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
Related Stories
In recent years, research showed that many professionals consider their work to be socially useless. Various explanations have been proposed for the phenomenon. The much-discussed "bullshit jobs theory" by the American anthropologist David Graeber, for example, states that some jobs are objectively useless and that this occurs more frequently in certain occupations than others.
Other researchers suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work. However, this is only one part of the story, as a recent study by sociologist Simon Walo of the University of Zurich shows. It is the first to give quantitative support to the relevance of the occupations.
[...] "The original evidence presented by Graeber was mainly qualitative, which made it difficult to assess the magnitude of the problem," says Walo. "This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilised dataset and provides new evidence. This paper is therefore the first to find quantitative evidence supporting the argument that the occupation can be decisive for the perceived pointlessness." Walo also found that the share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless is higher in the private sector than in the non-profit or the public sector.
However, Walo's study also confirms other factors that influence employees' perceptions of their own work, including, e.g., alienation, unfavorable working conditions and social interaction. "Employees' assessment of whether their work is perceived as socially useless is a very complex issue that needs to be approached from different angles," the author therefore concludes. "It depends on various factors that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual usefulness of work as claimed by Graeber. For example, people may also view their work as socially useless because unfavorable working conditions make it seem pointless."
Journal Reference:
Simon Walo: 'Bullshit' After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless. Work, Employment and Society. 21 July 2023. DOI:10.1177/09500170231175771
Related:
Bullshit Jobs and the Yoke of Managerial Feudalism
Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @05:03AM (6 children)
Dilbert is Truth. Stop fighting it. Maybe find a small company where productivity matters, but you will probably work more for less money.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 02 2018, @06:11AM (5 children)
For white collar jobs maybe. In skilled trades good productivity leads pretty much directly to more money in your pocket. Management in the trades generally aren't worthless paper pushers but experienced tradesmen who know what you're worth to them and are willing to pay it after some ritual haggling.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 02 2018, @07:27AM (4 children)
This ^ a hundred times! It often seems those college kids learned about some imaginary world. Construction companies and the like don't have a lot of time for the silly bullshit that goes on elsewhere. They know what needs to be done, and they get it done, or they go broke and no one hears from them again.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 02 2018, @10:29AM
All the above being a generalization of course. You can find worthless shitheads in any walk of life. They're just not as common when Getting Shit Done is the metric by which you advance.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:39PM (1 child)
What about organizations that practice nepotism?
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 5, Funny) by edIII on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:09AM
At least they're thinking of the children.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @05:53PM
Unless they've got the right contacts to get government contracts, of course...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @05:08AM (5 children)
... writing what is essentially a disgruntled reddit comment. I envy such people.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 02 2018, @05:55AM (4 children)
What, you thought anthropologist wasn't a bullshit job too? Silly AC.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Monday July 02 2018, @06:25AM (1 child)
Don't need to worry, mate, you are safe.
Anthropologists don't study buzzards.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 02 2018, @10:29AM
Too right. Their wives and daughters do though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:13AM (1 child)
You don't seriously think that do you? They do study past cultures which can give insight into our problems today, and that's completely discounting the historical value provide us. Some of it is more biological in nature, and probably closer to a hard science. Not all anthropology is the study of current cultures in 1st world countries.
It seems like you were equating anthropologists with astrology :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:58AM
That it's a bullshit job? Absolutely. That it's not a worthwhile pursuit? No.
There's value to be had in knowing such things but it's not a value anyone who works with their hands for a living is going to consider worth a dime of their money. That's where colleges and private grants from people with more money than they have a need for come in. Not from the government though. Not ever. If they have more money than the have immediate practical use for it means they overcharged us and need to give it the fuck back because I for one damned sure do have immediate practical uses for what they take from me and I expect the vast majority of the rest of the world does as well.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @05:42AM (14 children)
I heard David Graeber on Pacifica Radio (actually, their webcasts) a couple of times in the previous weeks.
History buff Mitch Jeserich had him on "Letters and Politics". [kpfk.org]
Content starts at 06:30 after a newsbreak and goes to 59:00.
A major point was that, before Industrialism, people were paid for doing tasks, not by the hour.
Making processes simple & repetitive and making workers interchangeable also made workers less expensive|valuable.
That was a far-ranging discussion but I would have liked more depth. YMMV.
Professor of Politics Suzi Weissman and fanatical worker advocate had him on "Beneath the Surface". [kpfk.org]
I liked that better.
I saved it as 40PercentOfPeopleThinkTheyHaveBullshitJobs(&CapitalismConstantlyMakesItWorse).
That segment is from 00:30 - 40:00.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @06:06AM (7 children)
Doing tasks? Surely you just!
Before that horrible industrialization you lament, a huge percentage of people were unpaid apprenticeships, indentured servents, or in some other way bount to a master, doing whatever they were told, or tossed out on their ear. Their pay was at best rags to wear, an a pile of straw to sleep on.
Maybe after 20 years of this you might be able to open your own cobbler's shop with broken and worn out tools. The glorious pre industrialization never actually existed. Unless you were landed gentry or titled.
Tasks, my ass.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 02 2018, @07:41AM (4 children)
Yeah, all of that is common wisdom. Except, conditions weren't the same all over the world. Didn't we have a recent article, telling us that peasants in feudal Europe had more time off than we do today?
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/ [reuters.com]
I'm not finding our article on that, but the link above is very similar. No, I'm not saying that I want to be a medieval peasant or serf, but sometimes we exaggerate how bad things were, and how good things are.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday July 02 2018, @02:20PM (3 children)
Peasants did not get retirement or 20 years of education either. 45 years of working with 4 weeks/year of vacation is less than 4 years. You get abut 12 years of vacation before you die with retirement.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Monday July 02 2018, @03:46PM (2 children)
It's amazing that you don't have to go back very far to see people who did not get 20 years of education. I do genealogy and you find at the turn of the century, 1900 not 2000, there were a lot of people who had little or no education. This was particularly the case for rural farming families all throughout the 1800s. It is shocking to modern eyes to see the documents signed by "making your mark." It makes it a bitch to discover the "correct" spelling of a particular name that the owner may not have even known. The census forms had columns for literacy and/or highest grade attended.
In 1992, I hired a neighbor who was a retired concrete guy to pour me a new back patio. He knew his shit and did a great job but I was shocked to find out he was totally illiterate. His wife managed everything for him that required reading skills. He was in his early seventies then and I always wondered how he would manage if she died before him.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday July 02 2018, @06:02PM (1 child)
I know people right now in their late teens and early 20s who are in the same situation. Nearly everyone graduates from school these days, but that doesn't mean they actually learn. The schools are fully aware of this, but they claim they have to pass these kids because being held back a grade level would be more harmful to the student than simply not being educated. Of course, then the kid can't understand anything for the rest of their education, so they get no further education, and they can distract the other students from getting an education too...but we're so focused on pushing the metric of "everybody graduates" that we've stopped caring about whether or not that graduation actually means anything...life is all about hitting the milestones and everything else is just decoration...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:42PM
I was with the principal of my school when a group of parents busted in yelling that they were suing him because their kids had flunked and wasn't being allowed to pass, ie, graduate.
I think the schools realized it was going to be a hopeless battle and went off to fight another war.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:30AM
I think you're leaving out the effect of unions and organized labor, which evolved greatly over time. When you had apprenticeships and masters, the masters did organize, and they did even strike. Not the unions we understand today, and most often, the organizations were disbanded the moment they got what they want. So you could look at as periodic, and constantly evolving. The response of the "owners" so to speak, was to start employing the apprentices more, which caused quality to suffer and the wages of the masters to decrease through lost work. Again, labor organizing evolved by these proto-unions deciding to allow in the apprentices to close that loophole.
Forgot the name, but there was a very interesting guy in the north east that went around recruiting for unions in the middle of the 19th century. This was before the civil war I believe, and he had the audacious notion to allow blacks into the unions with the same thinking to foil the plans of the "owners" to pit one class of workers against the next. That plan being effective and widely used all the way up till today with White Nationalists screaming hysterically that Mexicans are taking their jobs. It's not the c-suites, regulations, or anything else, but some other guys that just want to work. *rolls eyes*
Industrialization was never the problem. It was the lack of living wages, as always. Again, as always, the war is between owners and workers. Currently right now, workers are at a real, real, fucking low. I predict labor organization to grow again, until we force them to give us some scraps, and the game continues unabated, but continually changing.
So it really depends on exactly when you're talking about in the pre-Industrialization age, and what industry you were referring to. In general though, you're probably right that the times could be referred as glorious never existed. However, there really WAS a time, however brief, that the workers were living it up. Afterwards, there was a much longer period of time when unions (again, not as we know them now), were extremely effective. That was the glorious golden age for the worker which lasted up till the late 70's. Union membership was near 1/3rd of every American, living wages were high, and union factory jobs were plentiful. I'd say maybe 15-20 years. Which is not a lot out of the last 300 years or so.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:51PM
Yes, tasks.
Much production of what we would consider low-end "consumer goods" (coarse wovens; collars, kerchiefs and linens; stockings and knit goods; pins and nails; pots and pans; etc.) were produced by non-guild home labour, and was paid as piecework--contracted at so much per item/task by a middleman who himself was contracted to deliver a set number of finished goods (another task), which were then resold to shops or vendors to unload individually (more tasks) to those who could or would not produce those items for themselves (apprentices, labourers, journeymen and their girlfriends/wives, actors, etc.).
A substantial part of non-guild manufacture was casual and task-based, with people filling their spare time and later, as this sector of the economy became more important, all their working time, with piecework, in order to make ends meet, to make their livings, or to make a few extra pence--the same folk who would later riot when the "dark satanic mills" deprived them of their livelihoods.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @07:59AM (3 children)
> A major point was that, before Industrialism, people were paid for doing tasks, not by the hour.
Piecework (worker paid for each piece completed) was common in the early industrial revolution and there are still bits of this around. My grandmother sewed parachute harnesses in WWII and was paid by the piece. A friend has her own tiny company (just one helper) which specializes in sewing cargo harness for aircraft companies and I'm sure she is paid by the piece (or the lot--same thing except contracted amounts).
While tire manufacturing can now be automated, 10-20 years ago expert tire builders (assemble the different layers of rubber/cord/steel-belts on a building drum) were paid piece work in many US factories. May still be piecework in other parts of the world?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday July 02 2018, @08:42AM (2 children)
Paid "by piece":
custom furniture
custom cabinetry
custom (tailored) clothing
custom saddles
Whether a person runs a manufactory* of a few or many, or works on their own in a shed doesn't stop the payment/production model.
Scale and quality seem to be tied together, unless you go to something likeRolls Royce or Bentley or Aerospace parts.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 02 2018, @10:31AM (1 child)
Scale and efficiency are tied together, what you do with quality in the meantime is a management decision.
Accountability as a publicly traded company and management for short term profit seeking are tied together.
Short term profit seeking and quality are the ones that are inversely tied.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @11:55AM
tl;dr: Quick. Cheap. Good. Pick two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:06PM
As opposed to they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:43PM
Getting a full time salary seems much better than being paid by the hour.
You have a great deal of latitude to manage your own time and resources along with responsibility to achieve certain pre agreed goals.
Unless you work in an organization where "salary' really means unlimited unpaid overtime. No freedom or latitude. Just work longer and harder for the same (or less) money.
Soon enough people won't be paid for doing tasks. They can watch for free as the robots do what was formerly their tasks.
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:06PM
"... feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies".
Back in my day, we called them "yes-men".
(Score: 2) by srobert on Monday July 02 2018, @07:52PM
"People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference."
Only wealthy and well to do people care about that. I just want to appear to be doing something that someone will pay me handsomely to do. After I have enough money squirreled away that I can keep me head above water, only then will I start to care about making a positive difference in the world. And at this rate I'll be dead before then.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Monday July 02 2018, @08:12PM
"Mr Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics..."
So what do they pay this guy to do? Observe that everyone else's job is B.S. People need their jobs. They don't need some egghead informing the world that they're getting paid to do something dispensable. This guy ought to be first when the line for the guillotine gets queued up.
(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.