Organizations and Workforce Aging – Stakeholders, Interests, and Human Capital Management by Berg, Peter; Piszczek, Matthew M.;

Short description:

This timely book examines the impacts of an aging workforce, emphasizing how and why organizations choose policies to address this demographic shift. Peter Berg and Matthew Piszczek analyze interviews from top managers, supervisors, human resource managers, and worker representatives to explore how organizations are responding to workforce aging.

Long description:

This timely book examines the impacts of an aging workforce, emphasizing how and why organizations choose policies to address this demographic shift. Peter Berg and Matthew Piszczek analyze interviews from top managers, supervisors, human resource managers, and worker representatives to explore how organizations are responding to workforce aging.

Drawing on human capital theory and employment relations theory, Berg and Piszczek explain how different organizational stakeholders have varied goals for managing human capital against the background of an older workforce. They posit that the pursuit of these objectives via Human Resource Management practices is shaped by diverse influences spanning stakeholder power, the organization of work, and country-level institutions like retirement policy and collective bargaining. Ultimately, the book develops a framework for human capital management as a form of age management and adopts an employment relations approach that underlines multiple stakeholders and their interests.

This book is a crucial resource for scholars and students of business and management, human resource management, employment relations, and sociology and social policy. It is also a beneficial read for general managers for its practical guidance and breakdown of how institutional environments affect organizational policy.

‘Unlike most scholarship on the individual experiences of older workers, Berg and Piszczek elevate organizational and institutional contexts to amplify multilevel variations in demand and supply, interests and concerns. This book should be required reading, as both scholars and stakeholders confront the reality of aging workforces across organizations, industries, and nation-states. Why do those within and across organizations want to retain, hire, or push out older workers? And how? Lucid answers are in these pages.’