The White-Collar Opt-Out

Mustafa Yavas, Johns Hopkins University

Why do elite business professionals quit their hard-earned, high-prestige, and high-salary jobs? How do such quit processes begin and unfold? How do they feel and experience the aftermath of opting out of corporate careers? Drawing mainly from 68 in-depth interviews with business professionals, 15 of whom quit “corporate life,” this article capitalizes on the narratives of such opt-outs to better understand the perplexing quality of work life experiences of the occupants of the so-called “Good Jobs.” I find that when compared with their corporate jobs, the quitters typically earn less, but work fewer hours and get more fulfillment from their new jobs, and thus, become more content with their lives. However, white-collar opt-out is a highly contingent process. Interpreting such broad resignations from corporate careers as a failure of consent to alienating labor, the article develops a layered model of consent and its breakdown, proposing that such overdetermined consent of upper-middle class individuals to alienating labor can fail only when the “pushes” of workplace resonate with the “pulls” of non-work spheres of life. Furthermore, such resonance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for opt-outs; the decisions to quit can be carried out insofar as “safety nets” are mobilized and “golden handcuffs” are relaxed.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 258. Cultural Making of Groups