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.
"Hearn and Parkin’s work tries to untangle some if not most of these essentialist stances by recognizing that age(ing) can be, and is, mediated by not only individuals involved in social relations in organizations but also by the organizations themselves.
Read full review" - Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal
"The authors of this book, Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, bring to bear many decades of scholarship into gender relations, gendering, sexuality and violence in organization studies. This paves the way for an approach to ageing and organization that is contingent (provisional and relational) and intersectional. Age and ageing are thereby shown to be related to gender, race, ethnicity and class, showing how these characteristics work together to privilege some and disadvantage others. Through this, Hearn and Parkin, together with co-authors Richard Howson and Charlotta Niemistö, explore how meanings of age are culturally gendered, while also acknowledging the corporeal and material-discursive reality of the ageing body which, they emphasize, goes beyond social constructions.
Full revie: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01708406221112477" - Organization Studies Journal