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We've all been told, "Too old for this, too young for that." In this masterly study Hearn and Parkin show how organizations organize human beings into categories. Calendars, chronologies and "ticking clocks" mobilize to tell us what we are and who we are becoming. Birth and death are certainties, but age and ageing are where power meets opinion.

In reviewing this book, the phrase that continually comes to mind is `at last – a serious study of ageing and organization.’ There are so many positives to this book, not least of which is the authorship of Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, who build on a lifetime of high impact research on various aspects of power and diversity.

”This fascinating discourse offers subtle and subversive insights into the ways we enact age and aging.  It deconstructs conventional social scripts in ways that can improve both our own self-understanding and the shape of public policy.”

Hearn and Parkin bring long careers' worth of organizational research to bear on this mission to rescue the field. They show how regimes of age structure institutions, from the rise of bureaucratic authority and trajectory of the ideal career, to the management of dependency and death in the age of pandemic. Enjoy this book for its sly humor and obvious pleasure taken in the writing. Let it inform your theory as you design your organizational research.

Combining keen scholarly insight with personal testimonies, Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin provide a sensitive and sophisticated analysis of age and organization. Age at Work brings together age and organization studies in a comprehensive, highly accessible and contemporary account that addresses key concerns within cultural gerontology and the critical role of age in organizational construction and inequality.

How can such a thought-provoking book – paradoxically full of strokes and dementia and other geriatric challenges - be so wonderful to engage with? What Hearn and Parkin have succeeded in producing in this new work is a comprehensive survey of just how age and organization intertwine - ambiguously. Thus, the organizations through which we experience ageing are our places of work but also our places of health care, and of death.

Age as a ‘number’ is so deceptive, as this insightful book shows. Age is infused with socially constructed meanings, shaping and shaped by organizations of all types. The authors cast a critical sociological eye over this disparate field to expose age’s varied appearances and what may lie behind them. Amongst other things, they show us how age becomes politicised, commodified and exploited at different junctures of the lifecourse.

This is an exhaustive, erudite and comprehensive look at age and ageing. It playfully explores the idea of age ‘at work’: how it works, where it works and what it does in societal and organisational contexts. It includes but moves beyond paid work to look at various types of organisations: their structures, boundaries and regimes up to and including those involved in death and post death. It is particularly timely in its consideration of the meaning of age, the experience of ageism and the ambiguities involved in negotiating paid work boundaries from a liminal position.

With its dynamic framework of age, aging and ageism enacted through organizations, Age at Work is pathbreaking, fundamentally challenging our perception of age in terms of fixed categories or specific life stages. The evolution of this book, a product of years of collaborative work between Hearn and Parkin, is reflected in its theoretical breadth and reach, which I would describe as Kaleidoscopic.

Age at Work is a ground breaking book in a number of ways. At the core of the authors’ thinking around age, organizing and organizations is their fundamental plea to move away from static and limited concepts of age, ageing and the old as othered, to more fluid and critical ways of bringing non-essentialist, anti-ageist thinking and being and intersectional perspectives to the forefront of enquiry.

With this volume, Hearn and Parkin offer a truly novel approach to the relationships between age, organizations and organizing. It is particularly heartening to see the breadth of disciplinary scope and inclusion of stages of life normally beyond the boundaries of organization studies. The personal voices and experiences of the authors are woven throughout their insightful reflections on what it means to be an ageing subject.

Age at Work brings age and organizations together in truly innovative ways. ‘Age’ intersects with organization as each constructs the other across time. Through a creative conceptual approach using data ranging from biographical to comparative sources, the book uses the prism of age to detail how we interact with organizations as workers, consumers, clients, patients or citizens in all our complexities. It brings new conceptualizations such as age/organizations regimes to bear in analyzing how age works inside and outside organizations.

Innovative, timely and insightful. Essential reading for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the complex and so often neglected relationship between age and work. The book raises questions that could not be more important at the present moment in the context of the current pandemic. This is interdisciplinary work at its best.

Age at Work is a good reminder from the authors of a number of simplifications and stereotypes that are wrapped up in the making of age and organizations and it's a great and exciting read. 

Readable and easy to understand, it remains accessible to a wide range of professional readers not only in the field of studies of inequality, organizational culture, stratification, intersectionality, ageing or gender, but also for those for whom the study of the life cycle with a critical sociological perspective is just beginning to open.

Hearn and Parkin’s work tries to untangle some if not most of these essentialist stances by recognizing that age(ing) can be, and is, mediated by not only individuals involved in social relations in organizations but also by the organizations themselves.

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The authors of this book, Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, bring to bear many decades of scholarship into gender relations, gendering, sexuality and violence in organization studies. This paves the way for an approach to ageing and organization that is contingent (provisional and relational) and intersectional. Age and ageing are thereby shown to be related to gender, race, ethnicity and class, showing how these characteristics work together to privilege some and disadvantage others.