Although UK legislation against age discrimination is required by December 2006, little is yet known about how ageism affects different age categories of employees, and the gender dimensions of ageism have also been neglected. Both issues were investigated by questionnaire survey, producing responses from over 1000 employees of a major UK financial services enterprise. The extent and manifestations of ageism were found to vary across age categories and by sex, and evidence of gendered ageism emerged. Reported examples of ageism were highest among younger and older age categories, but all age groups were affected to some degree. Across all ages, women were more likely than men to experience ageist attitudes concerning appearance or sexuality. To be effective, legislation will need to cater for the complex nature and patterns of age discrimination revealed, though the comparator problem and other complexities are such that important aspects of age prejudice, including gender dimensions, risk being overlooked.

Despite policy emphasis on the importance of older workers (i.e. those aged 50 and above) to current and future labour markets, relatively little is known about the ways in which employers' attitudes, policies and practices influence their recruitment and retention. Drawing upon previous work by Taylor and Walker, this article reports qualitative research among employers across Scotland, which sought to investigate further the relationships between employers' policies, practices and attitudes towards older workers. The findings indicate a complex set of relationships, and challenge the simplistic causal link between attitudes and practice. The conclusions discuss the implications of these findings for the future employment of older workers, and assess the extent to which the forthcoming age discrimination legislation in the UK is likely to tackle discriminatory attitudes, practices and policies.

aThe York management school, university of York, York, uK; b university of edinburgh Business school, university of edinburgh, edinburgh, uK ABSTRACTIn a fast changing and fast-paced global workplace, where maintaining competitive advantage is paramount to success, identifying ways of sustaining employee well-being is of increasing importance to a range of stakeholders, both within the context of work and beyond. Within the workplace, wellbeing is important not only to individual employees in terms of maintaining their own good health, but also to managers and organisations as there is evidence to suggest that poor well-being at work can have adverse effects on performance and overall productivity. Beyond the workplace, health service providers must manage the potential burden of poor individual and population health, exacerbated in many nations by ageing workforces. Given the existing evidence linking employee well-being to key organisational outcomes such as performance and productivity, identifying ways to enhance employee well-being is, arguably, a core function of contemporary human resource professionals. However, the juxtaposition of an increased focus on well-being at work and the current business climate of needing to do more with less can pose significant challenges for HRM professionals in contemporary organisations. In this paper we examine some of the key issues of pertinence to researchers in the field of HRM and well-being, and propose a number of areas for future research.

Against a global backdrop of population and workforce ageing, successive UK governments have encouraged people to work longer and delay retirement. Debates focus mainly on factors affecting individuals' decisions when and how to retire. We argue that fuller understanding of retirement can be achieved by recognising the ways in which individuals' expectations and behaviours reflect a complicated, dynamic set of interactions between domestic environments and gender roles, often established over a long time period, and more temporally proximate factors. Using a qualitative data set we explore how the timing, nature and meaning of retirement and retirement planning are played out in specific domestic contexts. We conclude that future research and policies surrounding retirement need to: focus on the household, not the individual; consider retirement as an often messy and disrupted process and not a discrete event; and understand that retirement may mean very different things for women and for men.

This article seeks to explore how older individuals negotiate and manage their selfidentity in relation to work whilst situated outwith paid employment. After reviewing the current positions of the older unemployed in the UK, noting the substantial overlap between age and disability, we turn our attention to conceptualising the lived experiences of individuals through exploring 'identity work' as a means of understanding a non-working work identity. Based upon focus group interviews, our empirical analysis focuses on key dimensions of participants' identity practice and how they sought to manage the following social processes: imposed identities, crafting working identities; and contesting unfavourable working identities. The conclusion contextualises the findings against a backdrop of increasing individualistic discourses underpinning approaches to employability, closing with the policy implications arising from this study, and making suggestions for future research agendas.

In many countries economic and social concerns associated with ageing populations have focused attention onto flexible forms of working as key to encouraging people to work longer and delay retirement. This article argues that there has been a remarkable lack of attention paid to the role of gender in extending working lives and contends that this gap has arisen because of two, interrelated , oversights: little consideration of relationships between gender and flexible working beyond the child-caring phase of life; and the prevailing tendency to think of end of working life and retirement as gender-neutral or following a typical male trajectory. The findings of a qualitative study of people aged 50+ in the UK challenge some of the key assumptions underpinning the utility of flexible work in extending working lives, and provide insight into the ways in which working in later life is constructed and enacted differently for men and women.

This paper traces the emergence and evolution of the concept of ageism with respect to employment matters in the UK, and challenges some features of the emerging concept as defective and undermining of efforts to eradicate age discrimination in employment. Also revealed is some loosening in recent years of the association of the term ‘ageism’ with older employees. This latter observation informed the focus of our empirical work, which examined the views of 460 Business Studies students concerning age and employment. A significant proportion had experienced ageism directly in employment, and a large majority favoured the introduction of legislative protection against age discrimination, with blanket coverage irrespective of age. Though negative stereotypes regarding older workers were by no means uncommon among the sample, little firm evidence emerged of intergenerational tensions or resentment towards older people. The concluding section considers the policy implications of our findings, including the relative merits of weighting policy responses towards older employees. It is argued that initiatives restricted in this way, and further constrained by commercial imperatives and macro-economic objectives, are likely to prove divisive and self-defeating as a means of combating ageism.

This study is intended to improve understanding of the impact of workplace change on employee mental health and well‐being. We construct and test a comprehensive measure of organizational change, which is then applied in a prospective longitudinal study of nearly 5400 employees in six UK National Health Service Trusts. Self‐rated mental health was assessed using the 12‐item version of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). Just under a quarter of the sample were at increased risk of psychiatric morbidity (‘cases’). After controlling for a wide range of personal characteristics and work variables, it was found that respondents who reported an increase in the amount of work over the previous year were more likely to be classed as GHQ cases, whereas increased training and promotion and improved job security had a beneficial effect on employee mental health (less likelihood of being GHQ cases). Quantity or degree of change showed a somewhat ambiguous relationship with GHQ status. Our findings challenge the assumption that change will necessarily have an adverse effect on health, indicating areas, such as promotion and development, where a positive impact might be anticipated.