WES Conference 2023 Plenary: Kathleen Riach

Watch Kathleen Riach's plenary at the BSA Work, Employment & Society Conference 2023 - Working through ageing: Between organisational subjection and generative subjectivities.
How can we approach ageing as something that is experienced by everyone but rarely theorised as a particular organizational phenomenon? Over the past 40 years, the demographic policy agenda has called for action to recognise and manage age as a mode of inequality and point of economic risk. As a result of this imperative, studies of age and work have generally provided a rich, interdisciplinary understanding of how age is treated or encountered in the labour market. However, they also prevent a focus on ageing as it is dynamically experienced in particular ways. In response, I propose a move from understanding age as a marker to thinking about ageing as an organizationally situated phenomenon. This, I argue, manifests through the oscillation between two elements we can witness in everyday concerns of workplaces and workers. First, is the way that we can understand ageing as controlled, commodified, and conferred in and through organizational relations and exchanges. Second is the particular tensions that we encounter in ageing between recognising and distancing ourselves from our own and others’ ageing experiences in the context of work across the lifecourse. The interaction between these elements suggests that working through ageing is a simultaneous ontological and practical accomplishment and one that affords new possibilities for resistance and rupture in economies and societies in contemporary capitalism.
Bio: Kathleen Riach is Professor at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK. Her research focuses on understanding the ways in which age and gender inequality operate in the workplace, with a particular interest in identities, the working body and social theory. She is an Associate Editor of Organization and her work has been published across business and the social sciences including Human Relations, Organization Studies, Sociology, Urban Studies and Gender Work and Organization, as well as in health and medicine. With colleagues, Kat launched Menopause Information Pack Online - MIPO - a free public access resource to help line managers support their staff through the menopause at work, which has since been
accessed over 12,000 times across 52 countries. She provides regular media commentary and currently sits on the Scottish Government's Working Party for menopause and menstrual health and an expert advisory group for a new British Standards Institute benchmark. She is UK Delegate for the G20 engagement group for gender equality, the W20, and is currently writing her first book on ageing at work based on a 10-year study, supported by a British Academy Fellowship.
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