Organizations: Strategic Refusal

In addition to the many things on my mind these days, I'm thinking about the moment in any organization after a big change has been identified and before that big change is instituted. This moment is what the philosopher Jacques Derrida called "the verge," a moment before a threshold is crossed and transfers of responsibilities and transformations of identity follow.

In a previous issue, I described some strategies that may help leaders to move forward from a big change that has disproportionate effects. I used a recent - though not yet instituted - change in the structure of work in my institution to elaborate these strategies. These strategies are retrospective and facilitate necessary learning before forging ahead; attention to process, the ways process reinforces existing power dynamics and their asymmetrical operation, and the way power moves in the organization's history are each beneficial for figuring out what to do in the wake of a fracture.

In this issue, I'm thinking in the verge, and thinking about those of us who have some seniority because of a combination of experience and time in an organization, and who do not have access to the immediate levers of organizational repair. In spite of this, I think folks positioned in this way have one undervalued - and misunderstood - tool at our disposal: Strategic Refusal.

Workplace refusal has several expressions. Leaving is one; and while some organizations and work processes admit of ease here - that is, it is easier to leave some organizations and some work processes and take up with others - not all jobs are easy to leave. Say, for example, being a professor in the humanities. Not an easy job to leave and certainly not an easy job to take up elsewhere.

Another form of workplace refusal (and the one of this moment) is quiet quitting. Quiet quitting is an invitation to work in ways that prioritize my needs and my boundaries above those of the workplace; in quiet quitting, I refuse "to go above and beyond" my job duties.

Writing in Forbes in 2022, Kevin Kruse pinned the phenomenon of quiet quitting to employees who thread the needle between engaged employees and disengaged employees, itself tied to an idea of satisfaction. Managers should be concerned that employees are running this middle road instead of expressing a "deep, emotional commitment to the organization and its goals." Managers may interpret quiet quitting as "doing the bare minimum," and their interpretations are then juiced with quick tips about how to re-engage employees. However, the refusal to go "above and beyond" is incorrectly equated with "doing the bare minimum." In fact, this refusal to "go above and beyond" is just doing the job. Business literature sees quiet quitting as an object of moral panic, something that managers need to, well, manage, to stop, to end, etc. Not always for the sake of the employee, mind you, but certainly for the sake of the employee in relation to the bottom line. Kruse suggests 12 questions that get to the why of quiet quitting, but these are ultimately levers that the manager can address to reengage employees on the way to greater productivity.

Jan Chipchase, founder of Studio D, describes these poles differently. In thinking through the stories organizations tell about themselves, Chipchase identifies two poles of buy-in about these stories: the missionaries, folks whose personal purpose aligns quite closely - nearing overlap - with organizational purpose; and the mercenaries, folks whose personal purpose overlaps with organizational purpose in a more traditional venn diagram. The "mercenary" sees their relationship to the organization as utilitarian - paycheck, benefits, stability - where the "missionary" identifies with the organizational vision, mission, and values more fully. Chipchase suggests that he's uncomfortable with this as a strict binary, but it may better describe a rangefinder of sorts - a way of locating oneself relative to organizational purpose at a given time.

Quiet quitting is also a mode of work-to-rule, where the employee determines the best course of action is to fulfill the job duties as specified in the contract (or whatever passes for the contract) and nothing more. It's an act of reading the contract for its letter and not its spirit. It's an important option, especially in mission-driven organizations where organizational purpose is a norm that often cloaks overwork and under-compensated labor. Absent a union or other collective bargaining framework, work-to-rule is often the best available mode of refusal for the individual employee.

One of the challenges of quiet quitting, especially as a thoughtful mode of refusal on the part of the employee (and not a petulant label assigned to workers in whatever generation the management expert is not a member of), is that quiet quitting changes things for the employee but it doesn't change the conditions the employee works in. And this is a really interesting problem, one that philosophers who are concerned with change and transformation think at various scales, including the workplace. It's also a problem that has concrete implications for questions of equity in the workplace.

This nascent idea I'm calling strategic refusal is an effort to make a semi-public, collective commitment to the kind of refusal exercised in work-to-rule thinking. It's refusal that is organized and oriented toward changing workplace conditions. It's finding power in the more-than-one to drive a wedge into the process that uses those who work as the means to the organization's end.

Strategic refusal asks what would happen, for example, if we just said "We prefer not to"? A reasonable next question: You prefer not to what, exactly? A possible answer: Move ahead with prescribed changes until the necessary steps of planning are outlined and acted on (not just planned for); add more to our collective workload until x condition is met, and so on.

To be wielded thoughtfully and care-fully, strategic refusal depends on a recognition of institutional privilege. This cuts at least two ways. On one hand, because we care about the organization and have positions in it that bear more stability than that enjoyed by folks who are less senior or whose job classifications don't afford them a similar stability, we can use refusal as a tool to call attention to workplace conditions and expectations that need to change. On another hand, it also proceeds with the recognition that until the change takes place, or the desired outcome is realized, those with less stability might have to weather inequitable workloads while strategic refusal takes effect. It requires recognizing the downstream effects of refusal in the concrete conditions of the workplace. As such, it also requires that the desired outcomes are brought to bear first for those who enjoy less stability.

Katie Fitzpatrick writes about the differences between Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau on matters of civil disobedience, the political progenitor of strategic refusal in the workplace. Arendt is critical of Thoreau's position, precisely because Thoreau himself is a skeptic when it comes to community and prospects for our shared action. Fitzpatrick characterizes Arendt's position, saying:

Arendt insists that we focus not on our own conscience but on the injustice committed, and the concrete means of redressing it. This does not mean that civil disobedience has to aim for something moderate or even achievable but that it should be calibrated toward the world – which it has the power to change – and not toward the self – which it can only purify.

Differentiating between strategic refusal and quiet quitting depends on a recognition of the role of the world, the workplace, the shared conditions of our endeavor as the locus for change. While quiet quitting and individual work-to-rule commitments are beneficial for many individuals, the question remains as to what we might do if we refuse and refuse together.