Leaving, but Not Escaping: Corporate Residue and the Limits of Exit

• In Event: Theorizing Capitalist Crisis & Middle-Class Politics

Abstract

Voluntary exit from elite, high-intensity jobs is commonly framed as rupture: workers withdraw consent, reclaim control, and begin a new identity. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with former employees of China’s major tech firms, this article shows why exit often fails to deliver the break it promises. Workers carry with them durable practices, affective orientations, ideological commitments, and career dispositions shaped by their time in tech, operating on the level of their selfhood. I argue that exit from high-status professional employment reorganizes rather than ends the effects of labor control. I call this phenomenon corporate residue: the lasting imprint of intensive corporate socialization that persists through and beyond the employment relationship. By relocating the study of labor control from the bounded workplace to the post-employment life course, the article extends theories of exit, mobility, and consent in contemporary capitalism and identifies the social conditions under which leaving can become genuine disengagement rather than reorganization.

Author

• Ruiling Li, Cornell University