Splintering Organizational Subjectivities: Older workers and the dynamics of recognition, vulnerability and resistance

Drawing on insights from Judith Butler’s writing on the dynamics of subjectivity, vulnerability and resistance, this paper explores how older workers negotiate organizational recognition schemes that are based on age-related ideals. The paper draws on observational, documentary and interview data from an Australian call centre where older workers are both championed as a valuable potential recruitment pool and managed through age-biased discourses. Our analysis shows how older workers’ resistance to being positioned as simultaneously valuable and vulnerable leads them to disrupt the normative conditions upon which organizational recognition is premised. We emphasize the importance of an ‘aged’ perspective on workplace recognition in order to better understand how the dynamics of vulnerability and resistance not only shape older worker identities and experiences but also disrupt organizational recognition regimes, exposing the mutual vulnerability of older workers and their managers.