The Great Resignation as Neoliberal Compliance and Critique

This book examines how neoliberal power shapes individual subjectivity in contemporary American workplaces through the lens of the Great Resignation-the 2021 mass voluntary job departure phenomenon. Drawing on in-depth interviews and a Foucauldian framework, the book traces how neoliberal rationalities of choice, flexibility, and self-optimization shape the ways individuals explain their labor decisions and evaluate their lives. Rather than treating the Great Resignation as a singular rupture, the analysis situates it within longer historical transformations in governance, capitalism, and employment relations. The book identifies differentiated modes of labor subjectivity-alignment, negotiation, and refusal-showing how workers variously inhabit, strain against, or attempt to revalue dominant norms of work and responsibility. Across chapters, it demonstrates how quitting becomes intelligible not simply as resistance or market behavior but also as an ethical and discursive practice shaped by uneven opportunities, affective demands, and institutional constraints. In doing so, the book reveals both the durability and the limits of neoliberal labor governance. Offering a theoretically rich account of how labor and life might be reimagined, the book is intended for scholars and advanced students in sociology, critical psychology, labor studies, and social theory, as well as readers interested in work, governance, and contemporary capitalism. It will also appeal to researchers and practitioners seeking critical insight into current debates about labor, precarity, and organizational life.

Caroline Austin is a sociologist whose work bridges critical theory and applied research. Alongside academic writing and teaching, she has led community-based evaluations and policy-relevant research on work, inequality, and social well-being, bringing grounded empirical insight to questions of neoliberal governance and labor subjectivity.

Series editor preface 1) Framing the Phenomenon: The Discursive Field of the Great Resignation 2) The Making of Neoliberal Labor: Market Logics and the Restructuring of Work 3) Theorizing with Foucault: Discourse and Production of Neoliberal Subjectivity 4) Analyzing with Foucault: Discourse and Subjectivity as Method 5) Constructing the Great Resignation: Discourses of Labor and Selfhood 6) Narrating Exit: Meaning, Ambivalence, and the Problem of Quitting 7) Between Rupture and Continuity: Labor, Refusal, and Neoliberal Subjectivity