Introduction

“Quiet quitting” emerged as a concept, practice, and viral social media trend in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to draw significant public and academic attention. While definitions of “quiet quitting” vary, it is typically said to involve workers “doing a job’s bare minimum” (Detert 2023), or “doing what is specified in one’s job’s description, no more, no less” (Johnson 2023). Existing explanations typically link quiet quitting to demanding workplace cultures and widespread mental health concerns among workers (Lord 2022; Forrester 2023; Ellera et al. 2023); Scheyett 2023; Esen 2023). In response to these conditions, quiet quitters enforce strict boundaries between work and personal life by distinguishing sharply between contractually obligated tasks and non-obligatory but nonetheless expected behaviours, refusing or avoiding the latter (Espada 2022; Kilpatrick 2022; Ellis and Yang 2022; Klotz and Bolino 2022; Efendi et al. 2023).

While there have been suggestions that quiet quitting reflects a crisis in the experience of work as meaningful (Baker 2023; Caldwell et al. 2023; Mahand and Caldwell 2023), research connecting quiet quitting to the enormous sociological, managerial, and philosophical literature on meaningful work is still in its infancy. And while there is a sense that quiet quitting is linked to worker contributions being under-appreciated, un-recognised, or met with what Jim Detert has called “organisational silence” (Detert 2022; see also Clifton 2023; Hiltzik 2022; Hopke 2022; Mahand and Caldwell 2023), the connection between quiet quitting, meaningful work, and workplace recognition has not yet been theoretically elaborated. Establishing theoretical clarity on the relationship between meaningful work and recognition is crucial for the management literature, helping to guide the development of research tools to measure, explore, and understand quiet quitting behaviors and their consequences (see Anand et al. 2023; Efendi et al. 2023). To this end, this paper presents a recognition-theoretical interpretation of quiet quitting, drawing primarily on the work of Axel Honneth (Honneth 1996, 2004, 2007, 2012, 2014; Fraser and Honneth 2003; Hartmann and Honneth 2006).

Honneth self-consciously works in the “Critical Theory” tradition (or “Frankfurt School”) initiated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and continued in the so-called “second generation” Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Honneth’s “third generation” contribution attempts to amalgamate the insights and redress the perceived limitations of previous critical theorists: he criticizes first-generation thinkers for their purportedly thin understanding of social interaction, while aiming to introduce a more agonistic account of social interaction than offered by Habermas’ language-centred model of rationality (Ikäheimo 2023: 151-2).Footnote 1 Honneth’s elaboration of the concept of “recognition” – derived primarily from G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy – is intended to provide this thicker, more agonistic model. Honneth differentiates between three distinct forms of recognition operative in three social spheres: “love” recognition among family and friends, “respect” between equal citizens political society, and recognition of “achievement” in the workplace. Honneth argues that these three recognitive forms are jointly necessary conditions for psychological well-being, such that misrecognition in any one social sphere amounts to a disrespect that constitutes psychological harm.

In this paper, we deploy Honneth’s theory of recognition to provide a novel description of quiet quitting. Honneth’s uniquely tripartite recognitive framework allows us to identify quiet quitting as a compensatory respect strategy, in which workers respond to misrecognition and corollary disrespect in the workplace by pursuing recognition and attendant self-worth elsewhere, for example, by emphasising recognition in their personal lives, or perhaps by seeking alternative forms of recognition in sub-cultural activity outside of paid employment. Importantly, while Honneth has argued that experiences of disrespect tend to give rise to collective “struggles for recognition” (1996), quiet quitters’ “struggle” for recognition is typically an individual one, albeit in many cases including use of social media to draw attention to experiences of disrespect at work. At the same time, quiet quitters self-consciously and strategically give up on recognition in their own workplace, asserting instead the importance of extra-work recognitive relationships.

We elaborate on these claims in the following steps. Firstly, we outline the relationship between Honneth’s account of recognition and extant literature on recognition as a component of meaningful work. Secondly, we reconstruct Honneth’s tripartite recognitive schema. Thirdly, we explore accounts of the contemporary “entrepreneurial” work ethic presented by Honneth and others. The entrepreneurial ethic makes substantial personal and emotional demands of workers, while at the same time tending to make stable recognition for workplace contribution difficult for many workers to obtain. Fourthly, we analyse quiet quitting as a peculiar struggle for recognition responding to workplace misrecognition and disrespect, one best understood as a compensatory respect strategy. Quiet quitters, we show, disambiguate between what Honneth terms “achievement” and “love” recognition, and, unable to secure the former, invest in the latter. We distinguish this explanation of quiet quitting from its closest competitors and discuss the potential long-term limitations of this strategy for individual workers. To conclude, we employ the findings of our analysis to critically evaluate recently recommended managerial strategies for redressing quiet quitting.

Honneth, Meaningful Work, and Recognition

What constitutes “meaning” and how meaningfulness ought to be understood in relation to work (“meaning of work”? “meaning in work”? “meaning at work”?) remains contentious (Yeoman et al. 2019; see also Bailey et al. 2019), with Rosso et al noting that the literature on meaningful work is “splintered” into a “vast array” of distinct disciplinary approaches (2010). Nonetheless, one perhaps initially helpful distinction is between descriptive-psychological and normative-philosophical accounts of meaning at work. Note, however, that this distinction is only propaedeutic insofar as descriptive literature is implicitly or explicitly oriented by normative claims about what constitutes meaningfulness, and normative literature takes seriously the psychological benefits and harms of work.

On the one hand, management and organisational literature is typically descriptive-psychological, insofar as it is concerned with the advancement of organisational ends and a concern for worker psychology as a means to this end (Tweedie 2022, Fournier and Grey 2000). Human resource development (HRD) studies seek to empirically establish the benefits of meaningful work for workers and associated performance benefits for firms (Bailey et al. 2019), by, say, promoting organisational identification (Pratt et al. 2006), reducing absenteeism (Wrzesniewski et al. 1997), and increasing workplace performance (Wrzesniewski 2003). The term “recognition” features in empirical studies of meaningful work. For example, Montani et al. (2020) demonstrate a link between manager and coworker recognition and the experience of work as meaningful. Frémeaux and Pavageau, helpfully consolidating previous research into a comprehensive set of “sub-categories of meaningful work” and corresponding “managerial recommendations” include “work in which competences and results are recognised” and “valued” by managers (2022). Clifton and Harter strenuously argue that recognising the individual worker is essential to redressing widespread problems of worker disengagement and disaffection (2019, 2023).

More abstract philosophical and political-theoretical work tends to emphasise worker experiences of intrinsic meaning (and loss of meaning) in work activity in abstraction from the overarching instrumental goals of firms. Nonetheless, recognition features here also: recognition for one’s talents, capacities, and contributions is typically listed as a component of the non-instrumental and non-monetary “goods” that work ought to provide workers. For example, Gheaus and Herzog hold recognition to be one of four irreducible non-monetary goods of work: “(i) attaining various types of excellence; (ii) making a social contribution; (iii) experiencing community; and (iv) gaining social recognition” (2016: 71). They take these goods together as “unpacking the ways in which work can be meaningful” (2016: 71). Similarly, Ruth Yeoman determines the “normative features” of work experienced as meaningful: dignity, autonomy, non-alienation, respect, recognition and freedom (Yeoman 2014). This inclusion of recognition as a normative component of meaningful work is intuitively plausible: if relevantly situated others were not to recognize my work role and contributions as valuable, it would be difficult for me to understand my work as bearing meaning.

Honneth’s own account of recognition talks to both descriptive-psychological and normative literatures. Like Gheaus and Herzog and Yeoman, Honneth’s recognition-theoretic aims at a normative analysis of social practices. By stipulating the norm (where and how one ought to be recognised), Honneth hopes to be able to critically diagnose those defective instances in which that norm is not met. At the same time, Honneth’s attentiveness to the psychological dimensions of recognition – his integration, for example, of the developmental psychology of Donald Winnicott (Honneth 1996) – opens his work onto potential dialogue with management literature on worker motivation and well-being.

The central idea governing Honneth’s framework is that understanding ourselves as independent individuals, and ultimately as autonomous or self-determining individuals, is dependent on being recognised by others as such: it is not until “individuals see themselves confirmed by the other as independent can they mutually reach an understanding of themselves as autonomously acting, individuated selves” (Honneth 1996: 68). As he later puts it, it is only through recognition that individuals are able to “reflexively assure themselves of their own competences and rights” (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 138). So it is not simply that recognition is required by already autonomous selves to reach their full potential, but is rather a condition of having a meaningful, practicable sense of autonomy in the first place (Deranty 2009: 272 − 77). This distinguishes Honneth’s account of recognition from recognition as it is typically featured in the literature – both in the philosophy of work and in management literature – on meaningful work: there the assumption is that there are autonomous selves who, in addition to being treated with dignity, respect, provided opportunities to pursue excellence, and so on, ought to be recognised for their contributions at work. In the approach followed here, however, recognition is the foundational concept from which values like dignity and belonging follow: recognition makes possible the practical self-relations of human beings, that is, their capacity to take themselves as autonomous individuals directing and thus responsible for their actions to relevant others (Deranty 2009: 272). Indeed, such fully-fledged agency itself only makes sense within recognitive relations: to take responsibility for one’s actions is to recognise others as entitled to hold one accountable to the relevant normative standards, and for those others to recognise one as susceptible to account under those standards.

In this regard, Honneth’s account of recognition shares concerns with Deci and Ryan’s influential “self-determination theory” (SDT). Deci and Ryan link the development of autonomous practical capacities (what they call “autonomous” or “intrinsic” motivation) to appropriate relations to others, insofar as they take “relatedness” alongside “competence” and “autonomy” as essential to “constructive social development and personal well-being” (Deci and Ryan 2000; Ryan and Deci 2001). Honneth’s approach however remains distinct in his sensitivity both to the centrality of work for self-development and flourishing through recognition and his critical awareness of the psychological and moral harm that misrecognition and disrespect gives rise to. Misrecognition is a moral harm because we ought to be afforded recognition so as to develop and exercise our autonomy; psychological because, in having recognition denied to us, the lived sense of our own capacity as an autonomous agent capable of making meaningful choices and meaningfully contributing is threatened and potentially destroyed. In other words, we do not encounter misrecognition as some limit to the capacities of our identity and social agency, but rather experience misrecognition as a threat to that identity and agency itself. Another crucial difference in emphasis is Honneth’s focus on the historical actuality of collective attempts to secure recognition. Indeed, Honneth’s recognitive theory has been characterised as “dual” in the sense that it concerns both recognition between individuals and recognition of and by social groups (Zurn 2015: 6–7).

Forms of Recognition

The primary contributions of Honneth’s theoretical framework for broader discussions around the importance of recognition at work – and for the more discrete analysis of quiet quitting advanced in this paper – is his articulation of a differentiated account of recognition and his understanding of the denial of recognition as constituting a kind of harm. While “recognition” is seen as an important component of meaningful work, recognition for one’s workplace contribution is typically not distinguished from recognition as it functions in other social contexts – the recognition we might receive as a family member, or as a citizen of a state. As we noted in introduction, Honneth identifies three distinct forms of recognition, each operative in a different “sphere” or social domain: “love” recognition by family and friends, “rights” recognition in a political state, and “achievement” recognition at work. Honneth argues that the psychological development, self-worth, and well-being of modern individuals is dependent on being appropriately recognised in all three spheres. As such, denial of recognition in any of one sphere constitutes for Honneth a disrespect that undermines the practical capacities and psychological health of individuals, and that may gvie rise to a collective “struggle for recognition” (1996). For example, misrecognition and disrespect in political society may give rise to social movements making moral demands for political equality, paradigmatically in the US Civil Rights movement, or, more relevantly here, disrespect in the workplace may give rise to collective action demanding more humane working conditions, as in 19th and 20th Century labour movements (Honneth 1996, 2014; Fraser and Honneth 2003).

Honneth’s recognition-theoretical approach is, therefore, concretised through the differentiation of recognition into three spheres through which individual identity, autonomy, and self-worth are developed – and, by the same token, potentially threatened by misrecognition (See Table 1).

Table 1 Honneth’s Forms of Recognition
Full size table

Although this tripartite schema has been explicated elsewhere (see Deranty 2009; Zurn 2015; Altmeyer 2018; Ikäheimo 2023), a brief overview is essential for our analysis, outlining each form of recognition, the dimension of personality and autonomous capacities they condition, and the specific kind of disrespect and psychological harm that misrecognition gives rise to.

“Love”

On Honneth’s historical reconstruction, sexual relations in modern society are governed by the norms of “love marriage.” That is, such relations are held to constitute a normatively independent sphere, inured from the political and economic interests which in pre-modern societies largely determined marriage and familial obligation (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 139). In familial relationships, that is, both between sexual partners and between caregivers and children, one ought to be recognised as an embodied and thus physiologically and psychologically “needy” individual, and to recognise other family members as needy in turn. Drawing on empirical psychological literature, Honneth demonstrates that this form of mutual recognition is a condition of the development of basic “self-confidence” [Selbstvertrauen, literally “Self-trust”]. If one’s needs are consistently recognised, one develops a sense of trust in one’s own body as reliably signalling one’s own needs, and a trust in one’s social world that such needs will reliably be met. A denial of this recognition constitutes a form of disrespect we might call “abuse.” In cases where the needs of a concrete individual are systematically unmet – and especially in extreme cases of torture and sexual assault - individuals report a breakdown in this fundamental practical self-relation (Honneth 1996).

For Honneth, loving attendance to individual needs ought to be unconditional and non-instrumental; that is, one ought to treat one’s loved ones not as means to one’s own ends but as an end in their own right (Honneth 2007: 172). This attentiveness amounts for Honneth to recognition of the individual in their singularity, that is, recognition of the uniqueness of individuals and their qualities (2007: 167). As we will see, these two features differentiate “love” recognition from “achievement” recognition through work. Firstly, in the workplace, contributive valuing is bound up with one’s capacity to contribute to the realisation of some common project; value in the workplace is not attributed unconditionally to the individual, but rather dependent on their instrumental value for some particular project. Secondly, recognition for one’s workplace achievements ought not turn on the uniqueness of one’s personality and needs.

Also important for our argument in this paper is that this form of self-relation, while initially developed in children in the context of the family, is also sustained through intimate relationships outside of the family, namely, in close friendships and erotic relationships (Honneth 2014: 134–154). Importantly, Honneth draws on historical claims that friendship and family assume their modern form – unconditional concern for the uniqueness of loved ones – in part as a counter-weight to the pressures of modern economic life and the corollary culture of vocational achievement (see Silver 1990; Giddens 1990) a tendency we suggest in “Quiet Quitting as Compensatory Respect” is material in an analysis of quiet quitting.

“Rights”

Modern liberal societies understand individuals as politically equal, regardless of their social status. One’s wealth or class background are – or at least in principle ought to be – irrelevant to one’s political standing as an equal among equals. The instruments of this equality are political rights: everyone has or ought to have equal rights. As a subject of “rights” I am recognised in my universality, rather than my irreplaceable singularity: as a rights-bearer, I possess, like everyone else, the dignity belonging to all persons (that is, universally). Each of us, understood from the perspective of rights, recognises others as holding the same status as ourselves.

On Honneth’s account, this form of recognition enables individuals to develop a practical self-relation characterised by “self-respect,” insofar as individuals understand themselves as morally responsible in the same way as all others. Put simply, citizens are (or, again, at least ought to be) answerable to the same law in the same way. This brings into relief the corollary defect: where individuals are not granted equal political rights – where they are “second-class citizens” – their capacity as autonomous agents is directly undermined, insofar as their actions and actions against them do not count in the same way as those granted equality. In the sphere of rights, then, who counts as an equal subject of rights – and who is excluded – is the paradigmatic site of social struggle (Honneth 1996, 2014; Fraser and Honneth 2003).

“Achievement”

Honneth attempts to demonstrate that, with the institutionalisation of legal equality in the modern world, an individual’s social standing becomes now directly tied to individual achievement in paid work (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 140). In other words, modern individuals demand not only the “self-respect” due to all human beings as such, but also the “self-esteem” that results from the recognition of their particular contributions to social life through work (Deranty 2009: 305).

If in the family we ought to be recognised in our irreplaceable uniqueness, and as legally equal citizens we ought to accrue the universal dignity of persons, in work we act as particulars, that is, as individuals with this determinate role contributing to this determinate project. We work, in other words, not as unique individuals nor as universal citizens, but as a particular kind of person (as a nurse, a teacher, a carpenter, etc.) with a set of skills shared by some but not all members of our political community. A condition, then, of human flourishing is that, in addition to being recognised as a singular individual with needs and a “universal” citizen in possession of equal political rights, we are also recognised for our particular abilities and skills and our efforts in developing and deploying them in socially valuable ways (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 143). In a word: our achievements.

So modern individuals implicitly understand work as the site of a specific kind of recognition, one tied neither to emotional needs nor to legal rights, but rather to the exercise of practical skills and capacities required for some socially meaningful task, and through whose exercise the worker feels a “meaningful connection” to co-workers and to those who contribute socially through labour more generally (Honneth 2012: 70). This recognitive form is normative over work, Honneth argues, insofar as the labour market ought to provide workers with the opportunity to exercise skills and capacities in ways that they and relevant others understand to be socially valuable (Honneth 2012: 70).

This distinguishes Honneth’s recognition-theoretic account from those that take the norms of work to be generated in the work activity itself, as the satisfaction of a “craft instinct” that should in principle be available to all (Sennett 2009).Footnote 2 Work in a modern society need not be a kind of craftwork, need not be the skilful making of some artifact, provided that the skills and capacities deployed by a worker in their role are contributively valued. Were we to claim that work ought to be a kind of aesthetic production, Honneth reasons, recognition of the value of clerical and service work would be undermined (Celikates et al. 2023).

If in the sphere of rights who counts as an equal subject of rights is the site of recognitive struggle, we might say that, in the sphere of achievement, what counts as work, what counts a prestigious work, and what roles and behaviours count as achievement at work is struggled over. As a result of symbolic struggle between different social groups, some forms of work and the status of specific professions are not sufficiently recognised while others forms and statuses assume hegemonic position (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 141; Deranty 2009: 414). Most obviously, historically and still today, work is typically understood narrowly as paid employment outside of the home; it is in paid employment that one’s skills and contributions be understood as achievements informing one’s social status and self-esteem.

As such, Honneth understands remuneration to be a means – though not an exhaustive one – of conferring achievement recognition. That is, remuneration is one way in which one’s workplace contribution is recognised. This separates Honneth from those, like Gheaus and Herzog (2016), for whom recognition is a non-monetary good, to be considered in abstraction from questions about worthiness and fairness of pay. Honneth’s attempts to understand questions of wealth distribution in terms of struggles for the recognition of particular professions and workplace roles have been prominently criticized by Nancy Fraser (Honneth and Fraser 2003) and others (Ikäheimo 2023: 161–167). Those debates aside, understanding remuneration as a function of recognition is helpful in an analysis of quiet quitting. It has been plausibly claimed that a key motivation for quiet quitting is lack of remuneration for expected extra-role tasks (Detert 2023), a claim supported by recent analysis of relevant social media posts (Serenko 2024). From a recognition-theoretical perspective, failure to remunerate is not simply an economic issue, but constitutes misrecognition and thus a kind of psychological harm: workers feel not only that their work lacks value but that they themselves are not valued. Workers self-esteem is damaged.

Also relevant for an analysis of quiet quitting is contestation over the kinds of contribution at work considered worthy of symbolic recognition, and the opportunities that workers have to make such contributions. Even where fairly remunerated, “menial” workplace tasks and roles not considered skilful or valuable are unlikely to be recognised as an achievement, shutting out many workers from the workplace recognition that Honneth argues is a necessary condition for self-esteem. On Honneth’s account, then, employers ought to provide their employees, in addition to fair remuneration that serves in part to “recognise” workplace contribution, the opportunity to undertake some “worthwhile activity” in the workplace and “symbolic recognition” of it (2014: 188).

Ultimately, we suggest that Honneth’s account of “achievement” recognition provides systematic philosophical support for suggestions that quiet quitting is in part a response to workers’ experiences of being under-appreciated, un-consulted, and overlooked in the management of workplaces. But to properly assess this breakdown in workplace recognition, Honneth’s work suggests we need first to understand larger historical shifts in workplace organisation.

The Entrepreneurial Ethic and Misrecognition

While quiet quitters’ desire to assert a clearer distinction between work and private life has been put down to new communication and surveillance technologies and the strain of work-from-home expectations during the pandemic,Footnote 3 Honneth (2004; Hartmann and Honneth 2006) suggests a deeper root cause in the historical transition from mid-20th Century “hierarchical” to so-called “network” capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005), which seeks to cast employees as self-managing, self-motivating “entreployees” (Pongratz and Voß 2003), governed by what Erik Baker has, in his own insightful discussion of quiet quitting, helpfully dubbed the “entrepreneurial work ethic” (2023, see also Baker 2021). Baker (2023) claims that understanding the historical emergence of this ethic is essential to an understanding of quiet quitting. Following this, we turn in this section to Honneth’s account of this emergence and its impact on workplace recognition.

Drawing on Boltanski and Chiapello’s influential account of the historical transformation from “hierarchical” to “network” capitalism (2005), Hartmann and Honneth (2006) understand recognition in the workplace to undergo significant structural changes across the course of the 20th Century. In the former hierarchical “Taylorist” or “Fordist” model (roughly running from 1930 to 1970), the large firm offered employees long-term career opportunities, even in certain circumstances protecting social goods for the worker (worker residences, holiday centres, and so on). Workers were to be valued for their capacity to perform pre-determined and hierarchically distributed tasks in a large enterprise over long time-scales, and recognised for their long-term commitment (even “sacrifice”) to the firm. accordingly. In contrast, the emergent “entrepreneurial,” “project-oriented,” “flexible,” or “network” capitalist workplace values those “who can engage in new projects with great personal application and flexibility, who possess good networking skills and act autonomously as well as faithfully” (2006: 45). In other words, workers are expected to invest emotionally in the success of short-term projects, an “entreployee” “no longer induced to participate in capitalist enterprise by external compulsion or incentives” (2006: 45) but rather self-motivated to pursue opportunities for new experience and self-development that flexible work affords. As such, work is presented as the primary vehicle for self-development and self-fulfilment (Baker 2023), with workers under a standing obligation to love their work (Tokumitsu 2015). Effectively, contemporary work outsources meaningfulness to the worker; it is the worker’s responsibility to find meaning in work and/or find work that reflects their own self-described “passions,” rather than under a standing obligation to reward the worker with recognition for their long-term contributions.

Honneth and Hartmann seek to diagnose the “paradoxes” and corollary “pathologies” that emerge when work as a site of individual self-development through work becomes a “professional and behavioural requirement” (2006: 49). The promise of a qualitative increase in freedom can in practice prove psychologically harmful. In his paper with Hartmann, the emphasis falls on (1) the ways in which the expected emotional commitment blurs the boundaries between formal and informal relationships, and between instrumental and non-instrumental aspects of those relations, rendering the criteria for successful interaction ambiguous; (2) the way in which the expectation that work constitutes an expression of emotional authenticity contrasts with project-based workplaces tending to reward “flat” personalities capable of orienting quickly from one project to another; and (3) the blurring of private and public, formal and informal, professional and emotional reduces the availability of objective criteria for measuring the value of one’s contributions to work as a collective enterprise. On Honneth’s recognitive framework, the incoherency of standards for achievement constitutes misrecognition, insofar as workers are unable to reliably meet those recognitive standards. And, as we have discussed above, this in turn constitutes a kind of disrespect undermining worker’s self-esteem.

Stephan Voswinkel usefully provides terminology for the shift in forms of workplace recognition that accompanies the transition from Fordist to contemporary entrepreneurial workplaces: effectively, he further differentiates “achievement” recognition into two sub-species. On Voswinkel’s reconstruction, Talyorism-Fordism was characterized by what he terms “appreciation” recognition of achievement understood as long-term commitment and contribution, while contemporary work centres on “admiration” recognition of “outstanding” workplace achievements. While Voswinkel obviously does not endorse a return to Fordist workplace organisation (if such a thing were possible), he stresses, similarly to Honneth’s emphasis on “paradox,” that this transformation amounts to a “double-bind” for contemporary workers (Voswinkel 2020: 749). On the one hand, workers today cannot “morally request” appreciation for “ordinary” or “normal” work efforts (2012: 286). But on the other hand, it is not clear what behaviours and outcomes will afford admiration. Employees are expected to use their increased freedoms of self-organising and self-managing in service of the firm, and “take these demands upon themself and do not know if they are doing the right thing” (2020: 749). We might go further than Voswinkel and suggest that the criteria for admiration recognition are constitutively indeterminate: if individuals are recognised only for outstanding and thus singular achievements, it is impossible to generalise from definitionally heterogeneous acts a univocal set of conditions for the awarding of admiration. Each “outstanding” act or outcome is by definition inimical. In short, workers can neither demand admiration for their contributions, nor are they entitled to now outmoded appreciation forms of recognition (2012: 298). Voswinkel helpfully also puts this in terms of the increasing identification of performance with “success.” In the entrepreneurial workplace, either one is an outstanding “success” and is recognised, or one contributes in a merely “ordinary” way, is not recognised, and is thus tacitly “unsuccessful” (295).

We suggest that quiet quitting can be understood, at least in part, as a practice motivated by this very dynamic. To translate Voswinkel’s language into that used in public discussions of quiet quitting, “ordinary” – that is, contractually obligated or “in-role” – performances are not valued and not recognised. “Above and beyond” activities, or what Van Dayne et al. helpfully termed “extra-role behaviours” (1995), while implicitly or explicitly expected of workers as essential to some future “success”, are neither remunerated nor symbolically recognised with the consistency and transparency that would justify workers’ continued emotional commitment.

Quiet Quitting as Compensatory Respect

Honneth and Hartmann claim that the loss or denigration of stable criteria for workplace performance “leads subjects to seek recognition of their ostensibly distinctive achievements and attributes in struggles for attention outside the real professional sphere” (2006: 50). While their own examples here are perhaps obscure (they mention “exhibitionistic television appearances”), it is possible to see quiet quitting as a self-conscious and sober response to the set of contradictions they diagnose: unable to grasp and work towards a coherent set of markers for achievement – and where that incoherency and corollary lack of recognition constitutes a kind of disrespect undermining self-esteem – worker seek what they take to be more stable forms of recognition elsewhere. Workers self-consciously aim only to meet what Voswinkel would term “ordinary” performance standards, tacitly accepting no recognition at work; they compensate by seeking and emphasising recognition in other spheres. Despite the infancy of studies into quiet quitting, this line of interpretation does have empirical support: a 2024 content analysis of 672 relevant TikTok comments found that quiet quitters claim that their “perceptions of self-worth” are not (or no longer) defined by their job role, and that they instead choose “to engage in hobbies, spend time with family and friends…” (Serenko 2024: 31).

Honneth in another essay puts the dilemma facing workers more starkly: once authentic emotional investment in entrepreneurial workplaces becomes a demand and an expectation, workers can either “simulate that authenticity” or “flee into a full-blown depression,” “pathologically shutting down” (2004: 476). Importantly, however, quiet quitting as a novel social practice outstrips the alternatives proposed by Honneth: the quiet quitter refuses the entrepreneurial ethic and its corollary norms, “shutting down” at work, but only in order to safeguard their psychological well-being in what they take to be more secure and transparent relationships. In the case of quiet quitting, we suggest, Honneth’s recognitive framework helps us see quiet quitting as a kind of indirect or compensatory “struggle for recognition,” in which workers do not – or not directly – demand extra pay or non-monetary recognition at work, but rather seek to sustain one’s practical self-relation via recognitive relations outside of workplace achievement.

With this theoretical and historical background in place, we are in a position to demarcate our understanding of quiet quitting – as a compensatory respect strategy – from its closest interpretive competitors.

Quiet quitting is thus far an individualist strategy, and so does not align neatly with Honneth’s own emphasis on collective struggles for recognition. Obviously, the de-collectivising strategies that have accompanied and been in part legitimated by the emergence of the entrepreneurial ethic are relevant here (Peetz 2010). By the same token, the individualism of quiet quitting undercuts claims that quiet quitting is “just a new name” for an old industrial strategy, i.e., “work to rule” (Lord 2022). Such claims we suggest are insufficiently attentive to dramatic historical shifts in workplace organisation and worker self-organization of which the transition from Fordism to individualistically-oriented entrepreneurialism discussed above forms an important part. Moreover, such attempts to subsume quiet quitting under 20th century forms of collective industrial action are not attentive to the ways in which quiet quitters often make use of online identity construction (Wortelboer and Van der Steen 2023), a modality of recognition we discuss at the end of this section.

In our view, quiet quitting more closely resembles other extant worker strategies and explanations. It combines in a new way (a) a self-conscious change in what has been called “work orientation” with (b) the long-standing function of family and friendship as a retreat from and safeguard against workplace pressure. While quiet quitting is not a collective struggle for recognition of the sort Honneth considers, his tripartite account of recognition (coupled with his account of entrepreneurial workplaces) helps us to understand the novelty of quiet quitting and pick out its specificity.

  1. (a)

    Quiet quitting resembles a change in what is routinely referred to as “work orientation” (Baumeister 1991; Bellah et al. 1985; Schwartz 1986, 1994; Wrzesniewski et al. 1997). Take, for example, the below statement of quiet quitting by Zaid Khan, whose 2022 TikTok post is credited with the initial viral enthusiasm for quiet quitting.

“... you’re not outright quitting your job but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond. You’re still performing your duties, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it’s not. And your worth as a person is not defined by your labor.”

It should be obvious that Khan’s statement implicitly opposes what has been defined as “entrepreneurial” labour articulated above. One way to parse Khan’s statement would be using the language of “work orientation,” which proposes a tripartite distinction between individuals who see their work as: (1) a “job,” (2) a “career,” or (3) a “calling.” Those who understand their work as a “job” focus on the material benefits of their work, and meaning is found outside of work, in personal interests and hobbies. (Wrzesniewski et al. 1997). Those who understand their work as a “career” work to advance through an organizational structure; they find the increased pay, benefits, prestige, power, and self-esteem that come with promotion to be meaningful (Bellah et al. 1985). Finally, those who understand their work as a “calling” work for the fulfillment that the work itself brings. Approaching work in this way, as an “end in itself,” Rosso et al. remark, “is usually associated with the belief that the work contributes to the greater good and makes the world a better place.” (Rosso et al. 2010: 98). One potential way to understand quiet quitting, then, would be as a worker self-consciously altering their work orientation, shifting from a “career” or “calling” orientation to a “job” orientation, in which meaning is no longer expected to be found in one’s work role, either through advancement or in the work itself.

A recognition-theoretic perspective helps to deepen this interpretation. Most obviously, we should worry whether a sense of one’s worth can be achieved without the specific “achievement” form of recognition in the workplace, and through “love” recognition alone. Think, for example, of a professionally successful parent or sibling. One might be able recognise the uniqueness of their personality and respond compassionately to their needs, but one is not immediately in a position to recognise their professional achievements: one typically lacks the requisite training to assess the particular skills required in a family member’s professional role.

  1. (b)

    Quiet quitting, understood as a withdrawal from expectations of workplace recognition and a compensation for workplace disrespect with love recognition, arguably forms part of a long-standing trend. While Honneth himself does not elaborate systematically elaborate on the way in which individuals might “trade-off” or compensate deficient recognitive relationships in one sphere with more satisfactory relations in another, he nonetheless is interested in reconstructing the ways that the sphere of “love” recognition develops in response a response to modern economic realities. Honneth draws on historical research to argue that the norms of love marriage, the nuclear family, and non-instrumental friendship are related to transformations in modern society as a whole, and in particular to new understandings and experiences of work in market societies (Honneth 2014: 131–175, Silver 1990; Giddens 1990). As Honneth and Hartmann note, the “romantic idea of love” constitutes a “utopian vanishing point” that allows modern individuals subject to the economic pressures of modern market societies the hope of a kind “emotional transcendence” (2006: 42). Quiet quitting can be understood as such an attempt to “transcend” – if only by withdrawing one’s emotional investment from – unfulfilling work roles. This long-standing strategy, however, is complicated by the relatively new entrepreneurial expectation that work itself ought to be emotionally rewarding as the vehicle for self-development and self-fulfilment, confounding the historical distinction between a “heartless world” of work and a “loving haven” of the family (Weeks 2017: 39). Workers do not simply flee an overtly hierarchical and instrumentalist workplace for the comfort of family and friends; they rather have first to self-consciously disengage from an entrepreneurial ethic that claims for work a central personal importance and significant emotional investment.

Our worry is that self-conscious disengagement from contributive valuation in the workplace constitutes only a pyrrhic victory, a kind of holding pattern in economies where the possibility of collectively changing workplace cultures and goals seems remote. The ambiguities of the entrepreneurial ethic are material here. On the one hand, Honneth would agree in a sense with the entrepreneurial claim that work is of central moral importance for individuals; it is the site of distinct recognition necessary for flourishing personhood. On the other hand, the entrepreneurial ethic makes work the site of personal fulfillment, potentially to the exclusion and detriment of political and personal life, and indeed borrowing the language of “love” and “passion” from the latter. Workers might understandably resist this encroachment, especially where recognition in the entrepreneurial workplace is difficult to secure. On the other hand, Honneth, as we have seen argues that self-confidence through love relationships and self-respect through political standing ought to be complemented by the opportunity to “achieve” self-esteem, i.e. to be recognised for one’s contributions to some socially valued project. If this is right, then quiet quitting as a compensatory strategy might ultimately prove to be a kind of harmful self-restriction. In other words, the individual may not be able to fully compensate for the breakdown of recognition in a centrally morally important modern institution.

The role of social media and online fora in the quiet quitting trend is an important consideration in assessing its structure and limitations as a compensatory respect strategy. Honneth developed his recognition framework prior to the advent of social media, and his occasional comments on internet culture and practices since have been cursory – see, for example, his brief discussion of identity construction on internet dating platforms (Marcelo and Honneth 2013). As Driessen and Naerland have noted, the relationship between Honneth’s recognition theory and new media remain significantly under-explored (2022). Directly relevant to our argument here, however, is Wortelboer and Van der Steen’s (2023) analysis of social media discourse on quiet quitting. The authors argue that precariously employed workers use social media as an “online identity workspace,” in which to “construct meaningful identities while simultaneously detaching from the workplace” (282). This construction of a “precarious worker identity” through discussion of quiet quitting strategies on social media forms part of an attempt “to regain a sense of control over an increasingly precarious position” (282). While not referencing Honneth, Wortelboer and Van der Steen are concerned as we are with the negative impact that certain forms of employment and work organisation can have on one’s self-esteem, and the way that workers seek to construct an alternative and more desirable self-understanding outside of work contexts. In other words, identifying online as a “quiet quitter” as described by Wortelboer and Van der Steen is broadly explicable in the terminology we have developed here, namely, as part of a compensatory respect strategy.

Two important avenues for future research follow from this overlap. Firstly, the individualistic nature of quiet quitting – or at least, that it does not resemble the kinds of 20th Century collective social movements Honneth takes as exemplary “struggles for recognition” – might be partly explained by self-identifying quiet quitters finding recognition and thus a kind of compensatory solidarity in online space, without needing to vocalise grievances and mobilise in the workplace. While recent studies have pointed to emergent forms of “gig” worker online solidarity (della Porta, Chesta, and Chi 2022), online solidarity among self-identifying quiet quitters has not to our knowledge been systematically treated. Secondly, the idea that construction of an internet identity might serve as “compensation” for deficient social agency and experience itself has a long history (McKenna and Bargh 2000; McKenna et al. 2002), and further interdisciplinary research is required to assess whether the construction and recognition of an online identity as an individual experiencing disrespect at work can compensate long-term for that disrespect.

Conclusion: Managerial Responses

This study’s analysis, grounded in Axel Honneth’s recognition theory, not only corroborates existing research on the quiet quitting phenomenon but also advances our understanding of its roots and remedies. In this concluding section, we suggest that recently proposed managerial responses to quiet quitting are not sufficiently attentive to the way in which the entrepreneurial ethic can result in misrecognition and thus quiet quitting. If the connection between the entrepreneurial ethic and misrecognition is not drawn, otherwise well-meaning managerial attempts to improve workers’ wellbeing may only result in further harm.

Previous analyses have assigned much of the responsibility for the quiet quitting trend to managerial practices (Harter 2022; Zenger and Folkman 2022; Ellera et al. 2023; Caldwell et al. 2023; Serenko 2024). In their discussion, Mahand and Caldwell (2023) marshal empirical evidence to plausibly claim that firms’ failure to genuinely concern themselves with workers’ long-term well-being has contributed to the quiet quitting trend. For Mahand and Caldwell, crucial to any successful limiting of quiet quitting would be (a) the affordance of greater autonomy for workers and (b) satisfaction of the moral demand that firms’ treat workers as valued individuals, by showing compassion. Our approach in this paper above helps to clarify and nuance these suggestions.

  1. (a)

    As the discussion of the entrepreneurial ethic above should indicate, autonomy is a double-edged sword for achievement recognition and thus for meaningful work and worker motivation. On the one hand, one’s contribution can be more deeply valued if that contribution is more genuinely one’s own, if one has brought more of one’s personality and capacities to a work task or team; on the other hand, if greater autonomy is accompanied by a restriction of achievement recognition, if “admiration” recognition is given only to exceptional contributions – i.e., those which ostensibly require the investment of one’s whole person – and systematic appreciation recognition of continued contribution is neglected, then greater autonomy may in fact contribute to quiet quitting. In short, the granting of workplace autonomy must be decoupled from the value-system that makes ordinary contributions invisible. Given the problematic and ambiguous status of the entrepreneurial ethic for workplace recognition and thus for the experience of work as meaningful, it is alarming that prominent management experts Clifton and Harter, in response to widespread worker disengagement, reassert the entrepreneurial ethic, i.e., that workers are no longer satisfied with a secure pay check (a “good job”) but rather meaningful work (a “great job”) in which they can deeply invest (2019, see also Clifton and Harter 2023). Meaningful work is, on the recognition-theoretical model deployed here, essential to individual self-development and self-esteem, but in the absence of appropriate recognition of one’s workplace contribution, the expectation that workers “love” their job and deeply invest in their work role can in practice lead to worker disengagement and dissatisfaction. Indeed, quiet quitting has helped workers push back on the entrepreneurial ethic by distinguishing workplace recognition from other valuable recognitive relations. Doubling down on an entrepreneurial ethic for workers without a clear understanding of the recognitive obligations that it places on firms may well prove counter-productive.

  2. (b)

    The idea that management ought to respect, value, and show compassion towards workers is widespread. Recent studies measuring the impact of compassionate management behaviour in the public service (Eldor 2018) and provision of management compassion training (Paakkanen et al. 2021) provisionally indicate its benefit for workers and firms. Worline and Dutton in Awakening Compassion argue that “We must create [workplace] environments in which people are inspired, feel safe, are cared for, and receive recognition and celebration for who they are and what they do” (2017). Honneth’s recognition-theoretic urges more conceptual precision here: on the one hand, feelings of “safety” and “care” are for Honneth properly the result and responsibility of immediate family relations; on the other, “recognition and celebration” in the workplace ought to be of a specific kind, namely, enabling and valuing the contributions of individuals to a collective project. However important, compassionate management tacitly modelled on the kinds of care and concern typical of family and friendship groups cannot replace recognition of the kind specific to the social domain of work.

Thus one immediate implication of Honneth’s differentiated account of recognition would be that firms are neither obligated nor functionally best placed to provide “love” recognition of the individual in the uniqueness of their needs. As should be obvious, any use of the language of “family” in the workplace is a metaphor (one cannot “hire and fire” family members as one does employees), and potentially a pernicious one. As discussed above, core to familial forms of recognition is commitment to the satisfaction of an individual’s physical and psychological needs as ends in themselves. That is, “love” recognition is ultimately inimical to the instrumental relationship that employers necessarily take up in relation to their employees. Workers thus have some justification in exhibiting cynicism and detachment (Fleming and Spicer 2003) when presented with managerial representations of compassionate care. This is especially that case given that, as rehearsed above, the entrepreneurial workplace has more or less self-consciously departed from the paternalistic Taylorist-Fordist model that concerned itself to some degree with long-term worker well-being.

As such, an understanding of workplace recognition as recognition of the uniqueness of the person has the potential to distract from assessment of the forms of recognition that ought to be provided in the workplace. Insofar as an individual’s self-esteem and so proper functioning as independent and autonomous is conditioned by workplace recognition, it is incumbent on firms to recognise contribution in non-trivial ways, i.e., a material commitment to opportunities to undertake work that is considered valuable to the workplace and its ends.

The upshot, then, of Honneth’s framework for managerial responses to the threat of quiet quitting is twofold. On the one hand, Honneth’s recognition-theoretic frees management from confused and impracticable demands to recognise workers in the same way they ought to be by family and close friends; on the other, Honneth’s framework establishes firm’s obligation to provide genuine recognition for workplace contribution, especially where workers are implicitly or explicitly expected to heavily invest emotional resources in their work.