At a Critical Age: Organizing Age and Ageing – Special Issue in Organization Studies

We are delighted to report the publication here (subscription required) of a Special Issue of the journal Organization Studies entitled ‘At a Critical Age: Organizing Age and Ageing’ which is likely to be of interest to many readers of this blog.

The Special Issue has been guest edited by Robyn Thomas, Cynthia Hardy, Leanne Cutcher, and Susan Ainsworth and its focus is the critical analysis of age and organizations. The groundbreaking work of Susan Ainsworth and Cynthia Hardy is well known, being probably the first in this field to apply a discursive  analytic approach to the concept of the older worker (and laying the foundation for many subsequent studies, including my own PhD).

The issue starts with an extremely useful Introduction by the guest editors, pointing out how age as an embodied identity and as an organizing principle, has received very little attention in organization studies. The editors set out a research agenda to bring an age-sensitive lens to organizational analysis, focusing on age as an embodied identity, and the symbolic meanings of age within organizing practices.

The issue then features 7 papers all examining different aspects of age and work including our own paper ‘Baby Boomers and the Lost Generation: On the Discursive Construction of Generations at Work‘. For those without a subscription to this journal, a pre-print version of our paper is available here via this link.

The full list of the papers is as follows:

1. Robyn Thomas, Cynthia Hardy, Leanne Cutcher, and Susan Ainsworth: What’s Age Got to Do With It? On the Critical Analysis of Age and Organizations
2. Simona Spedale,Christine Coupland, and Sue Tempest: Gendered Ageism and Organizational Routines at Work: The Case of Day-Parting in Television Broadcasting
3. Katrina Pritchard and Rebecca Whiting: Baby Boomers and the Lost Generation: On the Discursive Construction of Generations at Work
4. Cameron Graham: The Calculation of Age
5. Frances Tomlinson and Fiona Colgan: Negotiating the Self Between Past and Present: Narratives of Older Women Moving Towards Self-Employment
6. Kathleen Riach, Nicholas Rumens, and Melissa Tyler: Un/doing Chrononormativity: Negotiating Ageing, Gender and Sexuality in Organizational Life
7. Paula Hyde, Diane Burns, John Hassard, and Anne Killett: Colonizing the Aged Body and the Organization of Later Life
8. Stephen Fineman: Age Matters

As the Special Issue was only published yesterday we have not yet had a chance to read the other papers but we are confident that they will form an extremely significant contribution to understandings of age in organizations and we are very proud that our work has been selected as part of this endeavour.