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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: 1) by khallow on Monday July 02 2018, @09:28PM (4 children)
OTOH, is it really such a stretch that 40% of humanity doesn't understand their place in the world and economics well enough to figure out whether they're doing something useful or not? I mean we get those kinds of numbers in support of mediocre US presidents.
The obvious rebuttal to this sort of sentiment is that labor costs are a big deal in the real world. Any company where 40% (or more!) jobs were truly bullshit jobs would be trampled by the company where only 20% of the jobs were bullshit. I don't expect perfect elimination of job inefficiency, but there's this huge incentive to make peoples' work worthwhile.
OTOH, maybe the author is just commingling business and government jobs, and most of the useless people are actually not in business?
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:22PM (3 children)
I suspect, if those 40% were asked by the higher-ups in the company if their jobs were bullshit they would give a much different answer than they would give to a co-worker or to a poll conducted by an outsider, else they would not have those jobs. Add in a few layers of managerial territoriality, self-aggrandizement, and obfuscation, and top it with a helping of the Peter Principle, and it ain't at all surprising...
I also suspect that smaller companies with, by necessity, a smaller percentage of bullshit jobs, are routinely trampled by larger, less efficient companies, which are then bought out and dismantled either by giant corporations which can mask their inefficiencies behind a facade of hyper-efficiency, or by parasitic corporations which produce nothing but quarterly profits.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 05 2018, @04:39AM (2 children)
And water flows uphill. What's the mechanism by which a giant corporation which is allegedly so inefficient continue to buy out far more effective businesses?
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday July 05 2018, @08:22PM (1 child)
Short term profit-taking, corporate raiding, smash-and-grab, call it what you will. They are corporations that pursue profits with no consideration for the damage they wreak. I'd call them predators, but they are more analogous to the worst of human sport hunters--instead of eliminating the weak and inefficient, they target the youthful, healthy and innovative, and utilize nothing save whatever they regard as the trophy.
Worse, are those within corporations who gut the useful and profitable, collect their promotions and bonuses and leave before the long-term damage is felt, or those who collect the profits from replacing excellence and innovation with stagnant mediocrity through illusory efficiencies.
We can also add patent trolls and the media associations to the list as well.
Collectively and individually, they are the host-killing parasites of the business world. I give you, they are efficient parasites, and they are profitable parasites, but, unlike natural parasites, they neither cull nor do they symbiotically benefit the businesses they feed upon, those that work for those businesses, consumers, or society-at-large.
They siphon away resources which could be used to produce, employ or innovate; and, I would argue, they make the market-in-general less efficient.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 06 2018, @04:44AM
I call them approaches that often fail precisely because of the short term thinking.
HOW? Something like that doesn't persist without a reason. And the short term thinkers with less deadweight will do better.