Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine different age groups and age management in organizations. Age management is obviously an important issue in business organizations and in society as a whole, as it is seen as one solution to the problem of an aging workforce. Age management is defined in this paper based on the theory of diversity management, which regards age as one aspect of diversity. In this paper I explore what kinds of meanings people in the case organizations attach to age and how they define age management in organizations. My research method is discourse analysis, in which the focus is on speech. The main outcome of the study is that people construct “the old” and “the young” as two distinct groups in their organizational discourses. The identity of a “young” and an “old” worker are similarly constructed. Two specific types of discourses were derived from the empirical data related to age management, namely: efficiency discourse and community discourse