Over the hill or under the table? Organizing age identities at work
Kathleen Riach, University of Glasgow
"What we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us." – Marcel Proust, A l'ombe des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1918
The sanitised view of an ageless community of workers which is promoted in light of new age discrimination laws throughout Europe draws uncanny parrallels with the commercialised promotion of genderless, raceless (and personality-less?) workforces. Turning against such views, critical perspectives which have attempted to explore identity define (although do not determine) the self as fluid, unstable and constructed in relation to social context (van Dijk, 1997; Grant et al., 2004). In no case is this more apparent than age identities where our bodies, minds and experiences continously push us along personal chronologies towards an undetermined future, albeit loosely predicted by the end point of death. Yet whilst gerontological effects may emerge some 20 years after the end of our working lives, current studies into organizational age discrimination suggest that age inequality is both constructed and perpetuated by larger social discourses which conflate ageing with irreperable decline. Indeed, it could be argued that extreme formulations of youth and old age have a pervasive effect on organizational age inequalities,to the extent that the cultural and social discourses of ageing have been condensed and exaggerated in a way that dichotomises ageing identities in the workplace.
Using Bourdieu’s tools of practice, this paper seeks to explore how ageing identities are constructed, understood and contested in relation to working and the workplace. Bourdieu’s habitus allows us to explore the possibility of identity as only a understood through discourse and social context but embodied and situated in individual experience and praxis. As part of a larger study exploring the construction of organizational ageism and age inequality, this paper uses data from 33 in-depth interviews with managers to develop a practice-driven construction of self-identity and age, where ageing identities are used not only as a means of organizational sense-making but allow the individual to pre-empt possible forms of marginalization. In doing so, individuals may be viewed as actively engaging in their own sense of praxis by consciously strategising their own condition, and attempting to configure themselves favourably, for example, to avoid embodying the ‘older worker’. However, participants were also seen to simultaneously reproduce larger discourses which supported a chronologically or biologically-determined identity, forcing a polarization between ideals of youth and older age. With such constructions appearing to coexist alongside more personal self-making histories, there is a question over whether this attempt to protect or emancipate a future, older identity is either sustainable or realistic.