Age at Work: Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing

Review\nWe′ve all been told, "Too old for this, too young for that." In this masterly study Hearn and Parkin show how organizations organize human beings into categories. Calendars, chronologies and "ticking clocks" mobilize to tell us what we are and who we are becoming. Birth and death are certainties, but age and ageing are where power meets opinion. -- Terrell Carver Published On: 2020-06-16\nIn reviewing this book, the phrase that continually comes to mind is `at last – a serious study of ageing and organization.’ There are so many positives to this book, not least of which is the authorship of Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, who build on a lifetime of high impact research on various aspects of power and diversity. The other must-read elements include timeliness (it includes discussion of Covid-19); personal reflections and self-critique (joining theory to experience); engagement with age hegemony and the discourse of ageing at work; all written in an engaging style; that explores a topic that is relevant to us all. -- Professors Albert Mills and Jean Helms Mills\n"This fascinating discourse offers subtle and subversive insights into the ways we enact age and aging. It deconstructs conventional social scripts in ways that can improve both our own self-understanding and the shape of public policy." -- Nancy Folbre\nHearn and Parkin bring long careers′ worth of organizational research to bear on this mission to rescue the field. They show how regimes of age structure institutions, from the rise of bureaucratic authority and trajectory of the ideal career, to the management of dependency and death in the age of pandemic. Enjoy this book for its sly humor and obvious pleasure taken in the writing. Let it inform your theory as you design your organizational research. It brings encyclopaedic knowledge of the histories of institutions to bear on the management of old age, the penetration of bureaucracy into familial and personal authority, the organization of daily care, attempts to extend the human lifespan, and memorials built to honor our heroes. This book ought to reshape the field of organizational studies. -- Professors Toni Calasanti and Neal King\nCombining keen scholarly insight with personal testimonies, Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin provide a sensitive and sophisticated analysis of age and organization. Age at Work brings together age and organization studies in a comprehensive, highly accessible and contemporary account that addresses key concerns within cultural gerontology and the critical role of age in organizational construction and inequality. This timely book expands new domains of interest within a neglected area of research, highlighting how age, ageing and ageism ‘figure’ in organizations and raising fascinating issues that will be an invaluable resource across the social sciences. -- Professor Ruth Simpson\nHow can such a thought-provoking book – paradoxically full of strokes and dementia and other geriatric challenges - be so wonderful to engage with? What Hearn and Parkin have succeeded in producing in this new work is a comprehensive survey of just how age and organization intertwine - ambiguously. Thus, the organizations through which we experience ageing are our places of work but also our places of health care, and of death. The authors show that age is a major issue for the young as well as the old; that age is a fiction but it is also a social fact; that age is contingent, intersectional and a social construct. Yet ageing is an event horizon from which there is no return. This unidirectionality notwithstanding, ‘Age at Work’ is a proper learning event to which one will be able to return, over time, on many occasions and, each time, feel more informed about oneself and those around you. -- Gibson Burrell Published On: 2020-10-05\nAge as a ‘number’ is so deceptive, as this insightful book shows. Age is infused with socially constructed meanings, shaping and shaped by organizations of all types. The author