Presentation for Oxford Brookes Seminar, April 2015

1. Research Seminar
23rd April 2015
Oxford Brookes
Age at work
Collaborators:
Rebecca Whiting, Birkbeck
(Age at work, @ageatwork)
Kate Mackenzie Davey & Helen
Cooper, Birkbeck
(Can Barbie be an entrepreneur?)
Katrina
Pritchard
@DrKPritchard
Research part funded by Richard
Benjamin Trust (Early Career Award 1103)
© 2015 Katrina Pritchard. All rights reserved.

2. Session overview
Whistle - stop tour
Discourses of age: generations
Discourses of age: missing million
Beyond text: visual analyses of gendered
ageing
Gendered ageing and the entrepreneur: from
weary women to Barbie and back again.
What next?

3. Whistle-stop tour

4. Scope of research (c. 2011)
All ages and all age groups
Exploring ‘language’ of age at work
Unpack voice and opportunities for voice
(who is being heard online?)
Explore, apply and develop qualitative
online research methodologies

5. Motivations and interests
 Challenge assumptions about age (naturalisation of
chronological age)
 Consider how ‘young’ and ‘old’ constructed as distinct in
the labour market and similarities in the means (e.g.
regulatory) and measures (e.g. chronological age) of
exclusion
 Explore a neglected (in management) aspect of diversity
(universality of ageing etc.)

6. Broad research question
How are notions of age, age identities and
related concepts, socially constructed
online* in relation to issues of work ?
(*Online here used in a broad sense to refer to Web 2.0 media as data
and internet-mediated research as method)

7. “research not
just about the
Internet but
also on it and
through it
and
constituted
within it”
(Hine, 2005)

8. Relevance?
 Unpack and explore what we might previously
have labelled ‘context’ or ignored
 Look at interactions between organizations and/or
the ways in which organizations engage with others
online
 Examine the ways in which individuals (including
employees, customers etc.) engage with different
organizations

9. Relevance?
 Web 2.0 “permeates and even replaces traditional
forms of organizing” (Pablo and Hardy, 2012: 822)
 Challenges the “assumption that organising
necessarily occurs in organisations” (Ashcraft,
2007:11)
 “media spectacle” (Tan, 2011): follow stories as they
unfold across various different media
 We might call this Digital Discourse Analysis

10. Discourses of Age:
Generations

11. Generations
 Generations are cohorts shaped by a shared socio-
cultural environment
 Generational cohort theory predicts that this affects
individual values, attitudes, beliefs (e.g. Twenge et
al, 2012)
 Increasingly used as a shorthand as practitioner
texts and a proxy for age in scholarly work (Foster,
2013)
 Includes specific generational categories and
broader notions of ‘generational difference’

13. Baby Boomers: are ‘older’ and
 lucky, selfish, conservative, risk adverse, blocking
access to jobs for young people
 in a privileged financial position with contested
entitlement to paid work
 alternatively, as victims, having lost their savings
and struggling to find work
 responsible for creating the lost generation, and
any negative consequences e.g. riots
 having lost the ability to protest with meaningful
impact (a giant postcard)

14. Lost Generation: are ‘young’ and
 unlucky, jobless with an (unearned) sense of
entitlement to work
 this entitlement is challenged through disputed
individual capability
 their talent is presented as potentiality
 as the most disadvantaged in relation to finding
work
 as child-like in their lack of ability to accept or
take responsibility, e.g. tackling their joblessness is
beyond the individual capacity
 as a group ready to riot who, without access to
work, as both damaged and likely to cause
damage

15. What’s interesting about this?
 The conflation and entanglement of generational
labels with age groups based on chronology
 This is presented as factual, creating equivalence
between baby boomers and older workers and
between the lost generation and youth
 Familial generational notions (child, parent,
grandparent) are enrolled within cohort-focused
debate e.g. lost generation’s is constructed as child-
like in their lack of ability to accept or take
responsibility
 Those falling chronologically between LG and BB are
marginalised in debates about entitlement,
responsibility and consequences

16. What’s interesting about this?
 Tensions between baby boomers and the lost generation
are emergent rather than natural states
 Generational categories are constructed and deployed as
an organising principle in ways that legitimate age-related
differences, in particular, the entitlement of different age
groups to paid work
 Use of dormant term (lost generation) allows previous
cultural understandings to be re-assigned, re-understood
and used with political effects

17. What’s interesting about this?
 Terms require less and less explanation across
different media as the establishment of
generational labelling acquires legitimacy
 Legitimacy allows for differential treatment of age
groups (once constructed as ‘generations’)
 This avoids issues of age discrimination
 Focus on generations deflects from more
structural factors affecting jobs and work

18. Discourses of Age:
‘Missing million’

19. Discourses of unemployment
 Fight and struggle (Straehle et al., 1999)
 Need to be rescued (Cole, 2008)
 Moral salvation of work (Whiteside, 2013)
 Age dimensions (Fevre, 2011)
 Scrapheap especially of early retirement
 Getting a foot on the ladder
 Emergence of the NEET (Furlong, 2006; MacDonald,
2011)
 scarring effect of youth employment (Bell &
Blanchflower, 2010)

20. On 16th November 2011 the UK Office of
National Statistics quarterly Labour
Market Statistics Bulletin reported that
“unemployed people aged from 16 to 24
increased by 67,000 over the quarter to
reach 1.02 million … The unemployment
level and rate for people aged from 16 to
24 are the highest since directly
comparable records began in 1992”.
The missing million

21. The numbers game
 Youth unemployment vs. ‘the elderly’
 Youth 16-24 vs ?
 ONS figures 16-64
 Youth further broken down 16&17 vs 18-24; students
seeking part time work vs. others
 Youth unemployment vs. foreign workers
 Debate about the statistics particularly measures
used by different political parties
 Attempts to highlight other groups overshadowed:
long term unemployed, women, those with
criminal records

22. ‘Youth’ vs ‘the elderly’: 14/11
TSO(CHILDREN) PRESS RELEASE: The most
disadvantaged unemployed 16 and 17
year olds are being ignored
UKNATIONAL NEWS: Training scheme sees
900% rise in apprenticeships for over-60s.
More elderly are taking up government
skills programme, but youth
unemployment is expected to hit one
million. For those aged 60 and over,
there has been an 878% increase – from
400 signing up in the year 2009-10, to
3,910 in the last year.
UKNATIONAL NEWS:Preliminary data for
October show a 900 percent increase in
government funded apprenticeships
being taken up by people over 60. The
apprentice scheme was set up to give
youth a chance to get on the job ladder.
MEDIAORGANIZATION: Apprenticeships
must help young workers
@INDIVIDUAL More elderly are taking up
government skills programme, but youth
unemployment is expected to hit one million
@TSO Over-60s apprenticeships up 900%!
While youth unemployment about to hit 1
million mark...
@NEWS Apprenticships (sic) up 900% as
youth unemployment tops 1 million
(NEWSLINK)
@TSO(CHILDREN) Did you know: the
unemployment rate for 16 and 17 year olds
has almost doubled in the last decade?
(WEBSITE LINK)
@MEDIAORGANIZATION FOR OLDER PEOPLE
Unemployment has hit one million
@NATIONALNEWS Youth unemployment to
hit 1 million as over 60s forced back to work
by Coalition retrain

23. Another missing million?
Three years later, on 23rd October 2014, a report
entitled ‘The missing million: illuminating the
employment challenges of the over 50s’ was
published by PRIME (The Prince’s Initiative for Mature
Enterprise, part of Business in the Community) in
association with the International Longevity Centre.

24. Work in progress
 Adopting a case study approach (Rao et al., 2000)
to examine these two debates.
 Uses a shortitudinal analysis investigates media
coverage during the two week period around each
of these announcements.
 Focus both on what is said and by whom
 Competition for:
 jobs,
 to be the most deserving recipient of the limited
resources/support.

25. Discourse beyond text:
Visual analysis of
gendered ageing

26. Research Process
Identify sample of
images
‘Archaeological’*
Visual analysis
Initial sample of 120 images
reduced to 16 for analysis from criteria
related to research question
Used Rose (2012), Davison (2010),
Machin (2004)
‘Dialogical’*
Visual analysis
Group photo-elicitation, 39 participants
‘what is your impression of these photos?’,
Thematic analysis of comments
Refine sample of
images
Purchased rights to 3 stock images
(*Meyer et. al, 2013)

27. Methodological challenges
 Complexity of online news and stock images
 Production vs. consumption
 Our consumption of data from online news
 Our (re)production in different form for photo-elicitation
 Photo-elicitation exercise
 Image vs. image and text
 responses as discursive fragments
 more emotional commentary than in our own analysis –
why?

28. Gendered Ageing
 ‘gendered discourses saturate our society and
guide the way we think of ourselves, respond to
others and negotiate identity in our interactions’
(Mackenzie Davey, 2008: 654)
 Intersectionality: ‘how multiple sources of
disadvantage combine’ (Woodhams et al., 2013:1)
 Looking at ‘young’ professionals Kelan (2014: 801)
finds ‘age is used to make gender unspeakable’

29. Picture credit: Johnny Greig / Alamy

30. Older woman
perched on
the edge
Older man
at apex of a
pyramid, in
command
of the table
Colour ‘rose’
represents youth
but all eyes are
on the younger
woman
Picture credit: Johnny Greig / Alamy
‘stereotypically older person is the boss, reviewing the work of a young team,
seated woman presenting the work so everyone is listening/focusing on her’
‘she [young woman] has called all these together to make some sort of
announcement’
‘ this [narrow age range] shows you don’t have youth or old age in a
successful environment’

31. Gendered ageing and the
Entrepreneur:
From ‘weary women’ to
Barbie and back again

32. Wearies
 Wearies: ‘Working, Entrepreneurial and Active
Retirees’. They are innovative and entrepreneurial
contributors to the UK economy” (Daily Mail, 2012)
 Pensioners who find it hard to get paid
employment because of their age but who
cannot afford to retire (Future Foundation, 2011)
 Potential way out of double bind?
 damned if they work (being selfish, taking jobs from
the lost generation) and damned if they don’t
(unvalued, burden on society) (Pritchard and
Whiting, 2014)

33. Real image/Alamy
Mark Baigent Life/ Alamy

34. Weary women: issues raised
 Gendering of the images:
 Assumptions made about the present woman and
the absent man
 Subject position of the ‘female pensioner’
 Compare/contrast with media representations
women across the life course
 Disconnect between W.E.A.R.Y and ‘weary’: does
this undermine even ridicule idea of older
entrepreneur?

35. Methodological
footnotes

36. Visual analyses
 Increasing attention towards the visual in
management studies
 Impossible to ignore in a digital context?
 Particular research focus on advertising and
commodification of the young, female body
 Within management studies focus on corporate
reports:
 Diversity mosaic
 Graduate recruitment brochures
 Annual reports

37. Internet = Big data? Better data?
 More data, meta data, better data
 Synchronous and cotemporaneous data
 Archive and archaeological data
 Big data as the capacity for big research (Boyn and
Crawford, 2012)
 Big data as mapping, mining, scrapping
 Ethical issues

38. Small data in a big data world
 Snippets, fragments and hints at data
 tweets, youtube videos, slideshare presentations, posts
and comments etc.
 data that might never be data (e.g. moderation)
 Composite/transient nature of websites and online
media
 Images, text, tags, hyperlinks combing in “a unique
mixture of the ephemeral and the permanent”
(Schneider & Foot, 2004:115)
 How we navigate the maps and negotiate the
mines
 Socio-material and practice-based perspectives

39. Dilemmas
 Web 2.0 data is messy; some “types” are better?
more like ‘ordinary’ data?
 Trying to fit-in:
 Separating text and image into recognisable forms (a
version of transcription)
 Categorising and counting

40. Examining consumption off
line
 Current focus on ‘stock’ images:
 Group photo-elicitation (image out of context, image
in context)
 Plan qualitative photo-response survey subject to
funding
 How to examine interactivity in Web 2.0?
 What aspects of consumption can be captured e.g.
via comments etc.
 How to explore internet practice off and online

41. What next?