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Escape from Work? Concepts, tools and practices for analysing the Anti-Work phenomenon

2025

Leaving the Job, and Then? Occupational Transitions under the Shadow of the Pandemic

  • Giulia Assirelli
  • Rosangela Lodigiani
  • Ivana Pais
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/SL2025-171004
Submitted
maggio 12, 2025
Published
2025-05-28

Abstract

The increase in job resignations during the pandemic period has brought back to the centre of the public and scientific debate the role that job plays within personal biographies. Based on a questionnaire administered to a representative sample of Italian adults in the summer of 2023, the Be-Change survey supplemented existing data with an in-depth look at the motivations and outcomes of job transitions. What emerged is that job-to-job mobility leads to an improvement in perceived economic and living conditions, and in the quality of both working and personal life. The literature on the Great Resignation has focused on choices made by workers – albeit influenced by the crisis. This research, instead, emphasizes the consequences of the pandemic, as they have been suffered by workers, in terms of unemployment and inactivity, with a specific attention to the inequalities related to individual ascribed and acquired characteristics.

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