Holding labor to ac(count): quiet quitting and the limits of the anti-work imaginary

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

This article addresses debates over the emancipatory potential of counter-accounting by asking whether the co-optation of oppositional accounts signifies success or failure. It charts the interplay between official accounts and counter-accounts through a historical analysis of four waves of anti-work struggle, showing how activists alternately challenged – and failed to challenge – the dominant work ethic. It is found that partisans of antiwork consistently drew on problematic accounts, leaving them vulnerable to recuperation, reintegration, and, eventually, defeat. By adopting the official accounting apparatus of dominant institutions, these counter-accounts inherited the ideological biases of the truth regimes they sought to dismantle. Counter-accounts cohere and become intelligible only by indexing themselves to the prevailing order. Accounting practices that repurpose existing data for alternative ends will likely bear the imprint of the truth regimes that created them, leaving them open to co-optation. The analysis concludes by invoking the contemporary phenomenon of quiet quitting, highlighting both its resonances with earlier phases of struggle and its departures from past precedent. By withholding voice and withdrawing from the productivist mandate, quiet quitting points toward a latent strategy of refusal that resists the imperative to be made legible to the accounting gaze, thereby offering a potential path beyond the traps of counter-accounting. © 2026 Elsevier Ltd

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