Researching the Multigenerational Workplace

Researching the multigenerational workplace is a complex undertaking. It requires understanding the perspectives of workers, managers and organisations. It also requires understanding workplace culturesWorkplace culture, policies and practicesPolicypractice and how they align (or don’t align) to produce the conditions of work, and work-family balance, for workers of different ages. In order to capture all these aspects, we adopted a case study approach. The case study method provides a valuable approach to observing complex organisational phenomena such as workforce ageingAgeing and genderGender dynamics at work, and the intersections between them. This book presents the results of detailed case studies with six organisations conducted over a seven-year period. In this chapter, we reveal what we did, including how we collected and made sense of data in our case study organisations, and the methodological discoveries and solutions we learned along the way.