‘He probably thought we were students’: Age norms and the exercise of visual judgement in service work
Organization Studies · 2015 · Volume 36 · Issue 2
Abstract
This paper analyses how organisational actors draw upon, perhaps without conscious acknowledgement, assumptions about age as they engage in organisational activities. Drawing on video-recordings of naturalistic interaction, the paper analyses how customers are positioned with respect to age-based norms, often following visual assessments of their physical appearance. Through detailed rhetorical and sequential analysis, the paper describes artful practices, through which participants make age-based norms relevant for the composition of ordinary organisational actions. The paper is amongst the first micro-sociological studies to analyse how people engage age-based norms in this way. It shows the positioning of age identities to be substantially an interactional phenomenon, as well as a discursive and reflexive one.
Keywords
age, identity, interactive service work, norms, social interaction, ‘the visual’, video studies
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