Advancing the Sociology of Ageism: A Special Section

Social Forces sought papers for this special section that address age discrimination and related phenomena across the life course and in a range of social contexts. We said that papers might focus on the social processes, institutions and structures that cause or constitute age discrimination, or on social psychological and other consequences of age discrimination. We distinguished age discrimination, which is behavior, from ageist attitudes, and welcomed papers that analyze the relationship between ageist attitudes and age discrimination. We were also interested in papers that analyze the intersection of age discrimination and other forms of discrimination based on gender, race and class. Finally, we noted that papers making a theoretical contribution in this area would be particularly welcomed, as would empirical papers based on any sound methodological approach. To a large extent we were successful.

Drawing on Feagin and McKinney (2003), Gee, Pavalko and Long note in their contribution that, "Discrimination can be defined as the actions arising from institutions and individuals that disproportionately and systematically harm members of socially marginalized groups. The study of perceptions of discrimination has become an important field of inquiry. The general assumption is that perceptions form one way of measuring the exposure to social experiences encountered by persons in marginalized groups." However, these authors note, there is an important reason to study perceptions of discrimination beyond their potential as indicators of actual discrimination. Perceived discrimination can have consequences in its own right, affecting health, well-being and occupational behavior. Thus, these authors say, "perceived discrimination is an important area because it connects structural inequity to individual outcomes." The positioning of their paper covers many of the dimensions outlined in our call for papers.

Yuan's paper on ageism and mental health presents systematic data that show how perceived age discrimination in the work domain affects mental health. It makes its theoretical case by drawing on the stress-buffer hypothesis so well established in social epidemiology and medical sociology. Calasanti writes on ageism in anti-aging advertisements and makes a strong argument for the psychological consequences of ageism, resting on the notion that cultural conceptions can legitimate differential treatment of people on the basis of visible characteristics of age. Rosigno, Mong, Byron and Tester, in their contribution, present a strong theoretical argument about the nature of ageism in relation to social closure processes. These papers deal with most of the conceptual terrain we sought to explore – territory including both age discrimination and ageism at the attitudinal or cultural level.

The methodological range is also broad, with Gee et al. and Yuan using different national-level survey data files for multivariate analyses, Calasanti coding and analyzing qualitative data from websites that deal with "anti-aging" products, and Rosigno et al. numerically coding, counting and descriptively analyzing a large archive of age discrimination cases, then analyzing qualitative data for a subset.

Overview of the Papers

The paper by Gee, Pavalko and Long deals with perceived discrimination in the workplace, and they relate this to "expected age preferences for workers." This is a judgment, based on a review of the literature on employer attitudes toward workers of different age, and public opinion data or inferences about preferred age made from other studies. Their reading of these data suggests that negative attitudes to age of workers will not be linear but rather variable in curvilinear fashion over the life course, and they consider this variability to be a proxy for exposure to age discrimination across the life course. They assume that reports of age discrimination will reflect this variability in exposure, and so they hypothesize that reports of age discrimination will be relatively high in the 20s, decline in the 30s, and then rise again. This is the age hypothesis, which they pit against a cohort hypothesis. Specifically, the authors suggest that cohorts of women who entered adulthood during or after the Civil Rights era might be more sensitive than earlier cohorts to discrimination of any form, including age discrimination, and consequently more likely to perceive it. Their paper is appropriately framed within the life course perspective, and employs a specific device (introducing "side information...