‘I was doing something that wasn’t aligned with me’: Quit Discourse on YouTube Video Diaries

Abstract

The Great Resignation was a mainly American economic trend in which record numbers of employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs, beginning in early 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the neo-liberal thought, quitting could be viewed as a sign of weakness or an act of disobedience. This may partly explain why many American “quitters” (i.e. individuals about to or who have already left their jobs) have turned to social media platforms to upload (semi-)spontaneous videos in which they express their reasons and motivations for quitting their jobs in the form of public diaries. Within this specific historical and socio-cultural background, the present study offers a snapshot of the “Quit Discourse” by first adopting a linguistic perspective. Particularly, to understand how these individuals determine and redefine their emerging identity, the study combines sentiment analysis and corpus-informed methods with qualitative discourse analysis that draws upon recent theoretical insights from critical work sociology. Findings reveal that speakers construe quitting as a positive and beneficial experience of the self and represent themselves as purpose-driven visionaries.