Quiet Quitting: The Resignation of the Subject and the Effects of Confinement on Work

Isabelle Orrado, Ana Magnolia Mendes, Jean-Michel Vives and Ludmila de Vasconcelos Machado Guimaraes

RAC - Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Journal of Contemporary Administration), 2026, vol. 30(2), issue Vol. 30 No. 2 (2026): Mar/Apr - 2026, e260057

Abstract: Objective: this article aims to examine the phenomenon of ‘quiet quitting’ and its relationship with the loss of meaning in work, situating it within the social and subjective transformations intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than treating quiet quitting as an individual or motivational issue, the study seeks to analyze it as a phenomenon embedded in broader social arrangements that reshape the relationship between subject, work, and social bonds. Thesis: the article argues that workers’ silent resignation should be understood as a social symptom, expressing less a lack of engagement and more a suspension of the work of signification. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, clinical material, and critical perspectives on neoliberal and digital capitalism, the analysis highlights how quiet quitting reveals a specific form of subjective resignation, marked by melancholy and by the erosion of symbolic mediations that once sustained work as a space of recognition and desire. Conclusions: the article contributes to debates in administration and related fields by challenging functionalist and normative interpretations of quiet quitting. It advances an ethical-political reading of contemporary work, showing how silent resignation is linked to broader processes of precarization, symbolic erosion, and transformations in social bonds. By framing quiet quitting as a social symptom rather than an individual deficit, the study underscores the relevance of psychoanalytic and critical approaches for understanding work, subjectivity, and mental health in the post-pandemic context

Date: 2026
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