Age Work in Organizations: Maintaining and Disrupting Institutionalized Understandings of Higher Age
研究提出‘年龄工作’概念，分析组织成员如何维持或颠覆年龄制度，发现维持年龄刻板印象有时能减少不平等，而解构年龄形象反而可能加剧不平等，对理解年龄多样性管理有启示。
Age diversity research calls for new approaches in explaining the persistence of age inequalities, which integrate different levels of analysis and display greater context sensitivity. Concurrently, neoinstitutionalist research interested in social inequalities calls for merging institutional theory with critical perspectives and to account for issues of power. In this study, we address the calls of both research streams through developing the concept of ‘age work’: the institutional work actors undertake on age as a social institution. Applying our novel concept to a multi‐actor study of four German organizations known for their age management, we come across a counterintuitive insight regarding actors’ age work: maintaining stereotypical age images can serve to counter age inequalities, whereas deconstructing age images can reinforce age inequalities. The multi‐actor perspective of our study allows us to categorize different forms of power‐laden and interest‐driven age work and to portray the reproduction of age inequalities as a result of actors’ age work, embedded in different contexts and complex power relations. Comparing employees’ forms of age work across sectors and organizations, we detail how notions of masculinity as well as income and job security shaped the categorized forms of age work.