People complain about their jobs being meaningless. Does it matter?

David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It, would have smiled at Elon Musk’s sacking half the Twitter workforce. Musk seems to be confirming the main thesis of the book, that much work in a modern economy is not productive. That includes work in businesses which does not add to profitability.

Graeber reports estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of all jobs may be ‘bullshit’, which he defines as

a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though as a part of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend this is not the case.

(I would prefer to focus on ‘bullshit work’, since often there is a useful element in a job, even if a small one. Graeber’s definition also excludes workers who with hindsight realise they were in a bullshit job, although they had convinced themselves they were useful at the time.)

The main source of evidence for Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, is a host of people who wrote to his website describing their meaningless work. They are mainly from the private sector although there are a number of stories from academia. The book is worth reading for its recounted gossip alone.

‘Just a moment’, says a narrowly trained economist, ‘private businesses are under competitive pressure; they cannot afford bullshit jobs. Sure, they may exist in the public sector which is a monopoly but not in competing businesses.’ Graeber and those who wrote to him say they exist in the private sector; so does Musk. (Most academics would support them, despite universities competing against each other)

What may be going on here is that the competition which ought to drive out inefficiency is actually a long-term process. In the short term, most businesses are monopolies or quasi-monopolies prone to employing bullshit jobs.

Graeber, attempting to systematise the vast quantity of amorphous anecdotes forwarded to him, identifies the following five categories of bullshit jobs. (I am not sure these categories work. They are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.)

1. Flunkies who exist primarily to make someone look important. (Graeber has in mind personal assistants and the like, but I suspect he would add those promoted to protect people at the top. Academics tell me of deans (oops, I mean deputy-vice chancellors – status inflation is endemic in bullshit jobs) with no academic reputation who keep creating sub-deans or whatever so they are surrounded by a phalanx of flunkies to support them if the staff get stroppy.)

2. Goons who find their job objectionable not just because they feel lack positive value but also because they see them as essentially manipulative and aggressive. Examples include corporate lawyers, advertising marketing and publicity. Perhaps ‘goon’ is not a good term for them. An example would be many in a PR department. One convinced a vice chancellor there was a need to ‘rebrand’ his university. To this outsider, and indeed to the academics, the rebranding had nothing to do with the values and purpose of the university – research, scholarship, teaching. The great advantage of the rebrand is it gave the PR department a purpose and employment, with a lot of follow-up work. What happens when that runs out? The department will recommend another rebranding exercise without mentioning that its last effort was a failure.

3. Duct Tapers are those who are there to deal with problems ‘that ought not to exist’. The term comes from the software industry describing those who fix up badly designed programs. Graeber applies the notion to similar fixers outside the software industry citing someone whose job was to turn a statistician’s report into English: ‘He struggled to produce grammatically correct sentences. He tended to avoid using verbs.’

4. Box Tickers are those who exist to allow an organisation to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. Academics spent precious research time – literally days – filling in tedious forms to enable their performance to be assessed for Performance Based Research Fund purposes. The universities provided box tickers to assist them, although uniformly, so I am told, they knew nothing about research; their skills were filling in forms. Some of the university bureaucracies got so enthusiastic, that they required the forms to be filled in years when the PBRF was not being assessed. What would their box tickers do in an off-year?

5. One type of Taskmasters assigns work to others believing there is no need for their intervention because the job will be done anyway. They are the opposite to flunkies, being unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates. The other type create bullshit tasks for others, supervise bullshit and create entirely new bullshit jobs. Organisations set up complicated systems to prevent cheating and then have to create a higher layer to ensure the anti-cheaters don't cheat. (Very often the effect is to create an expensive monitoring system which saves peanuts.)

Clearly Graeber has identified an important phenomenon although I did not find the latter part of the book provided convincing explanations; some of the history about the role of work ethics was fascinating.

I cannot help noticing that the rise of bullshit jobs occurs about the same time as the rise of generic managers, those who claim to be able to manage anything even though they know nothing about what they are managing. Many might argue that many of the layers of management they create are bullshit jobs, but generally such generic managers are unaware of their uselessness.

Perhaps generic management and bullshit jobs are the result of the demise of the clerical profession as a consequence of the digital revolution, with the clerks having moved on.

How do bullshit jobs relate to the Jahoda-Maslow ‘latent functions of paid work’? In addition to the income a job also:

– imposes a time structure on the working day;

– involves regularly shared experiences and contacts with people outside the household;

– links an individual to goals and purposes which transcend her or his own;

– enforces activity;

– provides social status (typically people who meet for the first time ask each other what do they do).

Perhaps bullshit jobs are characterised by people getting paid for work they do not think is socially valuable. It may be a form of alienation, raised by Marx in relation to nineteenth-century industrialisation; the notion is accepted today by a wider group of thinkers than just Marxists.

An economist cannot help noticing that many of Graeber’s respondents seemed well paid. In contrast, sewerage workers are low-paid; they may work with shit but their’s is not bullshit jobs.

Economic theory would predict that people doing useless work would be poorly paid, so for economists, bullshit work is a troubling phenomenon. They are not experts on organisational theory. The discipline generally treats businesses as black boxes, which have predictable responses to external stimulus. What goes on inside is a mystery they don’t need to understand. Except that bullshit jobs undermine the sorts of theories economists rely upon to explain the responses. Thankyou David Graeber for pointing this out, and Elon Musk for inadvertently confirming he is right.