How Employees Justify Quiet Quitting A Qualitative Analysis of Antiwork Narratives on Workplace Disengagement
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2026-03-03
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en
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Quiet Quitting has established itself in public and scholarly debate for reduced work engagement, but its exact definition and understanding remain unclear. It is often perceived when workers are unhappy with their job but cannot afford to actually quit. This thesis investigates how Quiet Quitters themselves justify and interpret their behaviour by analysing authentic, naturally occurring data from the r/antiwork community on Reddit. A qualitative content analysis was performed on 176 comments from 22 Quiet Quitting related posts, comparing the findings to a nomological network that was developed based on prior research.
The central aspect of Quiet Quitting is contractual compliance. The fulfilment of formal tasks is used as moral defence against criticism, since the contract establishes the exact balance of labour and wage. Individuals are often pushed towards this due to past frustrations in the workplace, opting to for a better work-life balance when their efforts go unnoticed. R/antiwork also strongly prefers ‘act your wage’ as a label for their behaviour. Quiet Quitting is perceived as an attempt to demonize the withdrawal of discretionary efforts, which organisations have used to increase profits but refusing to share it with those that produce it.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen