‘Othering’ older worker identity in recruitment

A B S T R AC T Current research into organizational age discrimination has placed a focus on the consequences of ageism and economic pressures of an ageing workforce, rather than endeavouring to understand the social processes that create and reproduce ageist ideologies within an organizational context. This article departs from mainstream approaches within age and employment studies in order to explore older worker identity as a discursive phenomenon. Analysis shows how the social construction of the 'older worker' may in itself serve to marginalize and contribute towards age inequalities through three discursive strategies: contextualizing the problem, essentializing older worker characteristics and ventriloquizing the older worker. The conclusions seek to situate these findings within larger political and practitioner debates concerning the older worker agenda and how distancing the older worker from chronological or biological deter-minism may serve to further our understanding of organizational age inequality as a social process. Introduction With the launch of UK anti-age discrimination legislation in October 2006, there has never been a time when age, the 'older worker' and related inequalities have been more relevant, both on a political and social spectrum. Yet despite the development of policy to encourage equal practice towards 'older workers', there is still a lack of sophisticated understanding about the multifaceted ways in which ageism may be experienced or enacted within an organizational context. Studies are often limited in their conceptual understanding of ageism and age discrimination, accepting terms such as 'older worker' or 'ageism' as truisms, and instead concentrating on larger social trends surrounding the over 50s or the incidence of explicit forms of discrimination through stereotyping. Yet the malleability of the meaning behind these terms is evident within the historical emergence of age discrimination as a policy issue. For example, practices which were once used as an economic and logical way of manipulating employment rates during the 1990s, such as the promotion of early exit (Casey, 1992; Platman & Tinker, 1998), or the use of incapacity benefit schemes are now heralded within government as ageist and discriminatory. Similarly, there are differing opinions (albeit unacknowledged) over who or how to describe the older worker, with an over-reliance on limited classification through chronological markers such as 'over 45' (Warr, 2001), '50' (Loretto et al., 2005) or 'over 55' (OECD, 2004). These examples not only highlight that naming, identifying and organizing ageing identities is highly dependent on history or context, but that …