Objectives: Using data from carefully selected institutional and professional sites, this project looked at age dynamics and ageist practice in (inter)action. The central empirical focus was given to key client-professional, employer-employee encounters to enable detailed scrutiny of ageism as it unfolds on the everyday grass-root level. Utilizing conversation and discourse analytic perspectives and methodology, the project yields detail of how ageist practice is born, sustained and challenged in and through situated language use. The study assumed that such understanding of the key characteristics, and the dynamic unfolding of –isms-in-interaction, represents a crucial step towards working against such practice.
Results: In performance appraisal interviews, age is “done” or actively negotiated in the interaction between manager and employee. In particular, age is done in three different ways: as organizational age, or expertise; as the passing of time within the company, or personal age; and as age group membership. Employees negotiate different types of age to achieve different goals in the performance reviews, such as supporting positive performance on leadership and justifying negative performance on innovation, which are accepted by the managers. While managers construct age co-membership with the employees to praise their performances.
In job interviews, age co-membership between job applicant and recruiter is used to construct a common ground on which candidates actively manage their favourable impressions. Age co-membership is a key resource for constructing solidarity and trust, as well as affective affiliation and it can explain the hidden dynamics of ingroup favouritisms (positive-negative asymmetry).
Exploring real-life conversations in institutional interactions allow unfolding hidden discrimination dynamics. In particular, recruiters, as well as managers, momentarily give up their institutional role to show affective affiliation, support and empathy towards candidates that can negotiate with them a co-membership on some social category, including age. These lead to hidden and implicit disadvantages of minorities that are not able to explicitly negotiate this co-membership, because they belong to disadvantaged groups. Within recruitment practices, ageist dynamics can be covert: older candidates, that do not fit the expected age for the position, are not openly discriminated against, but recruiters do not offer them support or affective affiliation, compared to younger job applicants, and this has an overall effect on the success of the job interview.
On the basis of these findings, ESR4 will create training for companies. The training will be developed following the method CARM (conversation analytical role-play method) and the training is under development.
Secondment(s)(Months), co-Supervisors: UNECE (3m), Vitalija Gaucaite Wittich; LIU (3.3m), Andreas Motel-Klingebiel. The first secondment is geared towards getting insight on international policies on workforce/employment, understanding central stakeholders and a possible target for the development of the project. The second secondment is geared towards academic collaboration in international projects on extending working life and social exclusion in later working life; Development of research on sectors policies in Italy and Sweden regarding extending working life and life-long learning; Developing and strengthening international research network for future collaboration.
