INFO: PsycCRITIQUES Blog

I am writing on behalf of Danny Wedding, PhD, Editor, PsycCRITIQUES: Contemporary Psychology-APA Review of Books. APA has developed a PsycCRITIQUES blog that makes it possible for interested psychologists around the world to read selected book and film reviews and comment on the issues raised in those reviews.  We think the following probe would interest those in Division 20.
    
***********************************************
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Older Workers in a New Economic Age

Tracey Ryan, reviewer of Dirk Hofäcker's Older Workers in a Globalizing World: An International Comparison of Retirement and Late-Career Patterns in Western Industrialized Countries, commends the multidisciplinary approach of the book. Written largely from a sociological and economic perspective, the book deals with the complex problems pertaining to older workers. For example, as Ryan summarizes, with the added dilemmas involved in an increasingly global employment market, national and political boundaries are less important to employers than in the past. She states, summarizing Hofäcker:

Technological change happens so quickly in this intensely competitive environment that many older—especially male—workers are seen as inflexible, outdated, and burdensome to employers. Paradoxically, the labor unions and "welfare" systems primarily based on seniority, designed to protect many of these older workers, backfire in this new economic age.

One solution offered in the book is to reduce institutional ageism at all levels of society, from educational systems to retirement systems.

What are possible approaches to reducing institutional ageism within major societal systems, like education and retirement? How have older workers, in particular, been affected by the global economic recession? What can psychology offer to the discourse about current problems facing older workers in the labor market?

Read the Review

Undervalued, Outdated, and Over the Hill? The Fate of Aging Workers
By Tracey Ellen Ryan
      PsycCRITIQUES, 2010 Vol 55(38)

***********************************************
    
You can review the blog and make comments at http://psyccritiquesblog.apa.org/books/ (click on the red comments button at the bottom of the probe).