In This Isn’t Working, host Tanya de Grunwald speaks with Brendan O’Neill about whether employers have “missed the vibe shift”. The immediate setting is workplace culture, but the real subject is broader. The discussion moves across free expression, DEI, class, public versus private sector responses, women’s workplace concerns, activist employees, institutional caution, and the feeling that some organisations are still speaking in an older moral register while the wider culture has already moved on. Whatever one makes of the speakers’ conclusions, the discussion is clear about the central concern: many people now feel that previously dominant scripts no longer command automatic assent, and that this is changing how people talk, disagree, and belong at work.
What makes “vibe shift” a useful phrase? It is not an argument. It is a diagnosis of atmosphere. It names the moment when a moral vocabulary that once felt secure begins to sound over-rehearsed, brittle, or strangely out of time.
In the podcast, de Grunwald and O’Neill describe that shift as a growing willingness to question ideas that, until recently, seemed professionally untouchable. They frame this particularly through workplace disputes about inclusion, language, gender identity, employee activism, and the role of HR and management in policing consensus.
The strongest part of the conversation is not any single claim, but its insistence that institutions are now dealing with people who no longer wish to buy a complete package of beliefs “off the shelf”.
Outside the podcast, the evidence suggests that something like this linguistic and cultural recalibration is indeed happening, even if it is uneven and politically contested. A Washington Post analysis of S&P 500 annual filings found that average mentions of DEI rose to 12.5 in 2022 and then fell to 4 in 2024, with many companies replacing explicit DEI language with terms such as “inclusion”, “opportunity”, and especially “belonging”. The article quotes researchers and advisers saying that firms are becoming quieter, more discreet, and less willing to use what are now seen as politically charged terms. [1]
That pattern is not confined to the United States. Recent reporting in the UK financial sector describes a similar repositioning. The Guardian reported that companies have been rebranding DEI work under headings such as “wellbeing”, “culture”, and “belonging”, while the Financial News report on the Diversity Project’s change to “Inclusion in Finance” presents the shift as both strategic and symbolic: less emphasis on slogan, more emphasis on culture and broad inclusion. These reports do not show a clean abandonment of inclusion efforts. They show something more interesting: the terms of civic and organisational discussion are being reconfigured in real time. [2]
This matters because words do not simply describe organisational life. They organise it.
A recent Journal of Business Ethics article on the phrase “bring your whole self to work” argues that inclusion discourse can end up individualising diversity while leaving structural exclusions intact. Its author says that “whole self” approaches risk turning authenticity into a productivity tool, and asks how organisations decide which identities are acceptable and which remain bounded or managed.
This connects directly to one of the more revealing moments in the podcast, where O’Neill dismisses the “whole self” slogan and argues that work requires a distinction between public and private life. The point is not that one side is simply right and the other wrong. The point is that the workplace has become a theatre in which competing ideas of selfhood, authority, and participation are now openly colliding. [3]
A useful way to understand this is through metamodernism, but not in the lazy sense that metamodernism is merely an “oscillation” between modern and postmodern positions. The original essay by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker did describe metamodernism as a “structure of feeling” that moves with, between, and beyond modernism and postmodernism.
That remains important. But later work, especially Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s, pushes the concept further. Storm argues that metamodernism “works through the postmodern critiques” and studies the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. He proposes a “Process Social Ontology”, in which social life is understood as dynamic, contingent, and temporarily stabilised rather than fixed once and for all.[4]
That is a much richer frame for the podcast than a simple left-right backlash story. Postmodernism, at its strongest, taught us to question objectivity claims, expose hidden power, distrust final vocabularies, and notice how discourse shapes what can count as truth.
Postmodernism, to use one definition, is characterised by skepticism or relativism, suspicion of reason, and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining power. That critical inheritance matters. But it can also harden into a reflex in which every public claim is treated primarily as domination, every disagreement as concealed violence, and every shared norm as an oppressive metanarrative.
The metamodern turn begins when critique is no longer enough. People still want interpretation, but they also want reconstruction. They want a language for meaning, trust, and ordinary social coordination that does not collapse back into naïveté. That is why the present “vibe shift” is more than ideological churn. It suggests that many people are trying to recover the ability to ask not only who benefits from a discourse, but whether that discourse still helps them make sense of lived reality.
In that respect, the shift is metamodern because it moves beyond post-structural suspicion without forgetting what suspicion uncovered. It seeks a more reflexive account of how meaning is made, how social relations are held together, and how institutions can remain legitimate when certainty has thinned out. [6]
This is where the idea of Loyalty Exit Options becomes especially useful. A sustainable democracy cannot require permanent emotional or ideological enclosure. People must be able to revise their commitments, step back from a group language, or leave a moral consensus without being treated as apostates.
That is what I mean by loyalty exit options: socially legitimate ways of changing one’s mind, re-situating one’s allegiance, or declining a group orthodoxy without total expulsion. In democratic life, heteronomous ideas are not a threat to be suppressed. They are a condition of renewal. If all thought must remain endogenous to the group, then the group becomes dogmatic by design.
The This Isn’t Working podcast repeatedly circles this problem. Its examples include women who have pushed back against workplace orthodoxies; private sector employers who are said to be reassessing the political costs of activist cultures; and institutional settings where people fear speaking plainly because disagreement is quickly moralised. Again, one may agree or disagree with the speakers’ politics.
The deeper issue is the social mechanism they are describing:
- When belonging depends on verbal compliance, dissent becomes costly;
- When dissent becomes costly, people either self-censor or leave;
- When too many thoughtful people either self-censor or leave, public reasoning declines.
Interestingly, recent academic work on DEI backlash supports a more nuanced version of this diagnosis than the culture-war caricatures allow. A 2025 scoping review in the Journal of Sustainable Business distinguishes between backlash and backfire. Backlash is described as intentional resistance, often ideological or emotional. Backfire refers to unintended negative effects of initiatives that were meant to help, such as stigma, resentment, or reduced engagement.
The review argues that the two often interact, and that provocative terminology, poor implementation, managerial misalignment, and insufficient participation can all intensify the problem. It also notes that some organisations now treat “belonging” as the intersection of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and recommends more participatory, trust-building forms of communication. [7]
That, to my mind, is where the next discussion should go. Not towards a winner-takes-all fight over which tribe owns the workplace, but towards a more serious inquiry into how civic speech is changing. Which terms have become exhausted, and why? Which forms of managerial language invite trust, and which produce compliance theatre? How can institutions hold disagreement without converting it instantly into a disciplinary event?
What forms of belonging are compatible with principled dissent. How can organisations distinguish genuine inclusion from symbolic choreography. These are not side questions. They are now central to democratic culture.
The most hopeful reading of the vibe shift is therefore not that one orthodoxy is toppling another. It is that people are rediscovering the need for live sensemaking. They want less script and more judgement. Less ritualised affirmation and more honest conversation. Less demand for total identification and more room for partial, provisional, revisable commitment.
That is metamodern in the best sense. It does not abandon critique. It places critique inside a broader effort to rebuild meaning, test language against experience, and let people move between positions without humiliation.
A future conversation worth having would start there. It would ask how workplaces, media, civic institutions, and political cultures can create conditions in which people are allowed to think in public again. Not recklessly. Not cruelly. But openly.
It would ask how loyalty can become a practice of good-faith participation rather than enforced conformity.
And it would recognise that a democratic society does not become healthier when everyone says the same thing with greater moral intensity. It becomes healthier when people can disagree, depart, return, and revise without the whole social fabric tearing at the seam.
That may be the real meaning of the vibe shift. Not the triumph of a faction, but the return of the permission to re-think.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2025/dei-companies-sec-filings/ “‘DEI’ vanishing from corporate filings, mirroring broader retreat – Washington Post”
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/26/firms-rebranding-diversity-initiatives-avoid-unwanted-political-attention?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Firms ‘rebranding’ diversity initiatives to avoid unwanted political attention”
[3]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-025-06055-0 “Bring Your Whole Self to Work: Boundary Conditions of Subjectivity in Diversity and Inclusion Discourse on Investment Bank Websites | Journal of Business Ethics | Springer Nature Link”
[4]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Full article: Notes on metamodernism”
[5]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Postmodernism | Definition, Doctrines, & Facts | Britannica”
[6]: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo90478773.html “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, Storm”
[7]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40991-025-00122-5 “Diversity, equity and inclusion at a crossroads: a scoping review of the characteristics of its workplace backlash | Journal of Sustainable Business | Springer Nature Link”
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