Age at Work

Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing

Jeff Hearn,Wendy Parkin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526454102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Age at Work explores the myriad ways in which 'age' is at 'work' across society, organizations and workplaces, with special focus on organizations, their boundaries, and marginalizing processes around age and ageism in and across these spaces.

The book examines:

• how society operates in and through age, and how this informs the very existence of organizations;
• age-organization regimes, age-organization boundaries, and the relationship between organizations and death, and post-death
• the importance of memory, forgetting and rememorizing in re-thinking the authors' and others' earlier work
• tensions between seeing age in terms of later life and seeing age as pervasive social relations.

Enriched with insights from the authors' lived experiences, Age at Work is a major and timely intervention in studies of age, work, care and organizations. Ideal for students of Sociology, Organizations and Management, Social Policy, Gerontology, Health and Social Care, and Social Work.

Part 1 Setting the Scene

1 Forgetting and Remembering Age: From Invisibility to Recognition

Forgetting age, and ageing too, is easy (until you get there) – especially when you are younger, and even more so when immersed in the world of organizations. We have certainly done so.

Now, we see it differently … having reached the ages of 73 and 83.

We think it may be helpful, at the outset, to state our own personal positions in respect of age, and why we are exploring this now. We admit to the lack of attention to age in our previous writing when we were both younger and in paid work.

Wendy is fully retired from paid work but has been actively involved in patient involvement in the NHS at her local surgery, and also at local NHS governance level until ill health forced her to retire. Wendy has been interested in age and ageing, and ‘end of life’ issues for several years. She has chronic ill health having suffered a stroke caused by a heart condition, is on heart medication and anti-coagulants, and has a pacemaker. In addition, she has some lung damage which has resulted in admission to an ‘elderly medicine’ ward with pneumonia, which has given her experience of ‘Elderly Medicine’ (formerly Geriatrics), as an in-patient, out-patient and ‘virtual ward’ patient. These experiences provide various case materials for this book.

Jeff is officially retired, though working more or less full-time. He has been interested in age and ageing since the late 1980s and early 1990s, in part through dissatisfaction with the orientation towards younger age in many debates on men, masculinities and gender relations. This followed being strongly engaged with activism and research on children and young people, and the ageism embedded there. He has attachments with universities in Finland, where he lives, Sweden, the UK and South Africa, and finds the ageism that comes his way no longer surprising. He is currently in good health, despite a small scare last year, and has also been part of a long-term memory work group of older pro-feminist men. These various experiences feed into this book.

Forgetfulness, ageing and organizations are culturally embedded and intertwined. The forgetfulness about age can easily continue with ageing (and it may even be a bit embarrassing to go on about it too much). Here, we interrogate age and organizations through this forgetfulness about age, within the framework of wider societal issues of ageing and with older people marginalized, discriminated against and subject to various ageisms. The supposedly ‘forgetful’ are conveniently forgotten. Likewise, the old are frequently invisible and forgotten in organizational terms, probably partly because they are often not or not seen as ‘at work'. Recognition, recognition struggles¹ and the bringing of neglected powers to critical interrogation have been and are the task of analysis, theorizing and politics.

In this book, we link the past, the present and the future. In earlier work, we have sought to ‘introduce’ and promote the notions of gender relations, gendering, sexuality, violence and violation into organization studies,² where gendered structures and processes had often been made invisible or hidden by privilege,³ as supposedly non-gendered. As such, the book is a development, celebration and elaboration, but also an indictment and self-critique, of that work. We address the neglected area of age, ageing, ageism, work, organizations and organizing. In keeping with a critical anti-ageist standpoint, and because older age brings age antagonisms to the fore, we give some special attention to oldness and later life, and indeed death and after death, in, around and outside organizations. We do not see age and ageing as negativity nor in terms of danger and the ageing ‘time bomb'. At its worst, ‘[b]laming a group of innocent people for their demographic situation straddles the threshold from nonhuman to human, and from individuals to aggregates, with an ugly insinuation that nations are better off with fewer elders’ (Gullette, 2018: 259). Throughout, we recognize a profound and productive tension between a focus on ageing, especially older people, and addressing age and age relations more generally.

In analysing organizations, age seems either just too obvious or natural or somehow irrelevant, hardly worth a mention, when considering how organizations and organizing work, even though it obviously does matter, a lot. Organizations may seem or seek to transcend age, for example, in their impersonal, disembodied rules and procedures, as part of the contradiction of ageing life/death and the continuing social. Organizations may seem both historically sedimented and yet age-less, beyond age, beyond the messy materiality of bodily ageing. The relative lack of attention to age and ageing in organizations and organization studies mirrors the contextualized and ideological valuing of the new and of being young(er), even whilst the young remain relatively lacking in power (see pp. 43–8). This organizational situation is legimitated by ideologies of ageing, narratives of decline, medicalization of age, and the homogenization and individualization of aged persons.

Yet entering most organizations, especially employing organizations, usually means entering the taken-for-granted, yet implicitly aged, world of adults –not children, young people or old and older people – but the world of normalized adults. These many and varied organizations are typically composed of what might be thought of as ‘ordinary', taken-for-granted organizational members, most often the ‘adults’ (see pp. 48–52), rather than the young, children, young people, the old and older old.

We now cannot get away from age and ageing in spite of numerous continuing attempts in and around organizations by managements and organizational members to do so, less or more consciously. This means recognizing the neglect of old(er) people, and at the same time not reducing age and ageing to old(er) people. These are fundamental matters of politics, and the grounds of politics, by which the politics of class, gender, race and much more often exclude or play down age, and indeed disability. Thus, this is a book about the politics of age, and politics beyond age, whereby aged people are not reduced to age.

In this introductory chapter, we first address the two central elements that we seek to bring together. First, we discuss key concepts around age, ageing and generations, followed by outlining the important concept of ageism, and some contemporary demographic changes. Next, we turn to organizations and, organizing … and aged organizations, and some initial examples of how age figures in organizations (see Chapters 4–5). The chapter continues by directly addressing the question of why bring age and organizations together: why is age relevant for organizations and organization studies? The chapter concludes with more personal reflections, including some of the influences that have moved us towards a focus on age and organizations.

Age, Ageing, Generation and Lifecourse

There is now a vast literature on age and ageing, along with a more limited literature on age, ageing and organizations. In one sense, there are many kinds of research literatures that bear on age, ageing, work and organizations. Some are strongly disciplinary, stressing, for example, the psychology or the sociology of ageing.⁴ Others are multidisciplinary, spanning social sciences and natural sciences, notably Alan Walker's (2014) collection, The New Science of Ageing. There are significant literatures on gender and ageing,⁵ and intersectionality, diversity and ageing.⁶ More focused studies address ageing, embodiment and sexualities.⁷

Among a growing number of major edited collections on ageing and work is Field and colleagues’ (2013) SAGE Handbook of Aging, Work and Society, with contributions on key issues and challenges; ageing workforce; managing an ageing workforce; living in an ageing society; and public policy. Less common are more broadly based, global studies, such as those in Hyde and Higgs’ (2016) Ageing and Globalisation, and Scharf and Keating's (2012) From Exclusion to Inclusion in Old Age: A Global Challenge. Many studies examining work and employment focus on the ageing workforce, moves to extend ‘working life', pre-retirement and retirement,⁸ and their implications for health, care and social policy.⁹

The literature on the ageing workforce is clearly very important, and the debate on age at work has, arguably, been transformed by moves to extend ‘working life’ in many countries, making some aspects of age less invisible, and reconstructing age groupings. However, its frequent domination of discourse to the exclusion of other issues around age, ageing and organizations remains somewhat problematic. As Fineman (2011: 2) says, ‘Age and ageing are often a major form of structuring of organizations generally. Age is a very powerful means and dimension of organizing, even a so-called powerful “master discourse.”’ It is crucially important to recognize that the relations of age, ageing and organizations concern much more than the question of old(er) people at work and in employment.

Concepts and Debates

Before going further, a first set of distinctions needs to be made between:

• age as something that (potentially) affects all people, whether in terms of time and/or biography, and is a profound social and societal relation and social division;
• ageing as a process over time that is biological, psychological, cultural, historical, social, political, economic, and perhaps also aesthetic and spiritual (for some at least); the term ‘ageing’ can be used in several other ways, for example, as in ageing processes (paralleling, say, gendering processes) or in ‘ageing a person’ by attributing them a certain or approximate age;
• the use of ‘aged' as referring to relating to age, as with gendered or classed, rather than aged meaning old, as in aged or agéd (sic.);
• people, individually and collectively, who are or are specifically considered to be old or older, and who are referred to variously in terms of: old, older, elderly, elders, aged, seniors, senior citizens, pensioners and oldness;
• generation as referring to groupings of people by dint of their relative similarity, or difference, in terms of age, earlier experiences, ageing and/or position in their lifecourse – a far from perfect concept, but one still preferable to the arguably naturalizing ‘life cycle’ and psychologizing ‘lifespan’ (see Settersten, 2009).

Age/ageing, as a shorthand for age and ageing, is in some ways an unusual social division and form of social relations (see Chapters 2–3). Age and ageing concern time and change over time, whether measured, assumed, assessed, guessed or evaluated. Though often not strictly and determinately calendar time-based, age and ageing are certainly time-related, usually onwards from birth, but also even from pre-birth, and in an anticipatory sense in the time pre-death. The relation of age to birth also means that aspects of age are intimately connected to the gendered organization of motherhood, parenthood, family and kinship, biological and social reproduction, and generativity. Thus, the meanings of age are frequently strongly and culturally gendered. Meanings of age and generation are strongly related to global and cultural location, partly by dint of gross variations in life expectancy, but also through the vastly different relations to life and death across cultures.

Age and ageing are often reduced to numbers of years since birth (assuming that is known), in defining who and what counts as ‘old’ (typically 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75 or 80), or to time more loosely, and understood in terms of simple chronology or biological change. So, what happens when someone asks you your age? Is it polite or rude? Appropriate or inappropriate? Or simply ambiguous? And what happens when this happens at work or in other organizations? Often such a simple numerical approach to the temporal aspect of age (for example, ‘the new manager is 34', ‘they are being forced to take early retirement at 59’ or as we ourselves wrote ‘having reached the ages of 73 and 83') is taken for granted, within established temporalities. Birth year and chronological age are relevant in some, perhaps many, organizational processes, for example, entry age and retirement age. However, they are insufficient as general measures of organization-related age, work-related age, career-age and generation more generally.

While age, ageing, and indeed the very notions of old and older are culturally constructed, age and ageing are also related to the biological body, so that ageing is not simply a social construction; it still entails bodily, physical, biological, chemical, molecular change.

No matter how clearly we understand the complex and interconnecting forces of social aging, we age in our individual bodies. (Cruikshank, 2003: ix)

Biological ageing impacts on bodily physiology, function and strength, speed of movement, physical size, immunity, disability, mobility, muscle development, cell division, metabolic rate, hormonal levels, recovery and so on. This is even whilst different body parts can age at different rates (according to the epigenetic clock theory of ageing), and even if these are simultaneously socially constructed. Biology matters! As Twigg puts it: ‘[…] ageing forces us to engage with physiology, not least because of the ultimate undeniability of death’ (Twigg, 2004: 63). Thus:

[n]o matter how committed one is to the social constructionist approach, there comes a point when one has to face the reality in the front of one's eyes and, indeed, the reality of the condition of one's much-used body. (Bytheway, 1995: 125)

We need to consider the social construction of old age in conjunction with the aging of bodies (which, in a vexing irony, we understand only through social constructions). (Calasanti and King, 2005: 6)

Ageing has a corporeal reality that includes perceptions and experiences of illness and death, yet this is often denied in cultural constructions focusing on the denial and avoidance of ageing. Hence, there is a need to recognize the physical realities of growing older in a way that is able to conceptualize ‘nature as a social text'. (Twigg, 2004: 60)

But though some age and some forms of disability correlate, age is not only about disability, and disability is not only about age. Having said this, we could be in danger of excluding another major issue if we did not refer to disability. In the past, we have played down age as a dimension of organizations, and do not want to do the same for disability. This is complicated by the wide variety of disabilities: genetic, congenital, chronic, acute, visible, partly visible and invisible. Addressing all this would warrant another book to explore disability and organizations. What we do need to recognize is that, a...