Eighteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

This paper uses case study evidence of one public sector organisation and one private sector organisation to compare and contrast age equality and diversity policies and practices across and within organizations. While diversity debates focusing on the experience of women and ethnic groups have been dominated by the apparent shift from a social justice approach to equal opportunities to the business case approach of diversity management (Dickens, 2005; Noon, 2007), far less attention has been paid to how the dimension of age inequality is addressed in these new approaches to diversity. The research utilised a reformulation of Liff’s (1997) typology of difference approaches to explore the approaches to equality and diversity in each organisation and to analyse whether some approaches are more able to challenge age norms and barriers that may perpetuate age inequality in organisations. Findings showed that the approaches to age diversity policy and practice were a reflection of wider diversity approaches, particularly relating to gender, rather than a consequence of a focus on age specifically. This was particularly the case in the public sector organisation where business case and social justice arguments appeared to coexist. These findings therefore revealed the importance of intersectional inequalities as diversity policies relating to other dimensions of equality had the potential to address age inequalities. Furthermore, using a reformulation of Liff’s (1997) typology of approaches to difference in diversity policy, it was possible to show how in the private sector approaches to age difference, to the extent that they were evident, were based on narrow business case arguments while in the public sector policies tended to use both social justice and business case arguments.