Gendered Ageism and Organizational Routines at Work: The Case of Day-Parting in Television Broadcasting

Abstract

This article contributes to the study of gendered ageism in the workplace by investigating how the routine of day-parting in broadcasting participates in the social construction of an ideology of ‘youthfulness’ that contributes to inequality. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the final judgment of an Employment Tribunal court case where the British public service broadcaster, the BBC, faced accusations of discrimination on the basis of both age and gender. Three interrelated findings are highlighted. First, the ideology of youthfulness was constituted through discursive strategies of nomination and predication that relied on an inherently ageist and sexist lexical register of ‘brand refreshment and rejuvenation’. Second, the ideology of youthfulness was reproduced through a pervasive discursive strategy of combined de-agentialization, abstraction and generalization that maintained power inequality in the workplace by obscuring the agency of the more powerful organizational actors while further marginalizing the weaker ones. Third, despite evidence that the intersection of age and gender produced qualitatively different experiences for individual organizational actors, in the legitimate and authoritative version of the truth constructed in the Tribunal’s final judgment, ageism discursively prevailed over sexism as a form of oppression at work. These findings support the view that the intersection of age and gender in the workplace should be explored by taking into account different levels of analysis – individual, organizational and societal – and with sensitivity to the context. They also suggest that the notion of gendered ageism is still poorly articulated and that the lack of an appropriate vocabulary encourages the discursive dominance of ageism over sexism, making the intersection of the two more difficult to study and to address.

Keywords

critical discourse analysis gendered ageism intersectionality legitimacy organizational routines

Introduction

This article contributes to the study of ageism in the workplace as a gendered phenomenon (Ainsworth, 2002; Coupland, 2007; Duncan & Loretto, 2004; Ginn & Arber, 1996; Moore, 2009) by investigating how organizational practices in broadcasting promote the construction and maintenance of an ideology of ‘youthfulness’ that stereotypes on the basis of both age and gender. Attention is directed to day-parting, an established routine in television programming according to which each day of the week is divided into segments associated with particular target audiences conventionally defined on the basis of demographic (age, gender, ethnicity), geographical and income-based criteria (Ellis, 2000). As a result, through the standard categorization and labelling of programmes as, for instance, ‘children’s’ or ‘adult’ television, age as a biological notion constitutes a fundamental and taken-for-granted organizing principle.

Day-parting is widely regarded as an institutionalized and legitimate (Suchman, 1995) industry norm. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals its fundamentally ideological nature. More specifically, the study in this article shows how, in applying day-parting to organize television schedules, broadcasters habitually engage in a series of editorial decisions that are based on hidden assumptions about age and gender, actively contributing towards the construction, maintenance and reproduction of discriminatory stereotypes in the workplace and in society at large. The study analyses in detail the decision taken by the BBC – the UK public service broadcaster – to move one of its programmes, Countryfile, from its traditional day-time slot to prime-time. This revised scheduling involved significant editorial changes including the production of new content, a new format and a new cast of presenters. It also gave rise to a legal challenge against the BBC, as one of the replaced presenters, Miriam O’Reilly, sued the broadcaster on grounds of both ageism and sexism. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment to unveil how a gendered ideology of ‘youthfulness’ was constructed, maintained and reproduced through the unquestioned application of day-parting.

Three interrelated findings emerged from the analysis. First, the organizational actors involved in the Employment Tribunal proceedings consistently deployed discursive strategies of nomination and predication (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) by adopting an ideological lexical register (Fowler, 1991) of ‘brand refreshment and rejuvenation’ that was inherently ageist and sexist. Second, they also systematically adopted a combined discursive strategy of de-agentialization (Van Leeuwen, 2009) and ‘abstraction and generalization’ (Fairclough, 2003) that produced two outcomes: it obscured agency by attributing their direct responsibility to impersonal, ‘reified’ entities (e.g. the ‘Channel’); and it further marginalized the less powerful members of the organization by reducing them to the inanimate position of ‘faces’. Third, despite evidence that the intersection of age and gender produced qualitatively different experiences of the workplace for those involved, in the legitimate and authoritative version of the truth constructed in the Tribunal’s final judgment ageism prevails over sexism as a recognized form of oppression.

The structure of the article is as follows. The theoretical section explores current thinking on gendered ageism in the workplace and justifies the choice of day-parting in television broadcasting as especially suitable for unveiling the potentially discriminatory consequences of routine organizational practices. The particular setting for the study is then introduced, with a detailed analysis of both the programme at the centre of the controversy and of the context within which the BBC’s decision to move it to a different schedule was taken. In the methodology section, two key decisions – namely, to focus on the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment and on the language used by all parties involved in the dispute including the Judge – are justified and an overview of data analysis techniques is given. The research findings are then presented and discussed. In the final section, the contributions of the study are discussed.

Gendered Ageism in the Workplace and the Practice of Day-Parting

Ageism, broadly defined as ‘any unwarranted response to any age’ (Bytheway, 1995; Bytheway & Johnson, 1990), is an established research area in organization studies. Rich bodies of literature focus on different dimensions of this complex issue, ranging from older workers’ participation in the labour market (Ainsworth, 2002; Ainsworth & Hardy, 2008, 2009; Gullette, 1997; McVittie, McKinlay, & Widdicombe, 2003; Maltby, 2007; Moore, 2009; Porcellato, Carmichael, Hulme, Ingham, & Prashar, 2010; Riach, 2007; Riach & Loretto, 2009; Vickerstaff, Loretto, & White, 2007) to ageing as an embodied phenomenon (Andrews, 1999; Coupland, 2007; Hurd, 2000; Hurd Clarke, Repta, & Griffin, 2007; Tulle-Winton, 1999; Warren, 1998). Age-based organizational practices are scrutinized, most notably in relation to employment and discrimination at work (De Vroom & Guillemard, 2002; Desmette & Gaillard, 2008; Duncan & Loretto, 2004; Loretto & White, 2006a, 2006b; McNair, 2006; Roberts, 2006; Taylor & Walker, 1998; Weller, 2007).

In this variegated landscape, growing recognition is given to the realization that employment-based ageism is not gender-neutral. Age and gender are increasingly regarded as systems that interact to shape life situations (Krekula, 2007) in ways that often discriminate against women (Arber & Ginn, 1995; Duncan & Loretto, 2004; Ginn & Arber, 1996; Granleese & Sayer, 2006; Itzin & Phillipson, 1995; Walker, Grant, Meadows, & Cook, 2007). A number of studies show that women tend to be perceived by employers and managers as older than their same-aged male colleagues and to suffer as a consequence in terms of careers, earning potential and financial prospects in retirement (Barnett, 2005; Duncan & Loretto, 2004; Itzin & Phillipson, 1993). Stricter performance standards are imposed on – and, indeed, anticipated by – women at work, a practice that contributes to the reproduction and maintenance of gendered performance expectations and perpetuates discrimination (Gorman & Kmec, 2007). Moreover, research shows that women resist ageist stereotyping based on appearance and sexuality by trying to look as young as possible (Itzin & Phillipson, 1995). This results in women actively participating in – consciously or otherwise – the maintenance and reproduction of the ageist assumptions and ideologies of which they are victims (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2008).

The notion of ‘beauty work’ – that is, the use of a variety of techniques ranging from the application of hair dye and make-up to surgical cosmetic procedures to mask or alter the physical signs of ageing – has been used in a number of studies to investigate the intersection between gender and age in society and, more particularly, in the workplace (Granleese & Sayer, 2006). In western societies, ageism is rooted in an ‘insidious obsession with youthfulness’ that results in the ‘assigning of social value, resources and opportunities based on actual and perceived chronological age’ (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2008, p. 655). The dominant ideology dictates that ‘youth is good, desirable, and beautiful; old age is bad, repulsive, and ugly’ (Healey, 1993, p. 48). Such value judgements result in considerable pressure for women to uphold an ideal of female beauty that privileges young, slim, fit bodies (Bartky, 1990; Bordo, 1993; Cortese, 2004; Gimlin, 2002; Wolf, 1991) and puts them in ‘double jeopardy’ (Duncan & Loretto, 2004; Itzin & Phillipson, 1993; Moore, 2009). Some scholars go even further in exploring intersectionality as a ‘multiple jeopardy’ (Ovrebo & Minkler, 1993) rooted in the interplay of several dimensions, including gender, age, ethnicity, class and disability. For example, in their study of the UK academic environment, Granleese and Sayer (2006) identify physical appearance as a conceptually distinct dimension in a ‘triple jeopardy of gendered ageism and lookism’ that characterizes female academics’ experience of the workplace.

In a society that privileges a cultural narrative of ageing as a ‘problem’ of inevitable decline and loss of power (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2009; Gullette, 1997; Tulle-Winton, 1999) and paradoxically adopts ‘agelessness’ as a measure of successful ageing (Andrews, 1999; Coupland, 2007), the double jeopardy of ageism and sexism is often conceptualized as the linear combination of two types of suppression. This additive approach is, however, open to criticism and several contributions, mostly in the field of social gerontology, recognize age and gender as intertwining systems (Browne & Misra, 2003; Collins, 1998; Weber, 2001). For instance, Krekula argues against the dominance of a ‘misery perspective’ and emphasizes how ‘the complex interplay between power relations can create qualitatively different experiences’ (Krekula, 2007, p. 162). The simplistic view of double jeopardy as an additive phenomenon focuses on the reciprocal strengthening of age and gender as a ‘double jeopardy’ (Beale, 1970) without taking into consideration how the interplay of such power structures could, instead, result in their mutual neutralization. Critics also invite researchers to take agency more fully into account. While double jeopardy as the sum of ‘two miseries’ (Krekula, 2007) could indeed operate on a structural level, individual actors still retain their agential power to interpret their own reality and devise suitable coping strategies. The significance of taking the level of analysis – structural or individual – into account is exemplified by current differences of opinions about the role of beauty work in promoting discrimination. On the one hand, some scholars focus on structure and regard beauty work as the oppressive norm of a patriarchal society that fundamentally disempowers women, forcing them to conform to a restrictive model of femininity and ultimately keeping them in a subordinate status (Bartky, 1998; Gagne & McGaughey, 2002; Negrin, 2002). On the other hand, attention is also paid to individuals, with some researchers regarding beauty work as the expression of women’s agential power to deploy the ‘dominant discourses and practices of feminine beauty’ (Davis, 2003, p. 13) competently, and as their chosen route to becoming ‘more socially visible and valued’ (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2008, p. 669).

The study of organizational routines provides a fertile ground for investigating gendered ageism in the workplace from an intersectionality perspective. Organizational routines, in fact, embody a duality of structure and agency and combine an ostensive dimension with a performative one (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). On the one hand, routines can be conceptualized as quasi-automatic responses to stimuli (Cyert & March, 1963; March & Simon, 1958; Nelson & Winter, 1982; Thompson, 1967) characterized by a repetitive, habitual, mindless and scripted nature. On the other hand, they can be regarded as ‘effortful accomplishments’ continually ‘worked at’ by those who sustain them in their day-to-day conduct (Giddens, 1984, p. 86) and as ‘grammars of action’ that help organizations develop stable patterns of behaviour (Pentland & Reuter, 1994). The specific organizational routine at the centre of the study of gendered ageism presented in this article is day-parting in television programming. Day-parting entails the division of the day into several parts, each associated with a particular demographic and target audience (Ellis, 2000). For instance, the time slot between mid-afternoon and early evening is typically associated with children as the key target audience, so that scheduling strategies privilege programmes such as cartoons and light entertainment. Prime-time is the time slot in the evening where families – that is both adults and children – constitute the target audience and this usually translates into schedules that favour game shows, fiction, comedy, melodrama and action adventure.

The segmentation of the target audience underpinning day-parting does not reflect the actual identities of the viewers but is, instead, driven by the expectations of broadcasters and advertisers. By the very fact that it defines particular groups of people as customers – the target audience – day-parting plays a key role in the ongoing process of framing (Callon, 1998) through which broadcasters and advertisers participate in the social construction of distinct markets and goods. Moreover, as managers tend to utilize the concept of the market as a model of the world as it is, as well as a model for appropriate action (Lien, 1997; Vickers, 1995), day-parting also exerts significant influence on how organizations make decisions concerning scheduling and programming. Despite increasing competition from cable, satellite and internet channels (Chalaby, 2009), the strategic importance of day-parting has increased for ‘full service’, public service broadcasters like the BBC. Somewhat paradoxically, for these types of broadcasters getting programming ‘right’ is as relevant as ever (Shapiro, 1989) and television schedules remain ‘the locus of power’ (Ellis, 2000, p. 134). In the new multi-channel, 24-hour world of contemporary television, the strategic importance of prime-time – the day-part that attracts the largest portion of the viewing audience – remains unquestionable (Lotz, 2009).

The focus on day-parting as a fruitful avenue for the study of gendered ageism in the workplace is, therefore, justified in terms of its conceptual and empirical relevance. Two broad questions guided the analysis of the case at the centre of this study: How does the organizational practice of day-parting construct ‘youthfulness’ and what assumptions about age and gender does it utilize? How do the organizational actors responsible for scheduling and its associated editorial decisions construct ‘youthfulness’ through language? The following section provides a detailed description of the setting for the study – the BBC in the UK – and of the specific case of the move of the BBC One programme Countryfile from day-time to prime-time. This description contributes essential background information and, more specifically, articulates how day-parting is embedded within the BBC’s temporally and spatially situated system of knowledge, values and organizational practices.

Public Service Broadcasting at the BBC and the ‘Countryfile Case’

The BBC is the UK’s public service broadcaster. Traditionally, the role of broadcasting as public service has been linked to the development of the cultural rights – rights to information, knowledge, representation and communication – of modern citizenship (Murdock, 2000). The early adoption and preservation of an inherently political view of broadcasting has significantly distinguished the BBC from commercial television companies (Buscombe, 2000). It is, for instance, directly related to its system of financing (a compulsory licence fee paid by the UK taxpayer), to its governance structure and, last but not least, to its overall strategy. The latter continues to be inspired by a number of key policies and, more particularly, by the three overarching objectives that characterize television broadcasting as a public good: mixed programming, namely, the making of programmes that appeal beyond the largest possible demographic; universal access, that is, making sure that television broadcasting is not the preserve of the high-income strata of society; and respect for diversity through the making of programmes directed to minority tastes and cultures and the embracing of genres that are typically marginalized by commercial broadcasters (Briggs, 2000; Scannell, 2000; Tracey, 1998).

Since commercial broadcasting was allowed in the UK in the 1950s, transformations have been closely regulated according to public service notions (Buscombe, 2000; Corner, 2010). From the late 1980s onwards, however, the development of a market-driven multi-channel broadcasting environment has challenged, not to say eroded (Tracey, 1998), the traditional model of public service, prompting lively debates into how public service communication should be ‘reinventing’ (Iosifidis, 2010) itself for the digital age. The BBC has been significantly affected by these changes: with the progressive erosion of the real value of its licence fee, it has been pushed into becoming more market-oriented while at the same time – and somewhat paradoxically – presenting this move as an integral part of its public service remit (Golding, 2010). The current socio-political, economic and competitive climate in the UK is characterized by a partial retreat from a purely political interpretation of public service in favour of more commercial considerations. It is in this difficult environment that the BBC faces the dilemma of having to maintain high levels of audience share in order to defend and preserve the legitimacy of its claim to public funding. This makes attention to ratings extremely important (Cushion, 2012) and it is in this context that the controversy surrounding Countryfile emerged and must be understood.

Countryfile is a rural affairs magazine programme, which started to be broadcast by BBC One on Sunday mornings (that is, in day-time) in 1989. The programme covers rural and farming issues and comprises a mixture of both journalistic and more light-hearted entertainment segments. At the time when the events under investigation started to unfold (the summer of 2008), Countryfile had good viewing figures and a loyal following in the ‘heartland’ BBC audience. Despite positive results, the programme was under review. In a series of meetings that took place during the summer of 2008, the then Controller of BBC One and other key organizational actors – such as, for instance, the Head of Rural Affairs – discussed its poor alignment with their stated mission to make BBC One ‘contemporary and connected to the widest audience’. As the average age of the BBC One viewer was 52, programming strategies for the longer term were informed by the key overarching objective of building younger audiences and engaging with younger people through entertainment. In the course of these ongoing discussions, as shown by the minutes of a meeting for the Audience Council for England, the prospects of an aging society and ‘particularly of an aging female society’ were weighed against the danger of ‘over catering’ for the heartland audience, and the decision matured to ‘make gentle steps to bring in younger audiences’.

As far as Countryfile was concerned, this meant a series of ‘pretty major changes’. The repositioning of the programme revolved around its ‘move forward’ from its traditional day-time slot on Sunday morning to an early Sunday evening slot in prime-time. According to the key decision-makers, the new scheduling called for ‘a much more regular team to front that proposition’, a judgement that led to the decision to ‘refresh’ the presenters’ line-up. By the time the new Countryfile was broadcast on 5 April 2009 in its prime-time slot, three second-tier middle-aged female presenters had been dropped and replaced by a team of younger, ethnically diverse, female and male presenters – two with roles as principal presenters. Of the previous line-up, two older males remained with revised roles and another two (also males) were offered alternative positions with the BBC. These changes were paralleled by editorial shifts in other areas: the presentation style became more immersive with presenters playing a greater, more active role in the activities they reported on; general journalistic content was reduced; the overall tone of the programme became lighter in keeping with the expansion of its entertainment value; the look of the programme was also updated with faster edits and through the use of more popular music; overall, the pace increased.

The move of Countryfile from day-time to prime-time was successful in terms of its immediate objective, as the viewing figures increased. But it also proved controversial, as it led to accusations of ageism and gender discrimination in the press and, ultimately, to a legal challenge against the BBC. In early 2010, one of the replaced ‘middle-aged’ presenters, Miriam O’Reilly, filed a complaint to the Employment Tribunal accusing the BBC of direct and indirect age and sex discrimination. The analysis developed in the article focuses more directly on the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment and on the testimonies and materials this text directly incorporates.

Methods

In the UK, employment tribunals are public bodies that have statutory jurisdiction over a variety of disputes between employers and employees, including cases of unfair dismissal, redundancy payments and employment discrimination. When a claim is made by an individual, a hearing in front of an employment tribunal typically follows. Evidence is heard, legal arguments are presented and a judicial determination is made. The process is formal and involves testimonies from witnesses and cross examinations, in a similar fashion to the proceedings in a court of law. The authors’ decision to focus on the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment is justifiable on several grounds. First, there are pragmatic considerations of accessibility given that this document is available in the public domain. Second, the nature of the document itself makes it especially suitable to investigate issues of power and inequality.

The Judge’s final report is, in fact, a highly formalized text comprising three canonical sections: the setting out of the Tribunal’s primary ‘findings of facts’; the ‘analysis of the law’; and the analysis of the case with the application of the law to ‘determine the issues’. It is through this internal articulation that the Judge’s sensemaking efforts unfolded and that a ‘valid and reliable account’ (Brown, 2004, p. 97) emerged in the Countryfile case. This authoritative feature characterizes such document as an active agent in the social construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1996) of a legitimate version of the truth (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) that both incorporates and manifests the cultural and institutional circumstances in which it is produced. This text constitutes an exercise in power defined as ‘the capacity to extend hegemonic reach by suppressing or overwhelming competing accounts such that one’s own interpretation dominates’ (Brown, 2000, p. 48) and, therefore, it is especially suitable for a study that focuses on issues of inequality and discrimination.

The choice to apply critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995; 2003; Sayer, 2000) to the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment is aligned with both the nature of the investigation and the text at the centre of the authors’ analytical efforts. A focus on language in studies of ageism is not novel (Ainsworth, 2002; Ainsworth & Hardy, 2009; McVittie et al., 2003; Riach, 2007; Riach & Loretto, 2009). A distinctive characteristic of CDA, however, is that discourse analytic techniques are applied to the critical appreciation of the ideological function of texts to constitute forms of knowledge in the institutional contexts of their construction. CDA is fundamentally interested in language as a key mechanism in the social construction of reality and as a manifestation of both opaque and transparent relationships of dominance, discrimination, diversity, power and control (Fairclough, 1995; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Phillips & Hardy, 2002). Its main preoccupation is not with language itself but with social phenomena and with ‘the functioning of ideologies in everyday life’ (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 8). Whereas other methods may take for granted the concepts of age and gender, CDA enables the interrogation of these phenomena as forms of social practice which ‘naturalise, sustain and change significations of the world from diverse power relationships’ (Fairclough, 1995, p. 67). Furthermore, CDA often focuses on texts that constitute typical sites of ‘struggle’ in that they ‘show traces of different discourses and ideologies contending and struggling for dominance’ (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 9). In texts like the public inquiry reports investigated in past research on ageism (Ainsworth, 2002; Ainsworth & Hardy, 2009) and like the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment here, discursive differences are negotiated and ‘governed by differences in power that are in part encoded in and determined by discourse and genre’ (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 9).

CDA typically focuses on larger units of texts and goes beyond grammar to capture action and interaction. It directs attention to the discursive moves and strategies employed by different actors in the course of their interactions as linguistic manifestations of power (Wodak & Meyer, 2009). Data analysis in this study was, accordingly, directed to exploring how different claims and potentially competing versions of an apparently ‘legitimate’ reality – the routine application of the principles of day-parting in the switch of the programme Countryfile from day-time to prime-time – were constructed through the medium of language by the various actors involved in the dispute as represented in the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment. More specifically, attention was devoted to analyse how a variety of actors inside and outside the BBC – ranging from the BBC officials directly in charge of the Countryfile programme to the Judge – used language and how such discursive interactions were constituted in the authoritative and legitimizing text of the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment. Specific attention was devoted to discursive manifestations of power that actively contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of hidden ageist and gendered ideologies. Data analysis started with a close reading of the text in order to identify discursive interactions involving salient issues of age and gender in line with the critical orientation of the study. This provided a selection of key passages in the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment for the application of critical discourse analysis techniques. The analysis then moved on to the identification of the actors involved in such interactions together with the specific discursive strategies they deployed to exercise power and to maintain and reproduce extant social structures (Fairclough, 1995) characterized by gender and age inequality. The final step of the analysis involved repeated rounds of interpretation that led the researchers to develop a problematization of the issue of gendered ageism in the workplace as both an organizational and a wider societal phenomenon. In the course of these efforts, a variety of possible interpretive lines progressively emerged. These constitute the architecture for the discussion of the findings in the following section.

In presenting the findings, a decision was taken to refer to specific individuals by their organizational role rather than by their name, despite the fact that all the characters involved are clearly identifiable, given the public nature of the Employment Tribunal proceedings. This choice was driven by the need to precisely locate each individual in the BBC’s organizational structure and, more particularly, to clarify their role in the editorial process triggered by the decision to move Countryfile from day-time to prime-time. The only exception relates to the key claimant, Ms. O’Reilly, and is justified on the basis of the significant publicity attached to her story. Furthermore, although all the excerpts presented in the findings are extracted from the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment, an annotation identifies – whenever suitable – the original source of the particular passage in question (for instance, as incorporated in the text from other documents such as written and verbal evidence submitted to the Tribunal). This choice is justified by the need to give a sense of the intertextuality characterizing the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment, a text that – as indicated earlier – is constructed by the Judge following a typical structure and by combining sections that fulfil different functions.

Gendered Ageism at the BBC: Insights from the Countryfile Court Case

The findings are articulated into three sections, each devoted to one of the main interpretive lines that emerged from data analysis.

The discursive strategies of nomination and predication: ‘Refreshing the brand’

The application of CDA to the Tribunal’s final judgment unveiled recurring patterns in the language used by the witnesses to represent Countryfile’s switch to prime-time. More specifically, the analysis identified a combination of the two discursive strategies of ‘nomination’ and ‘predication’ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009). These entailed the discursive construction (i.e. the ‘nomination’) of particular social actors and events involved in the Countryfile case and their discursive qualification (i.e. their ‘predication’) through a dominant lexical register (Fowler, 1991) centred on the notion of ‘refreshing the brand’. In her testimony, the Controller of BBC One at the time of the events under scrutiny referred to a meeting of the (BBC) Audience Council for England held in the summer of 2008. The minutes of this meeting, together with a set of more detailed notes, were produced for the Tribunal as evidence of how the decision to ‘move Countryfile forward’ in the schedule was taken by applying ‘legitimate commissioning factors’ and, significantly, in line with the wider strategy for the channel. The following statements on strategy were, for instance, included in the section of the Tribunal’s final judgment devoted to ‘finding the facts’:

Part of the mission was to make BBC One feel contemporary and connected to the widest audience, and given that the average age of the BBC One viewer was 52, this needed to be addressed for the longer term.

A member raised the issue of keeping the heartland audience of older viewers, reflecting that we are in an aging society and particularly an aging female society. [The Controller of BBC One] was mindful of the heartland audience … but there was a danger of over catering to those audiences; she was taking gentle steps to bring in younger audiences as well.

In regard to editorial decisions affecting BBC One programming, it was also recorded that:

In the next few months some things announced which may look mean, but she [the Controller of BBC One] needs to achieve ‘social engineering to re-gear the channel’.

In the Controller’s own words: ‘Brands need rejuvenating to stay fresh’.

These statements highlight a key duality in the text, namely, the distinction between ‘heartland’ and ‘widest’ audiences. Such duality unveils the witnesses’ implicit assumptions about what was dominant and hegemonic and what was marginalized and subordinate in the value system of the people taking editorial decisions at BBC One. ‘Widest’ prevailed over ‘heartland’ and, more specifically, ‘widest’ was equated (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) with ‘younger’. Biological age was, therefore, privileged over alternative and complementary criteria in scheduling decisions. ‘Widest’ could potentially mean ‘diverse’, with diversity conceptualized in terms of age but also gender, ethnicity, location, occupation and income. Indeed, claims to diversity were often upheld by BBC officials in their testimonies, mostly in regard to the need to include ethnic talent to reflect the diversity of the audience and to comply with the remit of the BBC as a public service broadcaster. These claims are consistent with the notion of ‘unequal egalitarianism’ (Wetherell, Stiven, & Potter, 1987) and with previous studies of ageism at work that show how protestations of inclusiveness often act as a ‘rhetorical justification of inequality’ (McVittie et al., 2003, p. 607). Despite being emphasized as highly desirable by BBC officials, a more diverse mix of presenters in terms of ethnicity was always associated with, indeed subordinated to, youth as the main selection principle – something echoed in the Judge’s own construction of the witness accounts.

In his summing up, the Judge suggested that ‘apparent’ diversity was sought at the BBC by means of a ‘slot-filling approach’ that did not respect ‘equality of opportunity’ and relied exclusively on the belief that ‘to try and attract younger viewers … the youth of presenters was a relevant factor’. New ethnically diverse ‘younger’ talent – emphasis on the ‘younger’ – was what the rebranding exercise required. This interpretation exposes the fundamentally ageist bias driving editorial decisions at BBC One. The Controller’s aim to widen the target audience and attract younger viewers was entirely legitimate and the application of day-parting as an organizing principle – which resulted in the move of Countryfile to prime-time – was not discriminatory in itself. However, as exposed by the Judge, the implicit assumption that youth is indispensable to attract youth on television and that, therefore, younger presenters are deemed more suitable than older ones is fundamentally ageist. It is an instance of the ‘insidious societal obsession with youthfulness’ (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2008, p. 655) which permeates the ways in which opportunities and resources are distributed and that ideologically privileges youth as good and desirable (Healey, 1993).

In the witnesses’ statements and in the documents submitted to the Tribunal incorporated in the final judgment, the hegemony of ‘youth’ at BBC One is masked by a vocabulary of brand refreshment that chimes with a market-oriented approach to public service broadcasting. The explicit reference to ‘social engineering to re-gear the Channel’ suggests that BBC officials were aware of their biased preference and were determined to pursue it through the exercise of power and formal authority, despite the danger of ‘looking mean’. Marketing discourses provided a rationale for the categorical assertion (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999) that ‘brands need rejuvenating to stay fresh’ – a statement that legitimized the actions taken by the Controller and her colleagues in the summer of 2008 and in the following months. If BBC One as a ‘brand’ needed to ‘refresh and rejuvenate’, the same necessarily applied to individual programmes, including Countryfile. The Controller of BBC One was recorded during the Audience Council meeting as saying that: ‘If doing in a zealot way we would drop C/File as it doesn’t attract younger audience.’ Countryfile could not, however, be dropped as it was the ‘epitome’ of a programme made for the traditional ‘heartland’ BBC One audience. Instead, as reconstructed by the Judge in his ‘finding of the facts’, in the course of several meetings and discussions held in the summer of 2008 the decision matured to ‘move it forward’ from its traditional day-time slot on Sunday mornings to early Sunday evening. In this prime-time slot it would be likely to appeal to the ‘widest possible audience’ – that is, to younger viewers. The vocabulary of ‘brand rejuvenation and refreshment’ was deployed consistently to make sense of and to justify the editorial decisions that went hand-in-hand with the switch in scheduling, particularly in regard to the team of presenters.

The following are but a few examples from witness statements included verbatim in the Tribunal’s final judgment:

[The Head of Rural Affairs] did not explain why I was not going to be working on the new show, except to say that the Network wanted to ‘refresh’ the presenter line-up.’ [Witness statement by the Claimant]

This was to assist in updating the visual image of the programme as it moved to its prime-time slot. [From a communication to the Head of Rural Affairs regarding the appointment of a new ‘co-exec’ in November 2008]

There are areas of the programme that we feel do need a tweak to make Countryfile sit comfortably in its new slot: 1. The new presenters and the way we use our presenters will do a lot to freshen up the brand. We are keen to immerse them… [Record of Countryfile editorial synopsis from a meeting held by BBC officials in February 2009 to prepare for the new broadcast]

The lexical register of ‘refreshing the brand’ provided BBC officials with a range of discursive resources that could be deployed to account for and reproduce the ongoing marginalization of older employees (McVittie et al., 2003). More specifically, it helped justify the hidden assumption that younger presenters are necessary to attract younger audiences, particularly in a context such as television where the visual operates as a dominant taken-for-granted norm. The ‘freshness’ of a face – both in the sense of its novelty for the audience and its ‘youthfulness’ – took priority over other potential selection criteria, particularly those based on merit and experience. It played the same role that ‘team fitness’ played in Handy and Davy’s study of female office-work seekers, ‘providing an acceptable, psychologically mandated, rationalization for discrimination’ (Handy & Davy, 2007, p. 451) which could be legitimized in terms of the dominance of the visual in television.

Obfuscation of agency through ‘de-agentialization’ and ‘abstraction and generalization’

CDA also unveiled how BBC officials in charge of Countryfile systematically adopted a combined strategy of ‘de-agentialization’ and ‘abstraction and generalization’ (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen, 2009) to hide their personal responsibility when dealing with the switch to prime-time and in reconstructing its associated editorial process. ‘Obfuscation of agency’ (Fairclough, 2003, p. 144) occurred in a significant number of instances, and through a combination of linguistic structures. In some cases, only partial abstraction took place as witnesses openly declined direct personal responsibility by specifically pointing in somebody else’s direction. For example, the Tribunal’s final judgment relates that in November 2008 the Head of Rural Affairs communicated by email to a number of potentially interested parties that decisions were brewing regarding Countryfile. In the specific case of one of the presenters that were ‘dropped’ the email read:

I was hoping to see you in person to let you know that some pretty major changes are being considered by the controller of BBC One for Countryfile. Nothing has been agreed yet but if it goes ahead it will have an impact on our relationship.

On other occasions, responsibility was simply denied without specifying the actual agents in control of events. For example, in an email response by the Series Producer for Countryfile to Ms O’Reilly in November 2008, a personal sympathetic tone combined with a clear attempt at distancing: ‘I can assure you, with my hand on my heart, it was nothing to do with me.’ A third way of obfuscating agency was achieved by means of ‘de-agentialization’ (Van Leeuwen, 2009), that is by attributing responsibility and human qualities to an inanimate, impersonal entity. The Employment Tribunal’s final judgment reports how in a significant number of cases direct agency was attributed to, respectively, the ‘Channel’, ‘BBC One’, the ‘Network’, the ‘programme’, the ‘show’. The following are some relevant examples:

I explained to her that the programme was moving and that I was sorry to say that she would not be moving along with the show, as the Channel wanted us to use presenters who had more experience of presenting on network television shows and who had bigger profiles. [Witness statement by the Head of Rural Affairs on how the Claimant was informed of the switch and her position]

… and I guess there was always going to be a time when the Channel would want to make changes. [Record of an email sent in November 2008 by the Head of Rural Affairs to one of the ‘dropped’ presenters in reply to her]

[The Head of Rural Affairs] did not explain why I was not going to be working on the new show, except to say that the Network wanted to ‘refresh’ the presenter line-up. [Witness statement by the Claimant]

It has been confirmed that the show is moving in April. [Record of an email sent in November 2008 by the Head of Rural Affairs to the Editor of Countryfile Magazine]

The latter statement is also an instance of ‘passivation’ (Fairclough, 2003), the use of the passive form to present social actors as subordinate recipients of events and decisions located elsewhere rather than as fully empowered agents. In the example above, the Head of Rural Affairs was casting himself as subject to the move of Countryfile to prime-time, thereby assuming the position of mere ‘messenger’ rather than that – as was indeed the case – of key decision maker. The use of the passive form to shift and avoid responsibility was commonplace in the accounts incorporated in the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment. Combined together, the discursive techniques that produced obfuscation of agency at the BBC as reconstructed by the Judge in his final deliberation can be regarded as exemplars of the range of rhetorical strategies used by employers to justify and reproduce inequality at work (McVittie et al., 2003). By suggesting that all BBC employees were equally subordinate to a superior entity, those responsible for Countryfile’s editorial changes attempted to disguise the harsher reality of a fundamentally unequal and politically divisive workplace.

The appeal to an all-powerful, impersonal entity is also consistent with findings from previous research, and in particular with the use of ‘external factors’ to supplant specific organizational responsibilities identified in Gill’s study of media DJs (1993). Moreover, CDA shows that BBC officials also constructed their relationships at work with the presenters as socially distant and fundamentally unequal by generically referring to them as ‘faces’. Individuals under consideration as presenters for Countryfile were regularly subsumed as an impersonal ‘face’, irrespective of the outcome. The following are some examples of how both negative and positive casting decisions were reconstructed in the Tribunal’s final judgment:

All of the Countryfile presenters were told that the programme would be losing some of its best known and well-loved faces. [Witness record statement of how the Head of Rural Affairs communicated in November 2008 the decision to move Countryfile to prime-time]

I asked who else was being dropped and he [the Head of Rural Affairs] said we would be losing some familiar and well-loved faces, but he would not give me the names. [Witness record statement by the Claimant]

Sadly it does mean that we will be saying au revoir if not good-bye to some familiar faces…. A and JC will remain with Countryfile to be joined by a number of new faces. [Record on an email sent in November 2008 by the Head of Rural Affairs to the Editor of Countryfile Magazine]

This reductionist assimilation of individuals with complex and variegated skills, backgrounds, levels of experience and histories to the single visual dimension of ‘face’ is fundamentally discriminatory. This interpretation is supported by several considerations. The first can be categorized as ‘arguing from silence’ (Martin, 1990). Even when casting decisions were negative (as in the case of the three ‘middle-aged’ female presenters who were not confirmed for the prime-time broadcast of Countryfile) the language used at the BBC and later reproduced in the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment was pointedly ‘positive’. Expressions such as ‘moving forward’ were used to describe what was, in reality, a radical turnover in personnel that left bruised ‘losers’ behind – in one case, to the point of suing. Presenters were never ‘dropped’ or ‘replaced’: those who were de facto dismissed were spoken of as ‘not moving forward’ and were referred to in terms of the ‘loss of familiar/well-known and much-loved faces’. This lack of negative terminology in the framing of what were, in some cases, ‘devastating news’ can be interpreted as an expression of sympathetic feelings and as diplomatic communication. An alternative interpretation, however, would regard it as an omission, indeed as a silence, that unmasks the hidden assumptions and preconceptions of those in charge.

The intersection of age and gender

Miriam O’Reilly’s claim to the Employment Tribunal was based on a combination of ageism and sex discrimination and, therefore, particular attention was devoted in data analysis to the intersection of age and gender. As highlighted earlier, a lexical register of brand refreshment and rejuvenation masked ageist assumptions held by BBC officials as to the most suitable age for presenters in prime-time. In the case of Countryfile, the average age of the day-time presenters was 52, exactly the same as the average age of the BBC ‘heartland’ viewer. With the switch to prime-time, three second-tier female presenters aged, respectively, 51, 44 and 43, were dropped; two older male presenters aged, respectively, 68 and in their mid-40s, remained with revised roles; two other male presenters were offered new positions with the BBC. The ‘rejuvenated’ team was led by two main presenters, one female (aged 38) and one male (aged 30); three second-tier presenters were added to the two older males remaining from day-time, one female (aged 36) and two male (aged, respectively, 26 and 38). In his ‘determination of the issue’ the Judge accepted Miriam O’Reilly’s claim of age discrimination and exposed an insidious bias towards youth (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2008): ‘If the Claimant had been 10 to 15 years younger she would have been given proper consideration to remain as a presenter of Countryfile.’

The Judge, however, rejected the claim of ‘combined sex and age discrimination or sex discrimination in addition to age discrimination’ on the grounds that Miriam O’Reilly would not have been retained for the second tier of presenters even if she had been a man of similar age, skills and experience

as the element of comparative youth required for the second tier presenters would have been missing. This is why we conclude that the decision that the Claimant should no longer be a presenter on Countryfile was an act of age discrimination alone.

The Judge’s authoritative interpretation recognizes that age and gender are interlinked and that older women in broadcasting experience difficulties at work, but his final deliberation prioritizes ageism as the key form of discrimination in the Countryfile case. In order to investigate the workings of age and gender as intertwining systems of power relations (Browne & Misra, 2003; Collins, 1998; Weber, 2001), data analysis focused on stereotyping on the basis of physical appearance (Itzin & Phillipson, 1995) and lookism (Granleese & Sayer, 2006). Two themes emerged as key. The first related to women’s own attitudes towards their looks. As reported in the ‘finding of the facts’, during her testimony to the Tribunal Miriam O’Reilly cited several instances in which younger female colleagues had made explicit reference to physical appearance, hers and theirs. One had said that she ‘would (herself) need to watch out for her wrinkles when high definition television came in’; another one, in response to Ms O’Reilly’s concerns about a future in the media, had suggested ‘it’s time for botox’; in a third example, Ms O’Reilly had been offered ‘a can of spray hair dye’. Another court witness (indeed, one of the three presenters who were replaced) also recounted how she was told by a junior female colleague that ‘she might not pass the prime-time test of being young and pretty enough’. Miriam O’Reilly received a consolatory email from a female colleague, who stated:

‘And please… what are old friends for? Old in both senses, I am acutely aware that at some stage, possibly sooner than I think, my face will not fit and I will be sent to Radio Training!’ [Excerpt from an email by a female colleague to the Claimant]

The analysis shows how women working for the BBC had gendered expectations about their position and opportunities at work (Gorman & Kmec, 2007) and felt under constant pressure to uphold an ideal of female beauty that privileges young bodies (Cortese, 2004; Gimlin, 2002) and is fundamentally disempowering (Bartky, 1998; Gagne & McGaughey, 2002; Negrin, 2002). It indicates how some women engaged in beauty work to resist ageist and sexist discrimination, becoming – consciously or otherwise – active agents of further stereotyping while striving to assert themselves and become more valuable to the organization (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2008). It also shows that it was mostly ‘younger’ colleagues who overtly emphasized physical appearance, whereas Ms O’Reilly and the other middle-aged presenters prioritized experience and competence. Taken together, these findings confirm the notion that individual differences among women must be taken into account, that agency matters, and that the homogeneous view of a collective female identity is fundamentally misplaced (Krekula, 2007).

A second theme in the Tribunal’s final judgment related to the role of physical appearance in casting the new team of presenters. In an email to the Head of Rural Affairs, one of the replaced female presenters remarked that the reshuffle was presented in the press as ‘an ageist thing’, complained about the BBC’s handling of the media as ‘brutal’, and concluded by expressing a wish to appear in a few more episodes ‘before the changes come into place and we are pushed aside for younger models!!’. The media and general public made sense of the changes to the line-up as both ageist and sexist, as shown in the two statements below incorporated in the Tribunal’s final judgment:

The BBC is to move Sunday morning rural affairs show Countryfile to a peak-time slot but without any of its current roster of middle-aged female presenters, sparking accusations of ageism. [Excerpt from the Guardian, 28.11.08, online version]

I’d like to say that I’m disgusted at the way the BBC has treated (the three older female presenters) in passing them over in favour of [new front line female presenter] to present the TV programme, just because she is younger and perceived to be more glamorous. She isn’t even a graduate or a qualified journalist – just a TV personality. [Email of complaint from a reader to the Countryfile Magazine]

These accusations were clearly regarded as damaging for the BBC’s reputation. The Head of Rural Affairs suggested that, before answering complaints like the one above, things should be talked about because

If it is an age thing, then JB (new female main presenter) and JC (retained older male presenter) are hardly spring chickens and if it is about personalities then that is subjective and all programmes need to refresh their output and that includes the faces on the screen. [Excerpt from email by Head of Rural Affairs to the Editor of Countryfile Magazine]

Moreover, publicity plans for prime-time Countryfile included an assessment of the risk as well as potential counter-arguments:

The BBC may be accused of pandering to younger audiences because the two new presenters are young, attractive sorts. We may face questions about the credentials of the new presenters, which could lead to accusations of ‘dumbing down’… I will prepare comprehensive Q&A to counter any suggestions that ageism/sexism plays any part in the new presenter line-up… I will set up interviews with the new presenters that will establish them in a credible light by emphasising their relevant experience and their passion for rural affairs. This should counter any suggestion that J and M [the two new principal presenters] were chosen simply because they are young and attractive. [Excerpt from Publicity Plan sent to Head of Rural Affairs]

To counter accusations of ageism and sexism, the Head of Rural Affairs established a relation of gender equivalence between two prime-time presenters (one male and one female) on the basis of age by labelling both as ‘hardly spring-chickens’. This can be regarded as another instance of ‘unequal egalitarianism’ (Wetherell et al., 1987) whereby age boundaries are renegotiated to avoid problematic characterizations (McVittie et al., 2003). The ‘hardly spring-chicken’ categorization brushed aside, indeed totally suppressed, a biological difference of 30 years (the female presenter was 38, the male one 68) and it provides further corroboration for the idea that women are perceived as older than their same-aged male colleagues, especially by men (Itzin & Phillipson, 1993) – or, as in the case above, as similarly old despite being much younger. This example is a reminder that age is socially constructed as a fundamentally gendered phenomenon (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2009), but it also suggests that gender stereotyping might be especially difficult to address: often subsumed into discourses about age, it remains in the background of social consciousness.

That both gender and age stereotyping were at play in the editorial process following the move of Countryfile to prime-time is, nonetheless, corroborated by the measures described in the Publicity Plan as reconstructed by the Judge. The ‘comprehensive Q&A’ and the need to ‘establish credibility’ for the new presenters by emphasizing their passion for the countryside and their experience indicate an attempt to present a benign, favourable version of reality and to disguise the fact that ‘youth’ and ‘looks’ were key elements in the editorial decision. In this instance, the ‘mask slipped’: inconsistencies, tensions and contradictions emerged (Boje, 2001) to expose the hegemonic influence of a sexist ideology of youthfulness.

Discussion and Conclusion

A critical discourse analysis of the Employment Tribunal’s final judgment on the Countryfile case allows us to problematize the issue of gendered ageism at work as both an organizational and a societal phenomenon. This is possible in virtue of the authoritative and legitimizing nature of this text constructed by the Judge in three typical sections – a primary ‘findings of the facts’, an ‘analysis of the law’ and a ‘determination of the issue’. Part of the analysis, therefore, provides an insight into how sexist and ageist stereotypes informed the performance of a taken-for-granted routine like day-parting in the situated context of a specific place of work, the BBC. The analysis, however, also allows us to focus on the societal level and shed some light on how the ‘legitimate version’ of the truth constructed by the Judge also contributes to the maintenance of unequal social structures and to the reproduction of a form of gendered ageism where one dimension – sexism – is silenced. These two levels are inextricably intertwined, but for clarity of presentation the discussion deals with each of them in turn.

At the organizational level of the BBC as a specific workplace, the analysis shows how age and gender stereotyping manifested themselves through a complex set of hidden assumptions underlying the routine application of day-parting and how these intertwining systems of power relations operated in a non-linear logic (Krekula, 2007). It shows how women working at the BBC were active agents in their own marginalization on the basis of both age and gender and how ‘lookism’ (Granleese & Sayer, 2006) proved critical for the attribution of social value in an organizational context dominated by an unquestioned tyranny of the visual. The findings also highlight the importance of language and, more particularly, of the lexical register of brand refreshment and rejuvenation and of the strategy of obfuscation in providing rhetorical justifications of inequality at work (Gill, 1993; McVittie et al., 2003; Wetherell et al., 1987). The analysis contributes to the literature on organizational routines by clarifying how age-based practices such as day-parting in broadcasting are not necessarily discriminatory in themselves but have the potential to generate inequality when performed (Feldman & Pentland, 2003) in particular contexts. In the specific case of Countryfile, ageist stereotyping occurred when the editorial team in charge of the programme decided to recruit new presenters on the basis of the hidden and discriminatory assumption that younger audiences can only be attracted by younger presenters. The distinction between an ostensive and a performative dimension in organizational routines is, therefore, a fruitful starting point in exploring how routines contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of discriminatory ideologies in the workplace. However, the article goes further in highlighting how the performance of an organizational routine is not necessarily associated with intended change but can act in an unintended direction.

In the intentions of its key proponents, the distinction between ostensive and performative aspects of routines redirected attention from a traditional understanding of routines as sources of stability (Cyert & March, 1963; Nelson & Winter, 1982), inertia (Hannan & Freeman, 1983), inflexibility (Gersick & Hackman, 1990) and mindlessness (Ashforth & Fried, 1988) to a more nuanced appreciation of routines as sources of change (Feldman, 2000; Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Based on this new ontology, significant efforts have been devoted to exploring issues of agency (Howard-Grenville, 2005) as well as structure in organizational routines, particularly with regard to phenomena involving organizational change, new practices creation, learning, power and political behaviour (Bruns, 2009; D’Adderio, 2008; Labatut, Aggeri, & Girard, 2012; Rerup & Feldman, 2011). This article contributes to ongoing debates on organizational routines by maintaining that equating agency with change is too simplistic and that replacing a duality of agency and structure for the traditional duality of change and stability does not fully account for the complexities of routines as constituted by both ostensive and performative aspects. As demonstrated in the Countryfile case, the performance of the organizational routine of day-parting did indeed emerge as an ‘effortful accomplishment’ (Pentland & Reuter, 1994, p. 488) by a variety of actors – including the editorial team – and was clearly situated in the specific context of the BBC at a particular point in time. However, agency as manifested in the ostensive dimension of day-parting did not produce change but contributed instead towards the maintenance and reproduction of hidden ideological assumptions that informed discriminatory practices at work. Moreover, the Countryfile case shows how the manifestation of power through language played a key role in the performance of the routine of day-parting, indicating how our understanding of organizational routines can be further enhanced if we conceptualize them as effortful accomplishments that are both relational and discursive.

Second, the analysis also shows how the intersection of gender and age in the workplace needs to be explored and understood at different levels of analysis – in this case, the individual and the organizational – and with sensitivity to the context (Krekula, 2007). More specifically, it clarifies how individual experiences of the workplace can be qualitatively very different, reflecting unique, spatially and temporally situated combinations of the intertwining systems of age and gender. In the specific case under study, this complexity is exemplified by a direct comparison between three characters: the 51-year-old Miriam O’Reilly; JC, the 68-year-old male presenter who was retained at prime-time; and JB, the 38-year-old female presenter who fronted Countryfile in prime-time. In the ongoing political struggle for organizational preferment and value (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2008), Miriam ‘loses’ against both JC and JB: she suffers from both ageism and sexism, and ends up not only losing her job but, eventually, being deprived of future opportunities of collaboration with the public broadcaster. JC ‘wins’ on all fronts: his value to BBC One as an ‘experienced’ presenter is further enhanced by his newly acquired symbolic value as a paradigmatic example in official responses to accusations of ageism and sexism. JB ‘wins’ vis-a-vis Miriam, replacing her partly due to her own age and looks in an organization dominated by a visual imperative. With regard to JC, however, her position is more complex and ambiguous: gendered stereotyping makes her socially ‘older’ than her biological age (Itzin & Phillipson, 1993), potentially lowering her value for the organization and undermining her future prospects (Barnett, 2005; Duncan & Loretto, 2004).

At the broader level of society, a critical analysis of how the Judge constructed a legitimate truth and articulated his final determination confirms that ageism and sexism at work are both regarded as significant and interlinked issues. However, it also suggests that the former has greater recognition and wider ‘legitimacy’ (Suchman, 1995). In his authoritative interpretation of the hierarchy of criteria applied by the BBC editors in the selection of the new Countryfile team the Judge makes a distinction between a first tier and a second tier of presenters. His deliberation is based on the claim that while age was a significant factor in excluding Miriam O’Reilly from the first tier of new presenters, her personal circumstances in regard to the combination of age and gender were immaterial in her exclusion from the second tier. Age discrimination is, therefore, recognized and de facto legitimized by the Judge as the dominant dimension in the social construction of a reality – namely, a truthful version of events – that silences gender while, at the same time, recognizing ageism as a wrong. By acknowledging the distinction between a first and a second tier of presenters, and by pushing the intersectional dimension of sexism into the background, the Judge implicitly legitimizes the association between the age of the presenters and the age of the target audience that he argues against in other sections of his final judgment. This suggests that, at a societal level, there is recognition of gendered ageism as a significant form of discrimination but that the connection between the two is difficult to articulate in a way that is robust enough to exert authority. Given this difficulty, and as highlighted in the Countryfile case, ageism often ‘incorporates’ sexism.

The recognition that age and gender intersect is a fundamental one, but it is also problematic for both scholars and politicians interested in promoting equality. Issues of gender stereotyping are often pushed into the background, confined to an ancillary position by societal attitudes towards the appropriate use of the language of ‘looks’. The absence of an acceptable vocabulary to talk about, and make sense of, the combined effect of sexist and ageist stereotyping makes gendered ageism an especially difficult issue to study and, even more significantly, to address.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biographies

Simona Spedale is Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and HRM at Nottingham University Business School, UK. Her research interests include institutional theory, the study of organizational decision making and collective sensemaking, and identity work and the use of language in the workplace. She has published internationally in journals such as Organization Studies, International Small Business Journal and Long Range Planning.

Christine Coupland is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Loughborough University School of Business and Management, UK. Her research interests centre on issues of identity, embodiment and language processes of people at work. Her recent publications include articles in internationally renowned journals such as Organization, Organization Studies and Human Relations.

Sue Tempest is Professor of Strategic Management and Learning at Nottingham University Business School, UK. She received her PhD and MBA from the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include: organizational learning; management education; strategy and new forms of organization and resultant career issues; demographic ageing and strategic management. She has published in journals such as Academy of Management Learning & Education, Organization Science, Human Relations, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Long Range Planning and Management Learning.

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