Say you are on a committee and you disagree with almost everything that the committee does. There is a certain level of dissent that you can get away with before people begin to ignore you and it stops being constructive. This "complaint quota" is what I'm trying to find a word for. If there is no word, what is another way to phrase this, specifically when you have "run out" of "complaint quota"?
3 Answers
Tipping point (sociology) — Wikipedia
In sociology, a tipping point is a point in time when a group—or a large number of group members—rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice.
The phrase was first used in sociology by Morton Grodzins when he adopted the phrase from physics where it referred to the adding a small amount of weight to a balanced object until the additional weight caused the object to suddenly and completely topple, or tip. Grodzins studied integrating American neighborhoods in the early 1960s. He discovered that most of the white families remained in the neighborhood as long as the comparative number of black families remained very small. But, at a certain point, when "one too many" black families arrived, the remaining white families would move out en masse in a process known as white flight. He called that moment the "tipping point".
Journalists and academics have applied the phrase to dramatic changes in governments, such as during the Arab Spring.
Tipping point is not the only phrase from physics that has been in other fields as a metaphor for human behavior. Critical mass from nuclear physics is another.
From Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point"
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
From ODO
noun The point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change.
"Brooding about this needless death, I reached the internal tipping point, where my guilt started to outweigh my pleasure."
Threshold — ODO
noun 2.2 The level at which one starts to feel or react to something
"Conditioned to expect immediate gratification, these youth have shorter attention spans and also a low threshold for boredom."
The final/last straw — Cambridge
(also the straw that breaks the camel's back)
the last in a series of unpleasant events that finally makes you feel that you cannot continue to accept a bad situation.
"Losing my job was bad enough, but being evicted was the final straw."
"She's always been rude to me, but it was the last straw when she started insulting my mother"