Title:	Managing an Age Diverse Workforce
Authors:	Emma Parry and Shaun Tyson
Keywords:	Diversity in the workplace Management
Issue Date:	2011
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	A majority of the population being over 50 years of age is a new prospect for organisations around the world, where there will be greater diversity in ages, lifestyles and personal circumstances among employees than at any time in the past. We see this as a timely moment, perhaps even a strategic inflection point, when all those interested in the management of people might take new bearings and consider what this kind of major social change means. The challenge for our society is how to reconceptualise age and work and to change attitudes that are embedded in our relationships. This comes at a time when the impact of a world recession, the worst in the United Kingdom and the USA since the Second World War, has put even more pressure on the need to manage organisations effectively, with consequential cost reductions, redundancies, pay cuts and restructuring in the public and the private sectors. Often it is the most vulnerable people who suffer most from the recession. There are in many countries already lower employment participation rates, and there is substantial unemployment among the young and the older members of the workforce, yet at this time managers have to rethink management processes and to keep cost criteria at the centre of their attention. Age discrimination legislation has now entered the statutes of all European Community Member States, having already become a part of employment law in many other countries, including the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As a shorthand for the human condition of having lived for a particular number of years, age carries with it the important symbols by which the stages of life are often measured, famously described by Shakespeare in As You Like It as the seven ages of man. Although age symbolises the temporal aspect of our lives, the stages we move through are extremely varied, and life chances are not equal. However, age is only one ingredient in the establishment of a sense of self. For example, Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, saw existence as the meeting point of time and eternity (Grimsley 1973). His philosophy suggests our existence is to be constantly striving, a dynamic process which continues over time, a kind of moral career alongside our actual career, an inner, individual debate which continues while physical temporal changes occur, in which we have to resolve the issue of coming to terms with eternity by making individual choices. From this perspective, life is not predetermined by our age; rather, we are free to make decisions at any physical stage of our existence, although there are constant tensions between the aesthetic and the moral. This reminds us that people are always striving for some new equilibrium, and that our work lives are only one aspect of our identity. The young and the old alike are engaged on a wider journey through life.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/50914
ISBN:	978-0-230-29911-5
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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