Fire All the Boomers: How Generational Labeling Legitimizes Age Discrimination

Abstract

Costanza and Finkelstein (2015) make a number of important observations in their exploration of how generation-based differences are understood by academics and practitioners. The absence of a unifying theory, the lack of a clear pattern of findings, and the conceptual ambiguity about generational membership have all limited the utility of generational membership to researchers, while the practice of describing large groups of individuals in generational terms has become enormously popular outside of academia. Certainly, there are several topics that are popular among the public and widely used by businesses despite being viewed negatively by academics; however, there is some danger in the widespread perception that group differences between individuals of different ages can be explained by generational membership. Although it might be tempting to consider these generational stereotypes as simply innocuous misperceptions supervisors may hold, they may, in fact, be quite harmful. The purpose of this article is to further expand on the potential for these stereotypes to be harmful for older and younger employees.

Life-Span Lessons: The Importance of Age-Related Knowledge for Aging Into Any Career

“…Unlike age, which will progress, generation is a stable social categorization (Cox & Coulton, 2015;Weiss & Lang, 2012), making generational differences as an attribution, which is not prohibited explicitly by discrimination laws, inherently more threatening than age in the workplace. This may also be true if generational stigma becomes internalized.…”

The Baby Boomer bias: The negative impact of generational labels on older workers

“…The idea that generation labels lack substantial validity is troubling given that the stereotypes associated with them are widely accepted and could be affecting employer decisions (Cox & Coulton, ). Recently, Perry et al () tested this idea empirically.…”