A name is not a finding. In 2022 a survey of workers in the United States counted people who did only the work they were told to do and called them quiet quitters. In 1911 Taylor, looking with a manager's eye, had written down working slowly on purpose as "systematic soldiering" and proposed to do away with it by time study. Whether these are one gesture under two names, or two gestures that happen to look alike, is not settled by either name. It has to be settled by something else: by what each source counted, by whom it was counted, and by what would have to be true for the later thing to be new.
This short study asks how a public record handles that question. Its material is a set of fifteen cases published by GAEKJU, a studio in the RISCON family that records where people's flaws are left in words at work, from idle talk and rough talk to holding back and holding out, and asks whether those flaws really cost the work. Of the three questions GAEKJU asks of every kind of talk (is it the same across domains, does it cost performance, has it changed across eras), this study takes the third, and of GAEKJU's three kinds of record it reads the one GAEKJU calls outside cases. GAEKJU says that its outside cases cite published studies. In the fifteen read here, each case is GAEKJU's summary of one or two of those studies, set beside a later time. Seven of the fifteen cite two sources, most often an older one and a newer one; the other eight cite one study and set it beside what came after it. Each has three readings, a lean, a dated judgment, a condition that would show it wrong and a proposal.
The research question is this: when a case asks whether a kind of talk at work has changed across eras, how does it decide whether a later name marks a new thing, and where does it put the test of its answer? The question concerns the form of the cases, not the studies they summarise and not the people in them.
What the paper adds
The paper makes three claims. First, the cases read a new name as a record of who was looking. A name given by colleagues to sanction one another, a name given by a manager to something he meant to remove, a name counted by a survey and a word the workers used for their own leaving time are, in the cases, four different kinds of name, and the difference between them is part of the answer to whether anything changed. Second, where the cases keep the gesture the same, they place the change somewhere other than in people: in the reach of small talk, in the room where rough words could be let loose, in a written channel that keeps what used to scatter, in the place where extra effort can be seen. Third, the cases put the test of sameness in data that would follow the same people across years or look back before a name was coined. No case holds those data. The cases leave the era question open, and this study describes how they do it and what the openness leaves a reader who meets a new name for an old trouble.
The debate: new names for old things
The first strand of the debate this paper joins asks whether a new name in research names a new thing. Jonathan A. Shaffer, David DeGeest and Andrew Li, in Tackling the Problem of Construct Proliferation (2015), call the accumulation of ostensibly different but potentially identical constructs a salient problem and set out a step-by-step way to assess whether theoretically distinct constructs are empirically distinct. Katherine M. Lawson and Richard W. Robins, in Sibling Constructs: What Are They, Why Do They Matter, and How Should You Handle Them? (2021), take the case of constructs that are related but distinct, place it in the literature on the jingle-jangle fallacies, and give ten conceptual and empirical criteria for judging how far two constructs are siblings. Nathan A. Bowling, Valerie I. Sessa, Jonathan A. Shaffer and George C. Banks, in Read my lips: No new constructs! Construct proliferation as a threat to the future of I-O psychology (2026), go further: they hold that construct proliferation is occasionally good, usually bad, largely inevitable and often incentivised, and they call for a temporary moratorium on new constructs.
This strand tests sameness by measurement. The cases cannot, because they hold no measures of the old thing and the new thing taken together; the paper shows that they ask instead what each source counted.
The quarrel over quiet quitting is the same question in a public key. Sandro Formica and Fabiola Sfodera, in The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting paradigm shifts: An overview of current situation and future research directions (2022), divide events into a pre- and a post-pandemic era and call quiet quitting a paradigm shift that will force hospitality managers to rethink their internal marketing and human resources strategies. Murat Atalay and Umut Dağıstan, in Quiet quitting: a new wine in an old bottle? (2023), conclude the opposite: that it was introduced in the media as a brand new concept but has persisted for many years and is intertwined with theories of motivation, commitment, engagement and social exchange. Dain Lee, Jinhyeok Park and Yongseok Shin, in Where Are the Workers? From Great Resignation to Quiet Quitting (2023), take a third path: they divide the fall in hours worked in the United States into fewer people working and workers working fewer hours, and find that the second accounts for more than half of the fall between 2019 and 2022. Four of the fifteen cases cite the same 2022 survey, and the paper shows that they land in more than one place on this quarrel.
The debate: why names rise
A second strand asks not whether a name is new but why it rises. Eric Abrahamson and Gregory Fairchild, in Management Fashion: Lifecycles, Triggers, and Collective Learning Processes (1999), find that when different kinds of knowledge entrepreneurs begin, continue and stop promoting a fashion explains its lifecycle, and that enthusiastic, unreasoned discourse marks its upswing. Jos Benders and Kees Van Veen, in What's in a Fashion? Interpretative Viability and Management Fashions (2001), name the ambiguity that lets a fashionable concept's connotations be shaped and reshaped: interpretative viability. This strand puts the namer in view. Its namers, though, are promoters in a market for ideas. The cases' namers are closer to the ground: a manager, a surveyor, a group of colleagues, the workers. The paper reads the cases beside this strand and says where the fit is loose.
The debate: how research uses its past
A third strand concerns the past itself. Stephanie Decker, John Hassard and Michael Rowlinson, in Rethinking history and memory in organization studies: The case for historiographical reflexivity (2020), note that the historic turn in organisation studies has mostly sought to fit history in rather than to let it reorient the field, and ask for historiographical reflexivity, attention to whether the past is reached through archives or through retrospective accounts and memory. Steven D. Levitt and John A. List, in Was There Really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant? An Analysis of the Original Illumination Experiments (2011), show what can happen to a classic when its data are found: the data of the first and most influential of a landmark set of 1920s factory studies were thought destroyed, and once recovered, existing descriptions of supposedly remarkable patterns in them proved entirely fictional.
The outside cases live on retold classics. Two of them summarise a wiring room observed in 1931–32, and the cases' 22 references run from 1911 to 2022. This strand asks whether the cases mark a summary as a summary and know what their own record of the later time is made of; the paper shows that they do both.
The plan of the paper
Chapter 1 sets out the data and the method, then reads the cases in three sections: those that weigh an old name against a new one; those that keep the gesture and place the change in where talk is said, kept and seen; and what the cases say would show a name new. An appendix gives the cases read, word for word in this study's English. The conclusion takes up the debate again, states the contributions, and names the limits and the further research they call for.