The Great Resignation: Exploring Definitions and Discourses

The Great Resignation: Exploring Definitions and Discourses Marianna Lya Zummo, Kim Grego, Alessandra Vicentini, Laura Tommaso Background. This paper aims to provide insights into the discourse surrounding and informing the ‘Great Resignation’, a social, cultural and economic phenomenon that gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis in the United States, with unusually high numbers of people voluntarily leaving their jobs, and that is now turning into a global tendency (Klotz 2022). Aims & Material. By analysing the resignees’ personal digital narratives (Aran et al. 2014) about job quitting on social media platforms (YouTube), we will first attempt to provide a definition of the trend and discuss the label(s) attached to it (e.g. resignation, quiet quitting, etc.). We will then try to identify the main discursive traits related to it as emerging from the analysis of the target corpus in which individuals give voice to their desires and/or motivations, and/or disclose feelings of shame when failing to keep up the expectations and obligations of family and community. Methods. The collection of YouTube videos will be transcribed and quantitatively analysed by means of corpus linguistics techniques, and then qualitatively interpreted through CDA and text analysis methods (Van Leeuwen 2008; Beaugrande/Dressler 1981), with particular reference to studies about identity construction (Schwartz/Luyckx/Vignoles 2011). Results. Expected results will hopefully start filling the gap left around a discourse which, at least to the best of our knowledge, is still under-investigated from an applied linguistic perspective. By understanding the reasons why employees resign and how they word their motivations and expectations, we may be able to understand a facet of the many social changes we are globally undergoing today. Keywords: Resignation, crisis, digital narratives, corpus-assisted discourse analysis. References Aran, O.J. Biel, and D. Gatica-Perez. 2014. ‘Broadcasting Oneself: Visual Discovery of Vlogging Styles.’ IEEE Transactions on multimedia, 16(1):201–215. De Beaugrande, R. – W. Dressler 1981. Introduction to text linguistics. London, New York: Longman. Klotz A. 2022. The Great Resignation is still here, but whether It stays is up to leaders. The OECD Forum Network. 3 June 2022. Available at https://www.oecd-forum.org/posts/the-great-resignation-is-still-here-but-whether-it-stays-is-up-to-leaders Schwartz S. J., Luyckx K., Vignoles V. L. (Eds.) 2011. Handbook of Identity Theory and Research. New York, NY: Springer. Van Leeuwen, T. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.