Why do elite professionals leave hard-earned, privileged corporate careers? This article examines an underappreciated case of employee turnover, white-collar opt-out, which involves resignations that may not immediately lead to a similar job or life experience, but are instead followed by alternatives to fast-track careers, including seeking another occupation, stay-at-home parenting, or pursuit of leisure and self-exploration. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with Turkish professional-managerial employees of transnational corporations located in both Istanbul and New York City, I examine their narratives about the quality of working life and their decisions to opt out through the lenses of worker consent and alienation. I identify the lack of work-life balance and fulfillment with one’s labor as drivers of opting out, showing how these push factors, combined with various pull factors of non-working life and safety nets, encourage elite workers to overcome status anxiety and abandon corporate careers. The article extends labor process theory insights into high-paying corporate occupations, illuminating how so-called “good jobs” may produce a relatively low quality of working life. It also exposes the inherent limits of resource-centered approaches to inequality, showing how alienating work can undermine the quality of life of even upwardly mobile, high-skilled workers.
AbbottAndrew. 2001. “On the Concept of Turning Point.” In Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2.
AppelbaumEileenBaileyThomasBergPeterKallebergArne L.. 2000. Manufacturing Advantage: Why High-Performance Work Systems Pay Off. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
3.
ArthurMichaelRousseauDenise, eds. 1996. The Boundaryless Career: A New Employment Principle for a New Organizational Era. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
4.
BarleyStephen R.1989. “Careers, Identities, and Institutions: The Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology.” Pp. 41–65 in Handbook of Career Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
5.
BinderAmy J.DavisDaniel B.BloomNick. 2016. “Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ‘Prestigious’ Jobs.” Sociology of Education89(1):20–39.
6.
Blair-LoyMary. 2003. Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
7.
BoltanskiLucChiapelloEve. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Verso.
8.
BourdieuPierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
9.
BravermanHarry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
10.
BurawoyMichael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
11.
CaterineChristopher L.2020. Leaving Academia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
12.
CentenoMiguel A.CohenJoseph N.. 2012. “The Arc of Neoliberalism.” Annual Review of Sociology38(1):317–40.
13.
CuzzocreaValentinaLyonDawn. 2011. “Sociological Conceptualisations of ‘Career’: A Review and Reorientation.” Sociology Compass5(12):1029–43.
14.
DeterdingNicole M.WatersMary C.. 2018. “Flexible Coding of In-Depth Interviews: A Twenty-first-Century Approach.” Sociological Methods & Research50(2):708–39.
15.
EbaughHelenFuchsRose. 1988. Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
16.
EhrenreichBarbara. 1990. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Pantheon Books.
17.
EmpsonLaura. 2017. Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
18.
EmpsonLaura. 2018. “Elite Interviewing in Professional Organizations.” Journal of Professions and Organization5(1):58–69.
19.
FindlayPatriciaKallebergArne L.WarhurstChris. 2013. “The Challenge of Job Quality.” Human Relations66(4):441–51.
20.
FitzgeraldJared B.SchorJuliet B.JorgensonAndrew K.. 2018. “Working Hours and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the United States, 2007–2013.” Social Forces96(4):1851–74.
21.
FrommErich. 1941. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
22.
GlaserBarney G.StraussAnselm L.. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Pub. Co.
23.
GoffmanErving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor.
24.
GraeberDavid. 2018. Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster.
25.
GrossNeil. 2009. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review74(3):358–79.
26.
GuhinJeffreyKlettJoseph. 2022. “School beyond Stratification: Internal Goods, Alienation, and an Expanded Sociology of Education.” Theory and Society51(3):371–98.
27.
GurrTed R.1970. Why Men Rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
28.
HarringtonBrooke. 2017. “Studying Elite Professionals in Transnational Settings.” Pp. 39–49 in Professional Networks in Transnational Governance, edited by SeabrookeL.HenriksenL. F.. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
29.
HoKaren. 2009. Liquidated. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
30.
HochschildArlie R.1979. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
31.
HodsonRandy. 2001. Dignity at Work. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
32.
HomPeter W.LeeThomas W.ShawJason D.HausknechtJohn P.. 2017. “One Hundred Years of Employee Turnover Theory and Research.” Journal of Applied Psychology102(3):530–45.
33.
IbarraHerminia. 2003. Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
34.
KallebergArne L.2011. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s–2000s. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
35.
KallebergArne L.2018. Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
36.
KellyErin L.MoenPhyllis. 2020. Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
37.
KeyderCaglar, ed. 1999. Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
38.
KohnMelvin L.1976. “Occupational Structure and Alienation.” American Journal of Sociology82(1):111–30.
39.
KohnMelvin L.1977. Class and Conformity: A Study in Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
40.
KundaGideon. 2006. Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation, rev. ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
41.
LamontMichèle. 2019. “From ‘Having’ to ‘Being’: Self-Worth and the Current Crisis of American Society.” British Journal of Sociology70(3):660–707.
42.
LareauAnnette. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd ed.Berkeley: University of California Press.
43.
MainieroLisa A.SullivanSherry E.. 2006. The Opt-Out Revolt: Why People Are Leaving Companies to Create Kaleidoscope Careers. Mountain View, CA: Davies-Black Pub.
44.
MarkovitsDaniel. 2019. The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. New York: Penguin Press.
45.
MarxKarl. [1844] 1978. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Pp. 66–125 in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by TuckerR. C.. New York: W. W. Norton.
46.
MearsAshley. 2015. “Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent.” American Sociological Review80(6):1099–122.
47.
MengerPierre-Michel. 1999. “Artistic Labor Markets and Careers.” Annual Review of Sociology25:541–74.
48.
MichelAlexandra. 2011. “Transcending Socialization: A Nine-Year Ethnography of the Body’s Role in Organizational Control and Knowledge Workers’ Transformation.” Administrative Science Quarterly56(3):325–68.
49.
MillsWright C.1956. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
50.
NorrisDawn R.2016. Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
51.
OcejoRichard E.2017. Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
52.
OlsenKaren M.SverdrupTherese E.KallebergArne L.. 2019. “Turnover and Transferable Skills in a Professional Service Firm.” Journal of Professions and Organization6(1):2–16.
53.
OstermanPaul, ed. 1996. Broken Ladders: Managerial Careers in the New Economy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
54.
PadavicIreneElyRobin J.ReidErin M.. 2020. “Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality.” Administrative Science Quarterly65(1):61–111.
55.
ParkerKimHorowitzJuliana Menasce. 2022. “Majority of Workers Who Quit a Job in 2021 Cite Low Pay, No Opportunities for Advancement, Feeling Disrespected.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
56.
PercheskiChristine. 2008. “Opting Out? Cohort Differences in Professional Women’s Employment Rates from 1960 to 2005.” American Sociological Review73(3):497–517.
57.
PortesAlejandro. 2010. Economic Sociology: A Systematic Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
58.
PoulantzasNicos. 1975. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. New York: New Left Books.
59.
RiveraLauren A.2012. “Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms.” American Sociological Review77(6):999–1022.
60.
RiveraLauren A.2015. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
61.
RosaHartmut. 2019. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
62.
RothSilke. 2015. The Paradoxes of Aid Work: Passionate Professionals. New York: Routledge.
63.
RutzHenry J.BalkanErol M.. 2009. Reproducing Class: Education, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of the New Middle Class in Istanbul. New York: Berghahn Books.
64.
SallazJeffrey J.2013. Labor, Economy, and Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
65.
SchorJuliet. 1991. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books.
66.
SchorJuliet. 1998. The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer. New York: Basic Books.
67.
SchulzJeremy M.2015. “Winding Down the Workday: Zoning the Evening Hours in Paris, Oslo, and San Francisco.” Qualitative Sociology38:235–59.
68.
SharoneOfer. 2004. “Engineering Overwork: Bell-Curve Management at a High-Tech Firm.” Pp. 191–218 in Fighting for Time: Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life, edited by EpsteinC.KallebergA.. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
69.
ShermanRachel. 2007. Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. Berkeley: University of California Press.
70.
SicilianoMichael L.2021. Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries. New York: Columbia University Press.
71.
SilvaJennifer M.2012. “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.” American Sociological Review77(4):505–22.
72.
SkotnickiTadNielsenKelly. 2021. “Toward a Theory of Alienation: Futurelessness in Financial Capitalism.” Theory and Society50(6):837–65.
73.
SmallMarioCalarcoJessica. 2022. Qualitative Literacy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
74.
SpilermanSeymour. 1977. “Careers, Labor Market Structure, and Socioeconomic Achievement.” American Journal of Sociology83(3):551–93.
75.
StonePamela. 2007. Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Berkeley: University of California Press.
76.
StonePamelaLovejoyMeg. 2019. Opting Back In: What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to Work. Berkeley: University of California Press.
77.
SullivanSherryBaruchYehuda. 2009. “Advances in Career Theory and Research: A Critical Review and Agenda for Future Exploration.” Journal of Management35(6):1542–71.
78.
TimmermansStefanTavoryIddo. 2012. “Theory Construction in Qualitative Research: From Grounded Theory to Abductive Analysis.” Sociological Theory30(3):167–86.
79.
TuğalCihan. 2015. “Elusive Revolt: The Contradictory Rise of Middle-Class Politics.” Thesis Eleven130(1):74–95.
80.
VallasSteven P.KovalainenAnne. 2019. “Introduction: Taking Stock of the Digital Revolution.” Pp. 1–12 in Research in the Sociology of Work, Vol. 33, Work and Labor in the Digital Age, edited by VallasS. P.KovalainenA.. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited.
81.
VallasSteven P.SchorJuliet B.. 2020. “What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy.” Annual Review of Sociology46(1):273–94.
82.
WeisshaarKatherine. 2018. “From Opt Out to Blocked Out: The Challenges for Labor Market Re-entry after Family-Related Employment Lapses.” American Sociological Review83(1):34–60.
83.
WhartonAmy S.Blair-LoyMary. 2006. “Long Work Hours and Family Life.” Journal of Family Issues27(3):415–36.
84.
WrightErik Olin. 1985. “The Biography of a Concept: Contradictory Class Locations.” Pp. 19–63 in Classes. New York: Verso.
85.
WrzesniewskiAmyDuttonJane E.. 2001. “Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work.” Academy of Management Review26(2):179–201.
86.
YavasMustafa.2020. “White-Collar Blues? The Making of the Transnational Middle Class in Turkey.” PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
87.
ZaloomCaitlin. 2019. Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
