences and situations help to turn them into ‘chronological misfits’ of one kind or another. The reason why discrimination against younger people has not been so highly publicized as that against older ones is the use of the widespread assumption that a cult of youth operates in some Western countries to the detriment, on balance, of older people, who therefore need more public support than younger ones do. In fact the cult of youth primarily means middle aged and older people acting immaturely and neglecting the responsible care and upbringing of the young so that it is the latter who suffer most, and the rights and welfare of their elders so that they also suffer. Younger people are, we emphasize again, major victims of ageism, especially if they are unqualified and unskilled (Mizen, 1995). Immaturity is the stigma most commonly misapplied to the young (Gadd, 1996). As noted, as unemployment amongst young people has grown in the UK, so have suicide rates, especially amongst males who feel unable to form adult identities (Furnham and Stacey, 1991).

Age is also often used against people - chronological misfits - if they have not ‘achieved’ certain levels of employment by particular ages, very often irrespective of the reasons, and also often in ignorance of valid alternative experiences which may be of great use to employers. The stigma of mental and physical decrepitude are normally misapplied to older people, resulting in feelings of rejection and atrophy of mental and physical powers (cf. Taylor and Walker, 1994; Pearson, 1996; Taylor, 1998). As people live longer and as a culture of early retirement becomes more entrenched millions of discarded, inactive, yet fit older people become an unnecessary burden on the active middle-aged and young. However ageism in all its forms ‘creates a series of barriers to the achievement of individual potential. This is wasteful in terms of the optimum use of human resources and represents a source of injustice and social exclusion’ (Walker, 1999: 7). Older people do, of course, tend to be more experienced and wiser, but physically weaker than younger ones. This means that it is those who ignore relevant strengths and who exploit relevant weaknesses, either out of fear or greed, or both, who deserve the most criticism.

Age discrimination in context

Contemporary patterns of employment have evolved out of industrialisation, which in the developed countries and some other ones has produced great wealth by historic standards. Largely as a consequence lives are considerably longer than they were 50 to 100 years ago, and in most industrial countries twice as long as they were in the eighteenth century, but most societies and employers have yet to adapt to this major demographic change. Ideally, employers should try to use and develop all of the abilities at their disposal creatively, but in reality short term economic and political factors and longer term disjunctions between technical and social divisions of labour interfere with the pursuit of the laudable aim. Thus in the latter case it is common for the wrong people to be doing the wrong jobs as members of the wrong occupations with the wrong skills and wrong education and knowledge with wrong expectations, attitudes, beliefs and motives, and so on. Social divisions of labour based on such task-irrelevant factors as age, gender and race interfere with the ideal technical/practical ones. Rigid and negative views of human potential often prevail with managers and employers failing to realise or acknowledge that failure to learn and succeed at performing tasks is due to lack of confidence or effort, not to a lack of ability or potential. They suspect diversity in employees’ backgrounds when they should celebrate, enjoy, explore and develop it.

Partly because of rising levels of income and of general affluence, partly because of the disjunction between (ideal) technical and social (aspects which interfere with the ideal, like age, gender and race) divisions of labour, meaning that the wrong sorts of people staff inadequately designed jobs, individualistic and selfish chaos can prevail in and around workplaces. People tend to be more concerned with career than with achievement and work. There is considerable social mobility (in all directions) but it is at least as much a product of chaos and often unrelated change in work organization as it is of effort, ability and positive economic and social development (cf. Herriot, Hirsh and Reilly, 1998).

Affluence, selfishness and organizational chaos tend to breed careerism, and concern with status, income and power, at the expense of vocation and the lifetime development of useful specialist personal skill and knowledge (Sorge, 1978; Jackall, 1988). The notion of vocation can be appreciated by reading Dingley (1996) on the medieval guilds, apprenticeship, professions, universities, religion and society, and on Utilitarianism and Durkheim’s views on moral and social integration in industrial societies.

Age is perhaps the last ‘legitimate’ general resort and/or final excuse for excluding people from and within employment. It is relatively easy for employers to use age to eliminate candidates from selection lists, partly because doing so is not yet prohibited by law. Also, and although the validity of the following is often very dubious in practice, there may be some justification in employers referring to such factors as inexperience, reduced energy or inadequate speed of response, when discriminating on the grounds of age.

Several researchers have tried to explain the issue of ageism in employment and work situations by using theories and concepts concerned with the operations of labour markets. These concern labour market segmentation, internal labour markets, the reserve army of labour, and labour market flexibility (see Laczko and Phillipson, 1991). Labour market segmentation theory is based on notions of inequality in the labour market and accounts for it at least partly in terms of differentiation based on gender, race, age, educational type and level, occupation, remuneration grades and so on (Laczko and Phillipson, 1991). Advocates of internal labour market theory note how older employees benefit from seniority-related pay and promotion, and do not have to compete with younger people for jobs in external labour markets, but if they lose their jobs it is difficult for them to find new employment, and they tend to experience long periods of unemployment. This is why during economic downturns older employees are often pressurized to leave their relatively highly paid senior positions, through early retirement, to be replaced by younger and cheaper counterparts. The third concept regards older unemployed and underemployed people as part of the reserve army of labour. According to this notion many older people are only employed when needed depending on the fluctuating demand for labour. Fourth and finally, it is also often argued that one effect of the use of different types of flexible working can be to move older employees from full-time positions, which are given to younger people, and to put them into part-time and temporary jobs.

Lay and academic concern with the possibly increasing net costs of having an older population has burgeoned since the 1970s in the UK (Arber, 1996). Debate has become increasingly sophisticated so that, for example, it has been linked to the thinking of such social theorists as Elias (1991) on childhood and adulthood and youth and old age in history, and Kumar (1995) on the slippery nature of our thinking about time and the life cycle in the context of discussions of modernity, postmodernity and so on. Laslett (1996) has depicted a ‘new map of life’ which takes account, especially, of a ‘Third Age’ from fifty onwards to the mid-seventies onwards, of hopefully rewarding activity following full-time employment.

Other and often wider aspects of age discrimination are discussed by Casey, Metcalf and Milllward (1997) who compared redundancy and early retirement prac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I – Introduction
• Part II – The problem and its causes
• Part III – The experience and practice of age discrimination in employment
• Part IV – Remedies and prospects
• Part V – Conclusion
• Index