ECON101: Principles of Microeconomics

The Great Resignation or the Big Quit represents a significant shift in people's importance of employment. In September 2021, U.S. Department of Labor data revealed that 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs, an increase of over 1.13 million from September 2020. This study aims to explore the socio-psychological reasons behind the Great Resignation and potential future shifts in how people view work in their lives. A data collection of 955 highly rated posts from the r/antiwork subReddit was analyzed using the BERTopic method to semantically examine the posts into identifiable topics from February 2020 to February 2022.

Subsequently, the moral economy framework was used to investigate these topics, classifying the reasons into three dimensions: work and employment, which reflects organizational factors; social Justice and activism, which includes community-level considerations; and health, well-being, and lifestyle, which relates to individual circumstances.

The study reveals a vocabulary of motives, including flexibility, meaningful work, social responsibility, and self-care, showcasing the interconnectedness across individual, community, and organizational dimensions. This evidence suggests an ongoing significant transformation in societal importance and understanding of work. These findings shed light on the profound shift in work values, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the Great Resignation phenomenon, and have far-reaching implications for organizations and policymakers.

In the summer of 2021, a significant increase in people quitting their jobs was observed in many different fields, particularly in the United States and numerous other countries. This phenomenon, called the "Great Resignation" or "The Big Quit," represents a significant shift in people's importance of work. This phenomenon has been and is still being discussed in the international media and academic and corporate spheres. Well-known newspapers reported data from the United States Department of Labor, according to which, in September 2021, 4.4 million Americans left their jobs, an increase of more than 1.1 million from September 2020, and a record number of open positions are being noted.

Moreover, 36% of U.S. workers plan to change their employment due to a lack of flexibility in remote work arrangements. Low income, a lack of promotion opportunities, and feeling disrespected at work were the primary reasons Americans left their jobs in 2021.

One potential triggering event for the Great Resignation is the pandemic-induced shift toward remote work. Over 50% of U.S. workers who were able to work from home during the pandemic want to do so in the future. As it has been underlined, home working increases the work-to-life and life-to-work conflicts, triggers greater work-related fatigue, and worsens the perceived work–life balance. These negative effects are mediated by positive work engagement.

In this light, the COVID-19 pandemic has driven some workers to reassess their work priorities and values. In particular, it has forced them to confront the reality that work is not just a way to make a livelihood but also a significant part of their identity as persons, social connections, and personal fulfillment. Recent studies have shown that those who feel disconnected from their work or lack a sense of purpose may experience burnout, stress, and reduced motivation. Conversely, people who find meaningful work tend to have better mental and physical health, higher levels of job satisfaction, and greater engagement and productivity at work.

Another potential factor contributing to the Great Resignation is the changing perspective on work among the younger generation of workers. Several studies have shown that millennials and Gen Z workers tend to prioritize work–life balance, meaningful employment, and a sense of purpose in their careers. They are less likely to be prompted by extrinsic incentives such as salary and job security and more likely to seek out employers that align with their intrinsic values and provide opportunities for personal growth. These values are driven not only by material interests but also by a sense of morality that shapes how people think about work and its role in their lives.

We will argue that the so-called "Moral Economy" is especially pertinent when analyzing the shifting views toward work and employment manifested for some workers in the Great Resignation phenomena. Moral Economy refers to a set of moral and ethical principles that both guide and justify economic behavior and decision-making in economic life. It suggests that economic transactions are not built only on self-interest but also on a sense of social responsibility, justice, and morality. The concept of Moral Economy was originally applied by E.P. Thompson in the illustration of the English food riots in the 18th century.

In his seminal work, Thompson made the key claim about what distinguishes morally legitimate from morally illegitimate practices in economic life. This difference is – as Thompson maintained – capable of inspiring individual and collective action based on some sense of what individuals owe to the collectivities in which they live. In this vein, the riots were not simply a reaction to unfulfilled basic needs, for they reflected a strive for a better world.

Respect, recognition, reciprocity, solidarity, justice, fairness, regard, appreciation, thoughtfulness, consideration, esteem: the Moral Economy conception points to the fact that people want and hope to be considered by others as "moral persons" whose needs are considered worth in themselves. It is key to clarify the way the Moral Economy conceives values and morality as key mechanisms. The Moral Economy approach treats morality as a social phenomenon. As Fourcade and Healy put it: "[This] approach is broadly Durkheimian. Morality does not refer here to some universal ethical standard; rather, it means what a society, or a group, defines as good or bad, legitimate or inappropriate." As we will argue in the following, Great Resignations phenomena refers to the "violation" of the Moral Economy of people. It is key to spell out two analytical implications.

First and foremost, it should be made clear that the concept of the Moral Economy lost its analytical power in a process of trivialization that reduced it to a moralized economy. It became a symbol to be invoked rather than a concept to be applied in social theory and scientific research. Descriptive and prescriptive elements overlapped in a confusing manner. This overlapping obscured the key added value of the concept, namely the social value of mutual obligations that arise when people transact with each other over the course of time.

Secondly, it should be stressed that these obligations are both psychological motives explaining the choices. We thus maintain that it is key to draw a line between the "psychological motivations" and the "vocabularies of motives" of social actors, as argued by C. Wright Mills and – more recently – by the so-called economy of conventions or conventions theory. The perspective of the vocabularies of motives goes beyond simply listing the supposed reasons given by an individual and interpreting them as psychological forces behind one's action. It examines how people express their motives, how motives are clustered, and how these vocabularies relate to the larger social structure and society-level changes.

This conception, thus, is especially effective for exploring the moral and ethical implications of a large-scale social change that the vocabularies of motives express and reflect. "Motives" here need to be framed not as "inner psychological forces," namely as intentions that causally explain individual behaviors, but as public justifications that support/justify one's decision in the eyes of others. They are public because their rationale is one that members of the public can accept. They are a sort of "moral recognition rules" that have larger socio-cultural meanings and consequences, as well as public conventions that situate social action within widely accepted normative models. In this vein, assessing empirically the relevance of the Moral Economy is a way to understand the changing symbolic order of capitalism.

On this premise, the key research questions of this paper are: RQ1 What are the predominant reasons that individuals on Reddit cite for participating in the Great Resignation?

From the empirical viewpoint, this study seeks first to identify the common reasons associated with the Great Resignation, then apply a Moral Economy lens to these reasons, and finally distill the vocabulary of motives from the analysis. Interpreting this vocabulary of motives as potential indicators of a societal shift in evaluating the moral aspects of work.

Data from the r/anti-work sub-Reddit from February 2020 to February 2022 on Reddit's social media platform was analyzed to understand the reasons behind the Great Resignation phenomenon. The Big Quit has been widely associated with Reddit r/antiwork, a forum dedicated to discussing worker exploitation, labor rights, and associated left-wing political ideologies. The Great Resignation, as it came to be known in the mainstream media, coincided with the time when r/antiwork experienced its highest growth on Reddit in late 2021, gaining 1.7 million by the end of 2021 and reaching 2.3 million by October 2022. The r/antiwork subReddit's popularity and subsequent expansion were credited to the same media coverage. The antiwork subReddit group collects many testimonies and reports of voluntary resignation and, more generally, opinions about the situation in the contemporary world of work, providing valuable insights into the different vocabularies of motive employed by individuals during this phenomenon.

The BERTopic method was used to analyze text and extract topics from the antiwork subReddit group, which were subsequently semantically interpreted and grouped using the moral economy framework to identify the different vocabularies of motives behind the Great Resignation and prospective changes in how future generations consider the work.

Source: G. Varavallo, G. Scarpetti, and F. Barbera, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-023-02087-x
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.