Just like a parent, a researcher is not supposed to have ‘favourites’, but there are some people you meet over the course of a decade who you feel more intimately connected with, and whose conversations disrupt a lot of what you thought previously. Isla was one of those people. Despite having moved cities, occupations and lifestyle to work in a different sector far beyond the financial services, she was always the first to get back in touch and was one of the most enthusiastic about being re-interviewed. While our meetings involved dropping in and out of each other's lives every two years, we both enjoyed each other's company and as the years went on, our conversations became more involved about what ageing at work meant to us as women.

One evening in 2016, we met down by Southbank, close to Waterloo Station in London, for some Yum Cha. In some ways it was like a lot of the other interviews I was doing now; often in people's homes, in cafes or bars, or restaurants that were close to their large corporate offices. In comparison to the more formal settings I had been in that day, the relaxed but trendy atmosphere of the restaurant caught me off guard and I looked out of place with cut-off trousers and unstraightened hair dry shampooed into position, apologizing about clearly letting myself go, since we had last spoken. Isla smiled warmly and said: ‘People talk about letting yourself go as if it's a catastrophe. But what are we so scared [about] holding on to? There are benefits to letting yourself go.’

This is a book about how people experience ageing in the context of organizational life. Specifically, it is about how we negotiate growing up and older in highly competitive professional contexts, while attending to the quality of ageing as an embodied and situated experience. It recognizes that ageing is not a process that is incidental to how, where and when we work, and who we work with, and nor is it separate from the way we come to know ourselves as ageing subjects more generally. Rather, ageing at work should be understood as simultaneously a making of the self through the constitution of dynamic organizational subjectivities – a ‘being’ of ageing – and a ‘doing’ of ageing through particular and specific embodied acts that are shaped by the occupational and work-based contexts of our lives. In other words, working through ageing is a practical accomplishment underpinned by a particular relational and experiential organizational ontology.

Such a concern rides on a wave of political and institutional attention to age and work. Much of this has been fuelled by dual socioeconomic concerns surrounding a fear of an increasingly ‘top-heavy’ demographic, and the need to maximize labour force participation across the life course. These trends are neither universal in their intensity nor in the way they pattern across different national landscapes. However, under the banner of ageing as a ‘global challenge’, multiple governments and international agencies have invested considerable time and resources to try and establish the most effective policy interventions that encourage and enable participation in the labour market across the life course.

We’ve all used the word ‘resilient’ at one time or another to refer to family members, friends, colleagues, acquaintances or public figures who have experienced their share of life's hard knocks. This might include those who have had very difficult upbringings. Those who may be battling with personal illness. Those who have lost loved ones. Been laid off. Struggled career-wise or financially. Endured a series of bad relationships or unfortunate, even catastrophic, events.

Think of the following comment made by a work colleague in casual conversation over lunch: ‘My friend Amelia is so resilient. Despite being made redundant more than once and experiencing other personal setbacks, she's managed to run a business and raise three great kids all on her own.’ But what does it really mean to warrant this label, to be resilient like Amelia, or like Sofia, Marie, Robert, Anne, Chloe and Jacob, whose stories I captured in part at the start?

What is resilience?

George Bonanno, a leading psychologist on the topic of resilience, defines resilience as our ability as individuals, when we are experiencing a highly disruptive event, ‘to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning’ across time, despite transient perturbations (or in simpler terms, the occasional uneasiness), and our ‘capacity for generative experiences and positive emotions’. Resilience, therefore, is about recovering quickly and easily from stress.

On a warm summer night in August 2011, Sofia, a veteran London bar owner, peered out of the front door of her small business and gazed in horror at what she saw.

Rioting, prompted by the fatal shooting by police of a 29-year-old black man, Mark Duggan, had resulted in chaotic scenes across London. A woman jumping from a burning building and a neighbouring family business in flames would become vivid and enduring images in the media.

Most business owners had been prevented from re-entering their premises by police cordons. However, like some others, Sofia was inside her business at the time. Behind her was her teenage son and some friends. She quickly pushed the door closed and locked it.

Soon after, she heard noises on the street. The rioters were making petrol bombs. They set fire to three cars just outside Sofia's front door. A sense of dread swept over her and she switched off the lights.

Now, there were 300 people outside. And only moments later the door of the bar was smashed open and the angry rioters poured in.

Marie worked in publishing and marketing for a time but after having a family set her sights on starting her own business. ‘I realized that I couldn't carry on doing what I was doing and have a baby,’ she said. ‘I thought, “alright, I’m going to open this shop, and it's going to be.” ‘ Marie opened what soon became a popular children's clothing shop in West London, in the early 2000s.

The day her business was hit by rioters, Marie received a couple of messages including one from the local council to say that the riots might be heading her way. Despite her feelings of disbelief, she contacted neighbouring businesses and, like them, removed items from her store front window, turned off the lights and went home. Later that evening, around 10 pm, she got a call from her alarm company. ‘It's such a horrible feeling. It's like if your purse has been nicked and you feel helpless.’ Her husband jumped into the car but didn't get as far as the shop. He turned around, according to Marie, because it was complete ‘chaos’, ‘too many people around’ and he felt ‘unsafe’.

A couple of hours later, a friend rang Marie: ‘I’m outside your shop now and it's totally trashed. There's nothing in there. It's just trashed,’ he said. Marie set out to investigate but it wasn't long before approaching the shop that she saw ‘people streaming everywhere’, some of which surrounded her car. ‘It was like I was in a dream. A really bizarre and frightening and bewildering dream.’

Two years on from the London riots, Amir spoke about his persistent concerns and anger. He felt let down in the aftermath of the riots by the lack of support. ‘I worry about the insurance, I worry about the Government,’ he said. As discussed, his clothing business in North London had been seriously vandalized, looted and flooded when rioters attempted to set fire to it. His local councillor, Member of Parliament (MP) and insurers were not as helpful as he believed they could have been, adding to his stress. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you pay so much [business] rates, you know? … My local council could have helped us further.’ Following the riots, he had ‘no money to start with’ and it took six months for him to be compensated. This was a difficult time: ‘I’m down so much mentally, I’m just, it affected me mentally.’ The inaction of his local MP continued to irritate him:

When Sam and I first met he was in his early 50s. Sam had moved to the UK a couple of decades prior, working in offices before starting his own businesses in the hospitality sector. He had built his North London pub from scratch a few years prior, something he was immensely proud of. On the first night of the London riots, he had heard earlier in the day from customers that ‘there was some kind of protest taking place in front of the police station’ and ‘a police car burning there’. Sam closed the pub around 10 or 11 pm and went home. On returning to the pub a short while later he said:

Sam then noticed something or someone that really startled him. ‘Because it was dark and one of the guys was coming through this window, I think he has a weapon in his hand and I say, “now I have to go and hide myself” ‘.

You do not have to look far to see how ageing is built into the world of work, from images of the workforce in recruitment advertisements, industrial action on pensions eligibility, and reports of productivity diminishing as the population grows older. These are not only underpinned by ideas of the working life course, but also a compulsion to be able to view ageing as a source of possible control and mediator of value or meaning. Yet age as a workforce concern has become more complex during the historical present as we see the move towards more fluid patterns of entry and exit, more flux in the workforce, and global changes in terms of how economies are structured. Systems of workplace forecasting are central to people management policies and are still predicated on the idea of a ‘hard stop’ at a certain point in time, usually based on chronological age. In some professions, this has been supported through using occupational pension eligibility to symbolically ‘mark’ the end of work. Other mechanisms may seek to control pathways around work, such as transition to retirement programmes, often called ‘phased’, which are increasing in popularity across the public and private sectors.

Such challenges are often felt most acutely at a local level, as revealed in a conversation I had with one senior manager in the National Health Service (NHS) on workforce planning. At this point, post-COVID-19 job vacancies were at crisis point, not only due to Brexit but also to employees choosing to retire around 18 months earlier than had been forecast, and a fear that the NHS was not able to protect older bodies at work.

A new book by Kathleen Riach is a major event and a gift for those of us with interests in ageing and work. When we started the Rethinking Work, Ageing and Society series, we wanted to publish books that shine a critical light on the issues that affect people as they age. Significant changes in the landscape include extended working lives and rising state pension ages, changes to job transitions in later life, an increasing recognition of health transitions in the workplace, and shifts towards individual responsibility and risk in private pensions saving. Volumes in the series have successfully explored some of these issues through critical, theoretically informed social science research. However, there is an important broader issue to be explored about how people experience ageing today and how we can make sense of this. This is not about focusing on a particular life stage, on older workers per se, or working in ‘later life’, although this remains important; rather, it relates to ageing as a process that proceeds and is experienced over the life course.

In this context, we are delighted to welcome Kathleen Riach's excellent new book, Working through Ageing. Throughout her distinguished career, Professor Riach's research has encouraged us to think more deeply, and differently, about ageing and work. This ambitious new project presents the theory of ‘working through ageing’, which seeks to avoid the common imbalance of focusing exclusively on ageing as something imposed upon individuals within organizational contexts or as something that is purely the locus of the individual.