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Human Arenas (2024) 7:556–575
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-022-00279-6
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ARENA OFSUBJECTIVITY
Keeping aFoot intheDoor: Neoliberal Ideology inSubjects
Who Opt Out ofaCorporate Career
FrancescoTommasi1· JohannaL.Degen2
Received: 27 October 2021 / Revised: 10 February 2022 / Accepted: 11 February 2022 /
Published online: 1 March 2022
© The Author(s) 2022
Abstract
It is well researched that ideals of freedom and self-fulfillment through work are perpetu-
ated by the neoliberal ideology that permeates subjective reasoning, meaning-making, and
everyday practices. While these ideals may seem attractive and enticing to the subject, their
pursuit usually leads to less secure working contracts and conditions. Thus, organizations
can continue to enforce economic principles and increase pressure on workers while, at the
same time, the mechanisms of liberalization and individualization make subjects — not
organizations — responsible for their own success and existential survival, and for creating
meaningful and happy lives. Striving to design and optimize their own personal and profes-
sional trajectories, subjects perpetuate these ideals and thus adopt the socially-validated
view that opting out of a salaried job in favor of self-employment is the zenith of self-
actualization. Existing research on the phenomenon of opting out emphasizes gender dif-
ferences around this issue, i.e., women opt out to stay home, whereas men — if their role
is even considered — do so to enhance their careers. However, this research is sparse and
lacks a contextualized understanding of the phenomenon, such that we still know very lit-
tle about who opts out and why. Following an explorative approach, this study looks at 20
single-case stories of subjects who opted out from corporate career tracks. We find that the
decision to opt out worked out well for diligent subjects with high self-esteem, who already
had successful career trajectories and who — independently of gender — viewed it as an
act to free oneself from, and a fundamental critique of, corporate working conditions and
values. We analyze this finding through the theoretical lens of critical psychology in order
to shed light on the phenomenon of opting out and the extent to which individuals can
pursue meaningfulness in life and work within the scope of neoliberal conditions, i.e., in
contexts where liberal principles remain applicable to the living and working conditions
achieved by subjects after they have left the corporate world.
Keywords Opting out· Corporate career· Neoliberal ideology· Critical psychology·
Agency
Francesco Tommasi and Johanna L. Degen contributed equally to the manuscript.
* Francesco Tommasi
francesco.tommasi@univr.it
Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Introduction: Opting‑Out inContemporary Neoliberalism
Characterized by general conditions of neoliberal ideology, contemporary work is rooted
in the market-driven acceleration and utilization of human labor, which hide behind seem-
ingly positive fantasies such as the positive liberalization of the self and work (Gergen,
2011, 2014; Rose, 1996). Within these conditions, subjects and their labor are exposed to
market-driven principles and pushed into the contradictory position of having to serve the
economy while simultaneously pursuing what is supposed to be freedom and individuali-
zation. Seen in this way, neoliberal ideology becomes an incorporated logic of individuali-
zation, competition, and a striving for survival and success via personal outcomes and per-
formance (Bal & Dòci, 2018). For subjects, this neoliberal focus on personal responsibility
as the key to survival impacts every aspect of existence: not only one’s work, but also one’s
personal life becomes oriented towards measurable economic outcomes and competition as
the justification for being and a measure of individual worth (Binkley, 2014; Rose, 1996).
Within this logic, subjects are deemed responsible for their own life courses and living
conditions, resulting in a need to optimize themselves and an individual quest to control
one’s own life course by creating one’s own opportunities, endowing one’s everyday life,
and working with meaning, and doing so in ways that enable one to meet the competitive
pressure not only to survive but also to thrive (ibid.). This logic fails to consider personal
perception, preconditions, and chance. Rather, it makes work into a distinctive field of self-
identification and meaning in which career is a key source of individual identity and the
place for self-fulfillment and individualization. The meaning of work shifts away from the
utility (an instrument to satisfy an existential need) and towards the possibility of achiev-
ing a utopian ideal of self-actualization through employment, career-path individualization,
and self-realization. In this scenario, the pressure of individualization and success leads
subjects — identified as agentic and reflexive — to design their career paths in ways that
enable them to pursue happy and meaningful lives through work. Subject to the neoliberal
ideology that pervades contemporary society, they must invest heavily in their careers and
workplaces if they are to meet the inter- and intra-subjective pressure to achieve individ-
ual success (e.g., pressure to achieve individual success, financial stability) by engaging in
meaning-making processes and making appropriate and fortunate career decisions.
In this context, opting out of formal employment in favor of self-employment (e.g.
founding a startup/ becoming an entrepreneur) to pursue an individualized career, and life
is positively perceived as a symbol of individual agency, autonomy, and self-actualization
(Carland etal., 1995). Neoliberal ideology views the self-employment as the expression of
an ideal that promotes individual ownership of one’s working life, life, and agency, includ-
ing the heroic fantasy that one can build a career and business from nothing but individual
skill and willpower: the liberal zenith of individualization.
The term “opting out” refers to the act of leaving a corporate career track or corporate
employment on one’s own terms, without pursuing an aligned employee position in another
corporation or company (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). However, the literature on
opting out and on the term itself is mostly reduced to a specific gender perspective, focus-
ing on women who opt out due to family duties or on the lack of what are presumed to be
typical female values in corporations (Belkin, 2003; Cossman, 2009). The narrative about
women opting out is predominantly tied to highly qualified women who leave corporate
career tracks in order to stay home and take care of family duties (Paustian-Underdahl
etal., 2019), thereby having to choose between the neoliberal ideal of a good worker and
that of the good mother (Wilton, 2017). In this sense, scholars analyze this phenomenon
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Tommasi and Degen
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from the lens of women’s equality and the less inclusive working conditions experienced
by women. Some research broadens these perspectives by describing the kind of work that
women tend to opt into, characterizing women’s alternative life- and working styles as less
masculine (Biese, 2017) and showing how women pursue what ideology perceive to me
a more authentic working style (Biese & Choroszewicz, 2019; Frkal & Criscione-Naylor,
2021; McKie etal., 2013). Other studies discuss whether women do not actually opt out
at all, but rather are being pushed out by the masculine culture of inequality (Cossman,
2009; Hoobler etal., 2009; Kossek, etal., 2016). If male opting-out is even considered, the
conclusion is that men opt-out for reasons related to self-actualization — to enhance their
own careers, for example, or because they feel dissatisfied (Biese, 2017). Opting out among
men is theorized as a decision to leave a corporation due to personal ambition, dissatisfac-
tion in, or a personal mismatch with one’s company (Batt & Colvin, 2011; Follmer etal.,
2018; Zimmerman & Clark, 2016).
However, these varied and often reductionist perspectives suggest that opting out as a
contested phenomenon that reproduces implied stereotypical gender polarities. Moreover,
they tend to neglect the role of contemporary working conditions and societal context, i.e.,
neoliberal ideology and the subject’s scope for action, reasoning processes, and life course
after opting out. In this sense, a more integrative contextualization of the phenomenon of
opting out could include factors beyond the gender-dichotomic perspective and instead
focus on subjective meaning-making, revealing insights not only into the act of opting out
but also into the meaning of work and the role of incorporated ideology in general. Such
an understanding could reveal the subjective negotiations between the individual subjects
and their contexts, considering motivations, justifications, orientations, assumed conflict-
ing interests, and life conditions. This approach would enable researchers to explore certain
issues — those related to agency (i.e., the responsibility of the subject), the individualiza-
tion process (i.e., career pathways), and the personal meaning of work and values under
neoliberal working conditions — from the subject’s stance, following the questions of who
opts out, why, and how so.
Method
Data Collection: First‑Person Perspectives onOpting Out
To answer our research questions, we conducted an exploratory case study involving a total
of 20 participants. Each participant was required to have at least 5years of experience in a
corporation. As we learned while analyzing the demographics of our study group, before
opting out all the participants had achieved hierarchical positions in which they held mana-
gerial and budgetary responsibilities.1 We recruited the sample between winter 2019 and
summer 2021 using a sort of snowball principle, first drawing on the contacts in our own
networks (two start-up networks from Berlin) and then getting them to recruit more con-
tacts. Participants were contacted via email and introduced to the topic of opting out, with
no further indication about the objectives of our research. Those who decided to take part
in our study were informed about the terms of their participation and about how we would
1 This was not an upfront criterion, rather being relevant as findings at it hints to the fact that the successful
opt out is successful.
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Keeping a Foot in the Door
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collect and use their data. We instructed the participants to write down their stories about
opting out, focusing on their personal experiences. As a writing prompt, the participants
were invited to tell their story of opting out from their first-person perspective in the form
of a narrative of up to 5000 words.2 There was no further indication regarding style or
form. Nevertheless, the word “story” included norms and assumptions — namely, a ret-
rospectively imposed (cohesion) logic, implied tension, and plots — and these, in conse-
quence, are probably present in the data. All of the stories handed in were included in the
data, whose collection ended as a natural sample of participants being willing to take part
and invest time in the project, and those who probably felt they had a story to tell.
The participants were n = 11 male, n = 9 female, and ranged in age from 33 to 65years. As
indicated above, they were on corporate career tracks for at least 5 and up to 26years as manag-
ers, CEOs, or in partnership positions. N = 18 participants had a master’s degree while n = 2 have
a doctoral degree. Their post opt-out careers as self-employed persons cover a broad range of dif-
ferent employment branches: consulting (n = 7 cases), yoga teaching (n = 1 case), coaching (n = 2
cases) and therapeutic practice (n = 1 case), food truck owner (n = 1 case), founders of multiple
start-ups (e.g., for instance, on mobile applications, n = 5 cases), speaker (n = 1 case), influencer
(n = 1 case), and researcher/scientist (n = 1 case). The narratives range in length from 2800 and
6201 words, with an average of 3976 words.
Data Analysis: Inductive Coding forAnalyzing Subjects’ Stories
To analyze the narrative stories, we used qualitative content analysis following the
approach of Mayring (1991, 2015). Qualitative content analysis allows us to build on both
deductive and inductive categories while examining the stories. While deductive categories
rely on theoretical knowledge and tend to impose (theoretical) assumptions onto the data,
inductive categories emerge strictly from the data and thus can lead to new insights which
can contribute to the initial understandings (ibid.). During the analytical procedure itself,
researchers first read the stories and then sort them into categories by identifying the top-
ics that arise; hence, each section contains several topics. In a second step, the topics are
briefly described and differentiated, related to each other, and then clustered. This results
in larger abstract categories, which often include several specific and condensed subcat-
egories and assigned codes. In systematically creating these larger categories, research-
ers repeatedly cycle through these steps, working both inter- and cross-sectionally as well
as across interviews. All subcategories are then depicted in an elaborated code tree. The
analysis was conducted by a group of researchers to ensure plausibility and intersubjective
accuracy. Later, a research assistant coded the comprehensive set of data in several loops,
ensuring the clarity and correctness of the categories and subcategories.
Findings: Subjective Perspectives ontheMeaning andProcess
ofOpting Out
Following the analysis process, our data yielded four main categories (see Fig.1), namely,
(a) identification and profiling, (b) opting out as a fundamental critique of corporate condi-
tions and values, (c) opting out and opting into?, and evaluating living conditions and con-
stituting (new) values (d), the social positioning of the self.
2 Translated from German by the authors.
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These main categories allow insights into the subject’s inner logic and justifications in
the negotiation to and positions within the social context and conditions of life. The first
category, “identification and profiling,” refers to the subject’s identity, constituting where
the subject comes from in dispositive terms, in terms of their somewhat natural charac-
ter, and in terms of their social becoming and origin. The second category, “opting out
as a fundamental critique of corporate conditions and values,” demonstrates how the sub-
jects negotiate with the social (work) context and free themselves from suction effects and
strings, and explores how they constitute opting out as a critique of working conditions and
their living conditions while they were employed. The third category, “evaluating living
conditions and constituting (new) values,” gives insights into the subjects’ perception and
evaluation of their living conditions and personal assessment of striking a balance (evaluat-
ing their own life). Here, the subjects characterize and compare their living and working
conditions before and after they made the decision to opt out, explain their choices and
behavior, give insights into how they are impacted by the context, and justify their life
course and values. The fourth category, “social positioning of the self,” carves out how
subjects position themselves in comparison to others and, in so doing, depict hierarchies
and prestige but also give insights into the idea of what it takes to opt out, who can do it,
and why they can.
Note. For each presented category, we include both the subcategories and codes (i.e.,
data examples) resulting from our analysis. The comprehensive code tree and additional
data examples are included in the Appendix, Tables2 and 3.
Identification andProfiling
The identification and the self-portrayal or profile refers to both an individual’s disposition,
and the identity or self-portrayal that they acquire through socialization. Subjects charac-
terize themselves as having been special their whole lives, with early influences that would
later have an impact on their decision to opt out; they portray themselves as different in
Fig. 1 Findings and graphical depiction of the data analysis
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comparison to an (unspecified) norm of others. In the introductions to their stories, the sub-
jects identify and situate themselves by reflecting on their early childhood, family and geo-
graphic demographics, socialized values and skills, and personalities. Indeed, they frame
the decision to opt out in terms of the very beginning of life, intertwining references to
opting out, who one is as a person, and one’s whole life course.
I grew up in a very nice house in the countryside in Germany (…). In my family it
didn’t matter what people did for a living. (1; 1-2)
I was 20 when my father died. I am the second oldest of seven siblings, I know
responsibility. (8; 2-3)
Nevertheless, the subjects view their roots as only one shaping influence on their
adult disposition. They describe themselves as “naturally entrepreneurial,” open-
minded, ambitious, and having certain specific strengths in comparison to a generalized
yet unspecified other. Accordingly, they tend to view themselves as living in a state of
alienation that sets them apart from supposedly average normality. “I always knew I
was different and today I understand why so, I am naturally an entrepreneur and not
somebody working on the clock (…) I am simply someone who has what it takes” (11;
23–25). This in turn is intertwined with the subject’s feeling of being more authentic
after having opted out (“Today I feel happy and like I’m in my element”) (15; 56).
By contrast, the participants reported having different and separate views on their
educational pathways and the role that educational level played in leading them to pur-
sue their dream of finding an authentic job. Although the participants broadly agreed
with each other regarding their dispositive and socialized motives, their views were less
aligned when discussing the more formal impact of education on their choice to opt-out.
Indeed, some participants reflected on their educational experiences as wrong, possibly
detrimental to entrepreneurship, and never a good fit for them personally:
It’s difficult to find out where I started going off the career track. I think it must
have been before I actually started my career in university. Most others had very
specific goals; I only had areas that interested me. (6; 2-4)
Conversely, other subjects presented their educational background and work experi-
ences in corporations as crucial to making possible the later act of opting out:
All of my siblings have studied either law or medicine, including me. It gave me
so many insights, which I use until today” (8; 3-4). “So my story of opting out is a
plea for education. I would have never been where I am today if it wasn’t for further
education. No one believed I could do it and everyone laughed at me and about why I
would stress about exams and today I am here and they are still back there. (5; 51-52)
In sum, the subjects frame the act of opting out as one that is intertwined with their
life course — which, in turn, is conditioned by their general mode of being, by who they
are as people, and by the skills that they (diligently rather than randomly) have gained
through their childhood roots, life, education, and work.
Opting Out asaFundamental Critique ofCorporate Values andWorking Conditions
The subjects explain their act of opting out by condemning, critiquing, and regretting
their former corporate lives and working conditions, substantiating their views with
concrete personal experiences. In recounting these experiences, the subjects allude to
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various factors: loss of time, lack of agency, and a lack of coherency between their own
and corporate values and working conditions. Yet, as they also note, these values and
working conditions represented desirable objectives when they first started their corpo-
rate careers. When reflecting retrospectively on this seeming contradiction, the subjects
tend to explain it as the result of their having been blinded by the light of certain key
conditions (e.g., a prestigious status, a high salary) which they describe as objectively
and normatively attractive. Over the course of a few years, these formerly attractive
conditions change their meaning, become foreign to the subjects, lose importance, or
generally become overshadowed by the conditions of life and work and the negative
effects of corporate position on both, leading to a personal state of alienation, lack of
meaning, inner emptiness, dissonance, and overall dissatisfaction. It is this perceived
negative state of living and working, the subject’s stress, that drives their desire to free
themselves from this condition by opting out.
In pointing to the objective aspects of corporate career pathways which they formerly
deemed positive, the subjects point to two things: (1) salary and (2) social recognition at
work (i.e., external feedback and acknowledgment) and in society in general (i.e., social
status and prestige as normatively successful and self-realized), thanks to a corporate posi-
tion which, especially in the first few years, is described as positive, satisfying, and a sup-
posed dream situation. However, the participants agree that such views seem to be the out-
come of flawed judgments. Indeed, all of them describe some enlightening reflections as
a form of unmasking, where the dreamy profession and feasible life become foreign and
suspect, revealing emptiness and logic that threatens well-being:
I truly had everything anyone could dream of. I remember how I felt very important
and, at the same time, very proud when walking into the huge building where I was
part of the managerial team. My salary was gigantic. At the same time, I started feel-
ing odd. The raises came almost automatically, and I wondered what the objective of
my work was, mostly networking, just being there - and that felt quickly wrong. (13;
41-45)
This might seem to immediately reduce opting out as a general reluctance of the career
pathway in corporations or neoliberal logic. Tellingly, however, the participants’ critique
targets the habitual and structural aspects of their current corporate working conditions,
and the conditions that they view as detrimental to their expressed wish to find meaning-
ful work; it does not target the characteristics of neoliberal working conditions (i.e., long
working hours, competitiveness, or individualized responsibility for success). For instance,
presentism is a sort of precarious characteristic of working conditions in the economy in
general.
I never mind working long hours - I work tons of hours now - but it was the fact
that we had to be there, in the presumably modern glass wall offices which really
meant everybody could watch every step. Overall it was awful, being there for no
reason when you are done with the tasks and knowing your wife is waiting at home.
It became more and more of a burden, until I did not even want to show up physically
at all, and that was not about work. (16; 308-312)
In this vein, social dynamics and values related to masculinity and conservatism are
suggested and revealed as counterproductive and outdated:
As a woman, I had to adapt to everything. I was successful very quickly, but only [sic] at
the expense of my own values, mode of being, and gender role. The boys’ club, which
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means everybody in the entire firm, was laughing about hostesses and I started hating even
the less radical incidents in the form of ongoing conversations about cars. The simple fact
that I was left alone to do all the emotional work for the entire department was horrific.
I did not notice it in the beginning, but really everything was masculine: colors, flowers,
jokes, career paths, clothing, meetings, travels, and food. (4; 156-160)
Moreover, working conditions and social traditions in the corporate landscape are
described as generally lacking in “decent” (3; 191) human behavior; relationships between
the companies or supervisors and employees or managers are reported to be rather negative
and inconsistent. This negative perspective on relationships refers not only to the subtleties
of the atmosphere, settings, and traditions but also to concrete factors related to (structural)
support and opportunities. Subjects report having felt personally neglected, unimportant,
or like burdens on the corporation and others when they do not assimilate. Just as their per-
ception shifted, making what once seemed to be attractive working conditions seem harm-
ful, the subjects describe this situation as a factor behind their decision to opt out.
In the beginning everyone is welcome, there is mentoring and everything, then you
are quickly left alone, you make suggestions but no one listens, your values, your
six-year education, and expertise, all irrelevant, all that matters is to maintain what’s
already happening. It was very unsatisfying, unbearable. (12; 77-81)
Such an inhumane landscape resulted in the impoverishment of human relations, until
employees felt unable to interact with colleagues and supervisors, resigning instead to what
they experienced as an inhuman authority. That is “I didn’t speak up so much anymore. My
attitude and power were gone and I became a reactive robot” (1; 60–61).
The subjects describe the negative effects (personal, psychological, and social) of this
situation on their well-being and talk about a decline of self-worth and self-esteem.
Lastly I wondered if these long hours were actually fostering my creativity and if
I was doing a better job by working that long, or the worst job due to the circum-
stances. I felt exhausted at times. I loved working, but a lot of the conditions were
just taking away my energy and personality. I learned that nothing is about me and
nothing is about the customer: it is all about the organization and its absurd tradi-
tions. (7; 36-38)
The context also contains the long-established conflicts and stereotypes of family
demands, intimate needs (e.g., time for one’s self or one’s partner), and structure within the
corporation (long working hours). One can gain a deeper perspective from what subjects
say about their personal networks and relationships, i.e., about the people in their lives who
reflect and communicate on how adapting to male behavior had changed the subject — and
not for the better — with female workers being called “domina” and “aggressive” (2; 36)
for having adapted to the male habitus, or from the subjects’ comments about their failings
as a partner in the personal sphere (private life): “What I realized only later was that I was
an even bigger failure as a wife” (1; 36). “There were flexible working hours; ironically it
was just the end of your career when making use of this as a woman. A man coming home
late is still a great father and provider, a woman who works long hours is supposedly inef-
fective, neglecting her family and counts as overall unorganized, in 2020” (12; 208–209).
The subjects’ critique of their living and working conditions not only enables them to
justify why one would opt out: through their critique, the subjects constitute their opting
out as an emancipatory act that opens the door to new conditions that support their per-
sonal values regarding life and work.
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Opting Out andOpting into? Evaluating Living Conditions andConstituting (New)
Values
In recounting the process that led them to leave behind corporate life, the subjects frame
their decision in specific ways. Two common themes emerge from these accounts: (a)
opting-out is a concrete act, and (b) opting out opens the door to a new life, oriented
towards personal values, and characterized by self-actualization. In the latter vein, the
subjects look comparatively at their lives before and after opting out, focusing on how
they felt and their mode of being in the world. Describing the restrictive and productive
dynamics that initially kept them from opting out, they refer to these as a function of
power. They also discuss the factors that led them to commit an emancipatory act of agency
against those restrictive power dynamics, i.e., to opt out.
a) In the subject’s accounts, the actual act of opting out is abrupt. It is either tied to a single
event, which is represented as the last straw (“the straw that broke the camel’s back”) or
represents the outcome of a long progressive process of internal and external negotia-
tions: “I decided that there was only one solution: The hard exit. I quit the next day” (1;
73).
In long-term processes, the opting-out act marks the start of a long, personally, and
socially challenging process of emancipation. This process has both positive and negative
suction effects on the subjects’ inner processes, as well as on their negotiations with norms
and the external work/social context. As positive suction effects that make it hard to opt
out, the subjects describe familiar (working) conditions, a high salary, social relationships
with coworkers, basic existential needs, and habitual belonging. Negative suction effects
that counteract the urge to opt out are described as fears about an uncertain future, existen-
tial insecurity, and possible failure.
It was hard to quit, I was sad to lose my colleagues and I was sure we would not stay
in touch. I was afraid to become a large disappointment and failure. I was afraid to
disappoint my family and my wife and to risk our existential base. (16; 300-301)
In deciding to leave their corporate jobs, the subjects are partially driven by negative
push-factors that lead to aggression (with aggression being viewed as a force to push
through one’s own interests). Such factors include the perception that their working envi-
ronment is unbearable, that the work itself is meaningless, and that there is an incongru-
ence that their work does not align with their personal values. Positive pull-factors driving
the same decision include optimistic and hopeful visions about a future that promises to
bring relief, freedom, larger scope for creativity, authenticity, and self-actualization, and a
better work-life balance: “I became actually crazy, which made it easy to finally quit and
overcome all fears. I had the choice to become a zombie or run, so I ran” (14; 177–178).
Overall, the act of opting out is depicted as challenging, and the years before as dep-
rivation. In consequence, the subjects often compensate for their suffering by traveling
or furthering their education after they leave their corporate jobs. This makes the act
of opting out not only a significant turning point and singularized event work-wise, but
also the start of a symbolically meaningful shift in the subject’s life, lifestyle, and social
context before she or he opts into a new career and self-employment: “Three months
later, we took the kids out of school, sold all our stuff and traveled the world for a year”
(1; 75–76).
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b) With respect to the realization of personal values as a self-actualizing event, opting
out is presented as ushering in a new form of life and work. The participants present a
series of aspects covering both themselves and their feelings about their new lives and
expectations (see Table1). The story of opting out is intertwined with references to the
subject’s personal values and general lifestyle leading up to and shaping their values, as
well as working conditions, the company itself, and life after opting out. The subjects
describe their emotions before opting out as fairly negative and report feeling overlooked,
unappreciated, sad, exhausted. They also report a feeling of inner emptiness in life and
the sense that life is meaningless. Their wording changes significantly when subjects
describe how they felt after the exit from corporate life. Here, they report positive emo-
tions and feelings — happy, powerful, excited, authentic, true, relieved, and free. Fear
nevertheless plays a role in the descriptions of life both before and after the act of opting
out; during their corporate days, the fear is to drop out, leaving behind the security of a
continuous income and a known, familiar life that one has learned to manage success-
fully. After leaving corporate life, the fear is grounded in existential needs — concerns
about the new company and the loss of one’s social and professional network. In terms
of describing working conditions, the subjects describe equally long working hours for
both scenarios (before and after the exit from corporate life). The difference between the
two is not the amount of work/investment put into each, but the meaning of the work and
the act of being true to their own values: “I only hire women, I am done with masculine
workforces and my company is thriving” (12; 215-216), “I have 14 enterprises now and
not a single employee of mine is working on the clock” (20; 135-136).
Contrary to the findings of existing studies on the subject, our results did not yield any
gender differences. Equally many male and female participants referred to family values,
and all of them named family, true flexibility, and autonomy of choice regarding when to
work, rather than how much to work, as significant factors. In their accounts, male subjects
may even place a higher value on family than female ones: “I had finally [through opting
out] been putting my family before the firm” (male, 3; 34): “First I fixed the family house
and took care of everything that had been neglected, then I turned my focus to what I could
do next and bought the truck [food truck]” (male, 8; 67–68).
Table 1 Subcategories concerning life after opting out
Subcategories of category 3 Data examples
Self and feeling “I work long hours, possibly even more than I have before,
but now it is giving me as much energy as it is taking up.
I feel good.” (7; 54–56)
Values and principles “My knowledge and my doing was used for someone else
but for whom” (); 189)
“a start-up with a purpose managed by 2 female founders
with a vision to change how we work.” (2; 100–101)
New life (judgments, i.e., as free, natural,
instinctive, and intuitively right)
“I am content with myself and with what I do.” (7; 54)
“But by now I am free, very happy and I enjoy my life
much more than before.” (4; 28–29)
New life (conditions, e.g., family relationships) “I do work even longer hours being in science but really I
can work whenever I want. I work nights, I work maybe
60h a week, but I am together with my three girls every
afternoon (…).” (5; 32–34)
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If we follow the subject’s meaning here, we can see opting out as the logical conse-
quence of an evolution and growth within — and later beyond — the corporate system. All
of the participants described the same basic dynamic. First, there was the thrill of success,
power, lifestyle, and money: “I enjoyed traveling everywhere first class in my suit. I’m not
an attractive man, but the women I got just with my business card and my expensive suits,
it was almost too easy. I thought it would always go on like this” (8; 41–43). Then, increas-
ingly, the subject began to question the impact and, later, the meaning of their corporate
career; thus, the objective criteria of success, like money, began to drop in importance as
the subject began to critically question the values that she/he associated with corporate
work vis-a-vis those of other people and corporate goals in general:
But after a while, I didn’t laugh at all anymore. I didn’t feel anything. I kept going but
even the merger of two big automotive companies did not thrill me anymore. I just
questioned myself, what are we doing, to our workers, each other and the world? (8;
54-57).
Regrets do nevertheless play a role: “I opted out of a corporate and executive career. I
regret all the energy and every single fight. However, I have not regretted my choices to
leave, even though working hours have been long and salary has been limited now I am
self-employed” (3; 46–48). Other forms of regret are projected into possible future failures:
“I am proud of my business, but I slept better when I was on my salary, and I can only
imagine the regret and desperation if this venture goes south” (9; 411–412).
The Social Positioning oftheSelf: “Self‑esteem andtheDiligent Elite”
Opting out is for the diligent, the successful, and for those with high self-esteem. Accord-
ing to our analysis, those who opt out want to self-actualize, independently of social rep-
resentations and the status quo. As seen above, those who opt out may have some specific
characteristics or an underlying conviction that only a life outside the confines of corpo-
rate life is worth living outside the confines of a corporation. Indeed, the act of opting
out is attributed to ability and will, to be brave and willing to take on risks, and to the
overall effort: “I was always better and faster than anyone – it was a family thing, every-
body needs to be better than everyone else, siblings as well as others” (8; 5–6). Accord-
ingly, the subjects had high self-esteem both before and after opting out, and they were all
highly successful in their corporate careers: “I was proud of being the youngest person in
the extended leadership team (…), and my salary was higher than anybody else my age.
And now I am proud to be among the most successful” (3; 7–9). High self-esteem does not
only refer to performance and success but also to values such as a greater meaning and the
willingness to take on risks: “It comes from my morality towards honest work” (5; 213).
“Everything was only possible due to my personal will to risk everything to build a morally
good working environment for myself and other women” (18; 131–132).
However, this is also to say that those who are capable of making the move to opt out
rely on skills gained during their corporate careers, and on the confidence, they felt when
comparing themselves with their peers:
(…) back then [in the corporate context at a later stage] I understood that I could do
it. And then after some time in the company, I saw many tasks that were conducted
or even outsourced that I could easily master myself and I wondered if the company
still made money, based on these uncompelled tasks. And I did observe that with
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567
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colleagues and friends. Their specialized jobs were quite plain and I could master all
this myself. (4; 65-69)
Although they present themselves as independent of social representations, the partici-
pants also report feeling superior in terms of their social position, and stress that they feel
just as successful and admired after having opted out: “I felt that I could not be the role
model I am able to be at the fullest. My abilities were cut back, my sparkle unwanted. In
my own company, I make the rules and I allow myself to sparkle and so do my employees”
(10; 180–182). While interpreting themselves as extremely successful among their peers
before and after opting out, the subjects feed the idea that they are individuals who are
exceptionally able to capitalize on their corporate experiences in terms of knowledge and
economic and social capital.
Discussion: Opting Out Goes Against Corporate Working Conditions
This paper has sought to offer a more integrated understanding of the opting-out phenom-
enon which shows that women and men, independently of their gender, may choose to opt
out of a working life that they view as impoverished and harmful and that they make this
choice not to reduce their working hours or escape the neoliberal ideology, but rather to
be true to their personal values and to enable a balanced lifestyle that leaves room for pri-
vate life. The existing studies on opting out have tended to portray opting out as a process
driven by gender differences, paying little attention to the context.
Our findings suggest a different perspective: that opting out is conditioned by the sub-
jects’ desire to find meaning and their urge to gain agency, coupled with their repudia-
tion of the inhuman landscape of today’s corporate environment, which they perceive as
outdated (presentism, masculinity), ineffective (absurd practices) and meaningless (token
tasks, neglect towards an employee’s potential and that of humanity as a whole). Organi-
zational working conditions then become an antecedent from which the subjects distance
themselves as they strive to achieve greater and more autonomous success through self-
employment. Ultimately, this shift is facilitated and conditioned by individual abilities (i.e.,
being diligent, a born entrepreneur, and successful prior to the exit from corporate work).
In contrast to current academic perspectives on the phenomenon of opting out, therefore,
our findings suggest that the reasoning behind the choice to opt out may not be dependent
on gender or work-family conflicts. This confirms previous arguments against gender-based
perspectives on the phenomenon (Biese, 2017). Moreover, the subjective drivers of opting
out depend on capital, disposition (courage, anxiety level/need for security), risk willing-
ness, social position, self-esteem, and the resultant perceived subjective meaning, which
are not exclusively reported on by males who opt out, as has been previously argued (see,
Batt & Colvin, 2011; Follmer etal., 2018; Zimmerman & Clark, 2016).
With regard to questions of equality and chance, the participants in our study define
themselves as having the ability to opt out, thanks to their natural state of being, their dis-
position, and their personal capital stemming from their education, corporate career, and
diligence. In profiling themselves as rather special and superior vis-a-vis their peers, they
do not appear to perceive their initial position as especially fortunate. Rather, they attribute
their own success, both in their former career and as self-employed persons, to aspects
of themselves: their competence, personal engagement, and risk willingness, and even
with reference to the logic of protestant work ethic. In this sense, they position themselves
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among the most successful — as members of the elite. This suggests that opting out
requires outstanding economic and symbolic capital gained from a person’s demographics,
socialization, and former career. Such evidence indicates that our participants incorporate
the neoliberal logic of individualization and competition into their justification for opting
out, arguing for a form of group differentiation and distinction in which they themselves
figure as members of a select group of successful subjects — the ones who are uniquely
capable of outperforming the average worker (Glynos & Howarth, 2007; Bal & Dòci,
2018). In short, opting out seems to stand at the nexus of the individual’s desire to self-
actualize/find meaning in life, and her/his personal potential in terms of self-esteem, per-
ception of capability, and actual capital and power. Yet those who opt out seem not to rely
on a novel form of emancipation from neoliberal logic; rather, they seem to express a form
of work individualization that reflects this very same logic.
Our findings suggest that opting out is a way of freeing oneself from current working
conditions in the corporate context, one that arises when individuals undergo an emanci-
patory evolution through personal experiences and crisis. Progressing in their corporate
careers after starting out with dedication and enthusiasm, the participants reported experi-
encing a lack of meaning in work and their suffering in the face of the corporate economic
logic. Despite having been part of corporations where they held a medium-to-high level of
responsibilities, all of the participants reported their high level of commitment to and iden-
tification with their working environment and their support for the organizational culture.
Supporting this dedication to work was their desire for social and economic recognition,
which led to a high degree of achievement — interestingly, the participants often do not
refer to themselves as outstanding when comparing themselves to other high-performing
employees. The more their careers developed, however, the greater their sense of mean-
inglessness and emptiness. Indeed, both the conservative environment and the inhumane
workplace relationships are pointed to by the subjects as detrimental factors within their
daily experience of work. For example, all of the participants referred to a dishonest culture
that followed the principle of utilization, leading them to states of alienation and to a radi-
cal decline in their well-being and functionality both in their professional and private lives.
The subject’s identification is disrupted, and while work which they can no longer identify
remains at the core of everyday life, ambivalences lead to a state of dissonance and psycho-
logical and social breakdown emerge.
These findings indicate, with reference to power, restrictive contexts and resistive
subjective scope and agency, that those who opt out use their state of crisis and dissonance
as a springboard to their own emancipation from corporate conditions and values, and then
create a lifestyle and working life that are imbued with new norms and an emancipatory
system of personal values, while still holding on to the underlying neoliberal principles.
Here, the meaning of work seems to change from a possible Marxist understanding,
which stresses existential security and survival and being part of a functional system,
to the more personal meanings of work that arise from the subject’s stance, such as the
drive towards self-actualization (Rose, 1996). In contrast to the masculinity, values,
relationships, working style, and atmosphere of corporate working culture, the subjects
posit alternative values that are rooted in true flexibility and autonomy in terms of time,
non-masculinity, work-private life compatibility, human (personal) relationships, and
even flat(ter) hierarchies. The neoliberal values that remain applicable are the orientation
towards success in accordance with objective criteria as expressed in monetary terms,
competition, superiority (proudly referring to success and capital as distinctive criteria),
and the tendency to see one’s work and profession as a source of self-identification. Work
remains the center of life in terms of the amount of time invested in it, with subjects
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viewing both competitive comparison and success as distinctive criteria. The subjects
continue to strive for objective success criteria after opting out of building their own
companies in a competitive market with an orientation towards power. In this context, the
meaning seems independent from the purpose of the company, but is based on the subject’s
perceived autonomy and is justified by their objective economic success. The subjects’
everyday practices after opting out demonstrate the obsolescence of long-established
corporate traditions, such as masculine principles, clocking, presentism, and hierarchies,
viewing them as unnecessary for objective economic success, by demonstrating functional
and practical alternatives within neoliberal market-driven logic.
From a critical psychologist perspective nevertheless, it becomes obvious that, in
critiquing corporate traditions and settings, the subjects remain squarely situated within
a neoliberal logic (i.e., Gergens, 2014; Rose, 1996). Accordingly, we find that those who
opted out developed a form of restrictive behavior against corporations — but not against
the system as such. This is evident in the extent to which the participants report on what they
see as the restrictive and structural contexts of corporations, and in the scope for agency
that they see in individual subjects, via enlightenment and change. As such, the subjects
criticize presentism but not long working hours. In fact, they even voice a desire to work
more and harder, and to take on more risks in terms of individualization and singularization
(Gergens, 2014; Rose, 1996) despite the (often negative) consequences (Marvakis, 2019).
Those consequences reveal that what would appear to be an emancipatory act of (supposed)
freedom and agency is actually an acceleration of individualization and risk that also
involves a loss of (social) security (ibid.). None of the subjects use the understandings they
reached and their potential scope of action to change the neoliberal aspect in their mode of
being. Conversely, in shifting from the corporate context to one of self-employment, they
relocate neoliberal working conditions within a frame of compromised values, basing it
on the same neoliberal principle, and thus retain a level of restrictive agency, in the sense
put forth by Holzkamps (1983/2003,1990; Schraube & Højholt, 2016): “I am willing to
work even harder and take more risks, as long as it is not under masculine tradition” (4;
301–302). Here, it is demonstrated that one’s life conditions can be questioned to a certain
extent, criticizing corporate traditions and working conditions, yet can remain restrictive
(compliant) within the general neoliberal logic and system (building companies in a
market-driven logic that strives towards economic success, submitting to the idea that hard
work might pay off, and engaging in identification through economic superiority). This
could be seen as an act of productive power, in which being heroic (freeing oneself from
the corporate world) — as the subjects perceive themselves and others who opt out —
in the bigger picture serves to advance neoliberal logic, and in which work changes but
the principles accelerate. Everyday practices, in the end, have changed in character (less
masculinity and presentism) but not in mode (working and economic growth as the main
driving force of life).
These findings provide an initial indication for considering opting out as an emancipatory act
against corporate values and against today’s workplace conditions while remaining in a liberal
logic of the self (Gergen, 2014; Rose, 1996). However, our argument of opting out as a form of
work individualization should be interpreted with some caution, since we have to acknowledge
some limitations and general reflections on the phenomenon of opting out. Our findings stem
from the perspectives of the subjects involved, all of whom voluntarily participated in our
study and had 5years of corporate experience, a fact which reflects a bias in the study design.
Therefore, the generalizability of our results is limited to those who had the personal motivation to
opt to narrate their stories, which might have led to a bias in favor of more successful subjects —
the ones who managed to maintain a career and who have a confident story to share. It is
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probable that there are other types of opting out from “moral” career paths, for instance in the
field of social and sustainable entrepreneurship, which might reveal differing styles of self-
employment or outright alternative stories about opting out in a non-entrepreneurial milieu. Also,
we restricted our data collection to a specific group of participants from the German context,
and we limited it to a certain number of participants. However, our data fully capture some main
aspects of the perspective set forth by those who opt-out and why they did so, proposing initial
indications for future developments and a starting point for comparison and possible typologies.
Indeed, future studies could examine our perspectives by enlarging the sample to ensure a more
international set of participants, and to offer financial incentives for participation in order to
reduce the self-selection bias. Nevertheless, these findings can be interpreted as offering initial
arguments that may be used both to explore individual processes of work individualization
and to interrogate contemporary corporate conditions. Ultimately, these findings can offer
initial insights on the utopian ideological thought on work and self-realization that represents
a neglected topic in the study of individuals, work, organizations, and the subject’s negotiation
and incorporation of a neoliberal context and logic. It is shown that individually and socially self-
actualized subjects emancipate due to personal achievements and with the aim to negotiate the
professional and private self, yet remain within the scope of neoliberal principles and economic
success, which is not seen as critical but, again, as a source of identity.
Conclusion
This paper presents a critical psychological view of the opting-out process. Our critical lens
demonstrates, first, that corporate working conditions do not serve the subject’s wish for self-
actualization. On the contrary, they reduce well-being, authenticity, ability to thrive, and can even
genuinely threaten health and well-being, leading to severe personal crises that can only be over-
come by the diligent and most successful individuals within a group of peers, if they choose to
gain agency through self-employment. Moreover, the overall stance of the subjects in our study
suggests that family-friendly values, the search for meaning, and the avoidance of masculine tra-
ditions are proven possible while maintaining neoliberal ideals; The subjects continued economic
success after opting out and implementing values as true flexibility and “female” (non-masculine)
work styles shows, these traditions are obsolete to maintain objective economic success, a
proven case that radically is questioning working traditions in corporations by their means. Sec-
ond, the critical perspective presented here shows that the subjects’ reflections on their corporate
experiences and their emancipatory action to free themselves of it are limited to their criticism of
corporate working conditions and their restrictive agency within it. However, they remain restric-
tive (compliant and even harder-working) vis-a-vis the larger frame of neoliberal logic. Deepen
our understanding of opting out as an emancipatory act, further theoretical and critical studies on
the questioning of corporate working conditions, on their purported necessity and legitimation,
and on their true consequences for subjects —especially when those consequences are hidden
behind certain notions about liberalization and freedom — are urgently needed. Other forms of
opting out (such as downshifting or autarky living), which go beyond the naturalized and incor-
porated neoliberal ideology and which may or may not constitute acts of resistance to a restric-
tive liberal ideology, also remain to be studied.
Appendix
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Table 2 Comprehensive Codetree
Category Subcategory Subcategory second order Subcategory third order
1. Identification and profiling 1.1 Demographic personal
1.2 Personal identification
1.3 Educational background 1.3.1 As irrelevant
1.3.2 As highly relevant
1.3.3 Regretting choice of education
1.4 General success narrative
1.5 My drop out 1.5.1 Turning point/radical
1.5.2 Processed dismantling
2. Opting out as fundamental critique of
corporate conditions and values
2.1 Corporate conditions as drivers to opt out 2.1.1 Everyday life in corporation
2.1.2 (In-)dependencies 2.1.2.1 Dependencies in corporation/owing
something
Independencies after exit
2.1.3 Treatment of and relation towards social surrounding 2.1.3.1 From supervisors
2.1.3.2 From colleagues
2.1.4 Payment
2.1.5 Structural challenges 2.1.5.1 Presentism
2.1.5.2 Gender
2.1.5.3 Perception of self as impactful
2.2 Social conditions when opting out/ social hurdles 2.2.1 Before exit
2.2.2 After exit
2.3 Characteristic of the process of leaving 2.3.1 Immediate
2.3.2 For years
2.4 Positive suction effects: opting into? 2.4.1 Values and principles
2.4.2 Characteristics and facts of new working life
2.4.3 Profiling as emancipated against the corporate life/
conditions
3. Evaluating living conditions and constituting
(new) values
3.1 Before exit 3.1.1 Emotions
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Table 2 (continued)
Category Subcategory Subcategory second order Subcategory third order
3.1.2 Values
3.1.3 Lifestyle/work
3.1.4 Relations
3.2 After exit 3.2.1 Emotions
3.2.2 Regrets 3.2.2.1 Former life
3.2.2.2 Hypothetical regrets
3.2.2.3 Pride to have opted out
3.2.3 Values
3.2.4 Relations
3.2.5 Lifestyle/work
3.2.6 Fear/insecurities
4. The social positioning of the self 4.1 Worth
4.2 Esteem
4.3 Comparison
4.4 (Retrospective) emotions 4.4.1 Before exit
4.4.2 After exit
4.5 Attribution pattern 4.5.1 External attribution pattern for behavior in corporation
4.5.2 Internal attribution for behavior after exit
4.6 Meaning making
4.8 Evolution 4.8.1 How I was
4.8.2 What I have become
4.9 Challenges 4.9.1 Work
4.9.2 Private
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Table 3 Additional data examples
Category Data example
Identification and profiling “We have always been entrepreneurs, it runs in
the family and me being in corporations was an
alienated state after all.” (8; 179–181)
“I did my masters but already back then I knew, this
was wrong, I should have gone for the own business
from the start, on the other hand, I learned a lot and
how would i have succeeded without the knowledge
and money from corporate life.” (4; 21–24)
“I guess something more creative would have been
better for me (…). Probably I also chose this
direction [management] to please my father to a
certain degree.” (7; 22–24)
“I could not have done it without the knowledge
and economic capital I gained from working for
corporate.” (19; 220–223)
Opting out as fundamental critique of corporate
conditions
“I was given more people and more money, but I just
functioned.” (1; 68)
“Boring! But you go along and play the game.” (2;
76–77)
“It was exhausting always saying the right thing. My
strategy was not to say anything anymore. Adapt.
Adapt. Adapt.” (5; 71–72)
“I was unhappy inside. I knew it was meaningless.”
(10; 20–21)
“I just made money and I did not grow anything. You
deliver but you have nothing in return. Your worth
may be even decreasing by time, by becoming
older.” (14; 22–24)
“How people and managers were treated. Being
dependent on the position and being abused and
used.” (17; 134–135)
“After a few years, everything was going great.
After some time I noticed, quite suddenly, that I
don’t agree with the corporate values. Working
conditions were awful, we had to be there all day,
nobody was happy. Not the employees, not the
customers, the price was broken families for all
of us and I suddenly saw that coming, I learned it
was the system immanent and I started hating the
company.” (20; 91–94)
“I grew tired of and frustrated by time and energy
consuming processes and hierarchies within a
corporate structure.” (2; 83–84)
“In the end I was supposed to only lead by numbers.”
(7; 32)
“The company did not trust my loyalty.” (3; 33–34)
“My excitement was lowered when I realized that
even though she told me my proposal was great, she
had clearly not read it. Also she did not really want
to hear about it.” (1; 43–45)
“And all of a sudden I had a huge corner office. The
uncomfortable part was, I did not feel I deserved it
more than anybody else.” (6; 111–112)
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Acknowledgements We gladly acknowledge Juliane Gökes who contributed to this paper with parts of the
data collection.
Funding Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Verona within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Com-
mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article
are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the
material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly
from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.
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CDI- 10- 2015- 0137
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Authors and Affiliations
FrancescoTommasi1· JohannaL.Degen2
1 Department ofHuman Sciences, University ofVerona, Verona, Italy
2 Department ofPsychology, European University ofFlensburg, Flensburg, Germany
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