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In an interview, anthropologist David Graeber answers questions about the modern workplace and the purposeless jobs that fill it.
Not since Dilbert has truth been spoken to power in soulless work settings. But the cartoon character's successor may be David Graeber. In 2013 he achieved viral fame with cubicle zombies everywhere after he published a short essay on the prevalence of work that had no social or economic reason to exist, which he called "bullshit jobs". The wide attention seemed to confirm his thesis.
Mr Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, has expanded on the ideas in a recent book. He responded to five questions from The Economist's Open Future initiative. He rails against "feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies." As he puts it: "People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference."
[...] One thing it shows is that the whole "lean and mean" ideal is applied much more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It's not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies.
From The Economist : Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday July 02 2018, @02:16PM
The topic is mostly a dog whistle for the diversity shakedown racket and so forth. The diversity department has a lot of people that do, pretty much, nothing.
Another contributor, which a family member is involved in first hand, is a generation or two ago, public school teachers kinda taught mostly how they wanted with the exception of the district selected and purchased the textbooks in bulk to get a good price (unlike university where they optimize for highest cost of textbooks). Anyway now there's roughly 1:1 admin to teacher ratio because teachers are hyper micro managed down to making pre-planned presentations planned to five minute increments in order to get the best standardized test scores. Someone, either teacher or kid, wants to take an extra couple minutes to talk about something off the topic of teaching to the test? Too bad. Its better in lower grades, supposedly. I've seen similar things at public utilities, every five call center employees needs at least one analyst to generate daily, weekly, monthly, annual detail metrics of each call. If each call lasts five minutes and categorizing and documenting each call takes nearly a minute per call because its obviously highly subjective and manual, that plus the endless semi-automated reports "makes sense" even if it seems kinda insane to waste that kind of effort on documenting.
Another contributor is CYA culture... in most of the nation the supply of suitable workers greatly exceeds demand, leading to insane job application requirements to whittle down the influx, and the CYA effect on current employees leads to vast numbers of people who have no purpose other than to deflect blame from a department onto another department. I saw a lot of that at public utilities also. People who's only full time job was literally to reject incoming work back to other departments... if there's ten qualified people to be the manager, and the best way to improve your exceedingly detailed manager job metrics is to ruin the customer experience, well, damn the customers, full speed ahead, kick all that incoming work back! And of course the call center has employees who's only job was to shovel as much shit as fast as possible at operations and engineering to improve their metrics, its not like their hands were clean... Eventually you end up with a ridiculous fraction of employees working to make sure their department doesn't work and whichever dept does more, will be rated as more successful, so one guess what you'll get more of over time. Eventually you end up with departments that don't really "do" anything, then the entire dept gets downsized. The most personally profitable management decision is to be the second most useless department, which is certainly an interesting way to run a company.