At a Critical Age: The Social and Political Organization of Age and Ageing

Age is a culturally and politically resonant discourse in contemporary society. Whether it lies in the fetishization of youth and novelty or in the anxieties of ageing, decline and decay, age has become a reified system of classification and a pervasive organizing principle. Nor are its effects neutral: the young and the new are lauded; while old age is subjected to the ubiquitous narrative of “age as decline” (Trethewey, 2001). Thus age and ageing have a particular meaning in contemporary society, in which the old are disadvantaged, while the young and the new are extolled. This meaning emanates from diverse political, cultural, economic and social forces: at the same time as individuals, organizations and societies struggle to deal with “problems” associated with age, they help to create those very problems. Thus the issue of age is political, cultural and institutional; it cuts across diverse organizations, communities, and societies; it produces significant material effects; and it links organizations, politics and policies. While there has been considerable interest in recent years in the societal and organizational challenges of ageing populations, this work has tended to take a more reductive bio-essentialized understanding of age. However, age and ageing is constructed through knowledge systems and social practices in and by organizations, which position and advantage youth and the new over the aged and the old. The nature of these practices and the implications of these meanings are so far under-theorized and underexplored in organization studies. The objective of this special issue is to examine how and in what ways age and ageing have become an organizing principle in contemporary society; to learn more about how meanings have emerged and the different influences that have contributed to them; and to investigate more closely the political, cultural and social effects of the way in which age and ageing is organized; We welcome papers that examine how ageing is constructed, organized, policed, managed and resisted in different organizational and societal contexts, and which engage with the themes and questions below. The aim is to use age and ageing to “deepen our understanding of the complexity of organizations as social and political objects” and to investigate “the links between organizations, politics and policies” (Courpasson, Arellano-Gault, Brown & Lounsbury, 2008: 1384, 1385). We welcome both empirical and theoretical papers and are particularly interested in submissions that draw insights from other age-related disciplines such as social gerontology, social anthropology, social geography and political sociology.