Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Hardcover – May 15, 2018

This book originated in an article on the phenomenon of meaningless (but proliferating) jobs. Hundreds of thousands of individuals responded to it and their comments were utilized to fashion a taxonomy of what the author terms ‘bullshit’ jobs. For example: 'duct-tape jobs' in which individuals patch together things already available; 'box ticking jobs' in which people are employed to respond to a claimed but fatuous need. The book is fascinating in its anecdotes and examples. These satisfy the terms for success which the author establishes: "The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like" (p. 285).Thinking about what a genuinely free society might be like is a worthy task, one that might well occupy the time of a trapped paper pusher preparing reports that no one will read or ticking boxes on forms that will be audited by reviewers who will then forward them to supervisors who will file them in drawers that no one will ever open again. The author gives several examples of individuals who spend their days avoiding work that strikes them as worthless and devoting their hours to more wholesome and useful tasks.The very real problem is that these largely meaningless jobs are an omnipresent (and growing) phenomenon and solving the problems they create is a significant desideratum. For example, in universities the number of non-teaching staff has increased by 240% over the last few years. These people contribute very little to the overall effort. If they disappeared the money saved could be used to lower tuition (a true problem) or to hire individuals to teach freshman composition (a real need). Many were hired to palliate university constituencies which senior administrators want to silence or keep at arm's length.While this is interesting to 'think about' it is even more compelling as a problem requiring a solution. The solution: hiring senior administrators with the fortitude to confront aggrieved constituencies and inform them that the purpose of the university is to teach and do research, not create comfort zones. This requires trustees who share the goal of focusing on central functions rather than peripheral ones. The problem grows because these deanlings, deanlets and assistant deputy vice provosts are careerists who seek advancement. Advancement is achieved through the creation of 'programs'; these programs require additional staff, assistants to the additional staff, work space, heat/light/air conditioning and so on. There is no incentive to do anything but proliferate. Solution: hire senior administrators who only solve real problems and recruit underlings with the charge that they are to save money, not spend more, and solve problems, not create new ones by forcing the reallocation of funds from central functions to (their) peripheral ones.The author's perspective is both helpful and challenging. He is a self-professed anarchist. The good thing is that he is skeptical of both large governments and large corporations. The bad thing is that he is skeptical of 'policy' changes; his preference is to find grassroots movements that might be singled out and encouraged. This gives him a unique perspective; he criticizes both the left and the right. Bravo. However, he is unable to suggest solutions to the horrific problem which he has identified. For example, within universities one of the most frequently-recommended solutions (most recently articulated by Richard Vedder) to bureaucratic proliferation, the politicization of student support staff, grade inflation, the gutting of core curricula, and other problems is the closing of all colleges of education. That will require a battle plan and an actual battle, not just the thinking about an ideal world.He offers two major metaphors for our current condition. The first is a neo-feudalization of society in which a hierarchical system of dependency is created within workspaces, one that can ultimately be seen as a morbid desire to control. I think this is imprecise, because there was a reciprocal relationship within feudalism in which the lord would protect his serfs by ceding land to them and by risking his life for them in battle. That is different than having a martinet or power-tripping boss who brutalizes subordinates in order to salve his or her own ego.Another metaphor or, better, point of analysis, is far more interesting. He suggests that we are seeing the ethos of 'finance' extending to all aspects of human work. In other words, instead of having an individual capitalist invest his own money in a business, hiring workers, selling products, and so on, we have (for example) complex organizations created by large company takeovers. A film studio, e.g., once run by an entrepreneur who knew the entertainment industry, loved movies, hired his writing crew and his acting crew, etc. and greenlighted pictures by himself or with one other individual is now taken over by some other large, non-filmmaking organization. Instead of a 'clean' and orderly operation the company is suddenly infested with individuals who want to personally capitalize on a viable operation, rent-seek for themselves within that operation and, often, create ways for making money that are tangential to the original organization. For example, car makers do not make money selling cars; they make money on car loans with high interest rates or infinitely-complex 'insurance deals' that customers succumb to as a result of obfuscation or duplicity.Another way to think about it: I grew up in Cincinnati where there was a great proliferation of Savings and Loans. The notion was that the community pooled its savings and money was then lent to fellow citizens so that they could own homes. The loans were at, let us say, 7%; the investors/savers received 3-4% on their money and the savings and loan took the 3-4% as their profit. Clean. Simple. Compare that with a world in which money is made by selling unintelligible financial derivatives. This is 'capitalism' but it is a betrayal of 'purer' and 'cleaner' forms of capitalism. It is the case, e.g., that business schools are contemptuous of 'manufacturing' as an academic track (if they consider it at all) and tend to privilege 'finance' as their key area. 'Finance' is the top field at the nation's top business school. I think Professor Graeber is onto something here; certainly the modern university has been despoiled by a vast and growing school of lampreys who drain its resources and divert it from its original, central purposes.One last caveat. Professor Graeber tends to make easy generalizations that are highly questionable. For example, in defending the notion of a guaranteed basic income, he writes, "Most people would prefer not to spend their days sitting around watching TV and the handful who really are inclined to be total parasites are not going to be a significant burden on society, since the total amount of work required to maintain people in comfort and security is not that formidable. The compulsive workaholics who insist on doing far more than they really have to would more than compensate for the occasional slackers" (p. 281) Say what? He needs to have a look at the patterns of behavior of contemporary college students enumerated by Professors Arum and Roksa in their book ACADEMICALLY ADRIFT. “Socializing” has displaced “studying.”Bottom line: the book is very thought-provoking (which is its purpose) but the subject is so important that we need to hear more.

Does your job seem fulfilling? Or, to put it more clearly, do you feel your job has a net positive value to society as opposed to just a way to make money? If your answer is no, or if you think a larger percentage of the world’s jobs fall under the low- value umbrella, then you might like this bookWhat this book proposes is that far too many jobs are of this variety. The individual working the job could quit tomorrow and nothing significantly negative would happen to the company he/she works for, or society at large. Far too many people are engaged in pointless employment, or so this book suggests, which raises the important question: Why is this happening in a capitalistic society, one that is supposed to strive toward efficiency with very few exceptions? The book attempts to answer that question, and others related to it, as it rambles on for nearly 300 pages.As I read this book, I started to think about jobs I have held and others have held that fit the definition of this type of job. I can think one job of my own, from the past, that came close, but it still wouldn’t qualify. However, I can think of positions others have held that do, indeed, fit the definition. And it does make me wonder why the folks in charge allowed such a situation to occur.This book does raise some interesting questions and it does get you thinking about the usefulness of employment. It makes you wonder why the workweek hasn’t been shortened and remains at 40 hours, at least here in the United States. It makes you wonder about the push for job creation by politicians of most every stripe and whether or not this push has, in some way, encouraged the proliferation of so many useless job positions. And it makes you wonder why someone with a do- nothing job wouldn’t enjoy it at least for the easy money, since we are so often told that most anyone will slack if given the opportunity.I like any book that brings up thought- provoking questions and this book accomplishes exactly that. But it is not without its flaws, chief among them the fact that the book presents an idea without any formal research. It’s an idea that, while intriguing, has no official research to back it up. Another issue I have is the books repetition. It continues to repeat similar thoughts over and over. The book could have been reduced about one hundred pages and easily gotten its message across. And then, there are the estimations that book makes about b.s. jobs and their occurrence. I find it hard to believe that roughly one- third of all jobs qualify as useless. I can agree that most any job has its moments of uselessness and that most of us could finish our necessary tasks in fewer hours at work each day. But based on my own observation, I cannot see how so many jobs fall under the b.s designation.Our free- market economy thrives on competition and the efficiency that is supposed to result. Capitalism is still the best system around for wealth creation and opportunity, but it is not without its flaws, and the same could be said for any other economic system. There are certainly useless jobs all around the world, and this book is a good way to at least get you thinking about these jobs, why they exist, and what it means for society. I have issues with this book, but it is still an interesting enough read to recommend.

Worst book I've read in 2018 - should know better than trust an academic anthropologist to teach me anything about the industry. The subject is interesting, but the author has little idea what he's talking about and lots of ideology.Evidence is anecdotal at best: individual emails or, unbelievably, posts from internet fora where anyone can pose as anything. The BS-job-definition underpinning the book - it's BS if the person having the job believes it to be - is pure strategic genius, as it deflects all critique. Unfortunately, it's methodologically ridiculous in all its naive relativism. The obvious ramifications are left entirely unaddressed: CEOs, bankers, military (BS-job examples the author uses) do not acknowledge their job as such; engineers and SW developers, instead, often fall over each other to do that. (Annoyingly, I'm also a hands-on engineer; so are my half a dozen colleagues who read the book.) The figures (all two of them) are a joke: still unsure what Figure 1 supposedly shows, but it's neither trend (two datapoints, one year apart) nor that >50% of work is BS (unless emails, good and bad meetings, admin tasks and more are BS; anyone with teamwork experience can disprove that). Equally annoying are the straw men the authors insists on knocking down (Douglas Adams's hairdressers), as well as his abysmal ignorance of e.g. SW (industrial SW means duct-taping together open-source SW? for real?!). Again, should know better than have an anthropologist lecture me about SW.All in all, a waste of time and money if you're a trained scientist/engineer or simply partial about substantiated claims. If you insist on wasting the former, I'll save you the latter by sending you my copy (lightly annotated before giving up). Even better, just read Graeber's original essay; the book adds nothing to it anyhow.

John Maynard Keynes had great confidence that capitalism will improve not only the wealth but also the well-being of all in society. One of the specific predictions he made that, sadly, did not come true, was that by the end of the twentieth century, the major Western societies would have achieved the fifteen-hour work week because technology would have alleviated hitherto long menial hours. Why has that not happened and instead employees are working longer and longer hours? Graeber blames the creation of what he calls ‘BS jobs’ (I had to shortened the word to pass Amazon censorship rules) and the ‘BSization’ of proper jobs. Graeber’s defines a BS job as ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’. He also says that ‘Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not particularly good at’. He provides plenty of examples, cabinetmakers compelled to fry fish is one of them. There is the story of a corporate lawyer who went on to become a happy singer in an indie rock band when he became disillusioned with his job as a corporate lawyer. He had taken ‘the default choice of many directionless folk: law school’ but has found his job as a lawyer to be ‘utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist’. Some such BS jobs are so pointless that no one notices even if the employee vanishes. One case involved a Spanish civil servant who skipped work for six years to study philosophy and became an expert in Spinoza before he was found out. In another case, an employee had been sitting at his desk, dead for four days before his colleagues realised that he had died. BS jobs can also be defined by the scope of work. People who are employed in jobs that exist primarily to make someone else look or feel important are known as ‘flunkies’. Doormen are examples in this category. There are also ‘goons’ who exist only because people employ them – soldiers, for example; and ‘duct-tapers’ who are employed to help one part of an organisation communicate with another in the same organisation. In addition to financial consultancy, middle management is where one might find BS jobs aplenty. A sign that you have a job like this is when you are designated to provide ‘strategic leadership’. This is what Graeber has to say in middle management in academia:‘Now, those of us toiling in the academic mills who still like to think of ourselves as teachers and scholars before all else have come to fear the word “strategic”. “Strategic statement” (or even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instil a particular terror, since these are the primary means by which corporate management techniques – setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do and less and less time actually doing it – are insinuated into academic life’. Graeber interviewed employees from various sectors. From one he quoted, ‘in banking, obviously the entire sector adds no value and is therefore BS’. Then there is the Human Resources Department that sets up intranet and instruct employees to make it ‘into a kind of internal “community”, like Facebook. They set it up; nobody uses it. So they then started to try and bully everyone into using it…Then they tried to entice people in by having HR post a load of touchy-feely crap or people writing “internal blogs” that nobody cared about.’ Graeber argues that the rise of such jobs was not due to economic factors but political and moral ones. He discusses how jobs can truly have value, and how exactly can value be measured. What is clear that we must resist ‘The pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not be doing…if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work you’re not living right’. The last part of the book is devoted to answering the question, ‘How have so many humans reached the point where they accept that even miserable, unnecessary work is actually superior to no work at all?’ From there Graeber discusses the modern culture of managerial feudalism and the resentment it generates, yet is itself oblivious to it. If Graeber is right that this is not an economic problem but a political and moral one, then the solution cannot be economic either. Unfortunately, Graeber is loath to make policy recommendations. That keeps us then, in utter suspense – unless workers revolt.

I know little about the academic discipline of anthropology but if it's possible for someone like Graeber to be Professor of Anthr. at a world-leading university (LSE) then I am genuinely concerned for the subject and those who study it. BS jobs is a promising concept and worthy of analysis and interrogation. But Graeber's evidence is anecdotal at best, his arguments childish and his writing repetitive. Worst of all, the book is full of circular justifications and truisms and lacks intellectual rigour. Best avoided by all except true believers in revolution.

The author wrote a blog post about unnecessary jobs which gained a bit of traction. He then received a relatively small number of anecdotal storied for people describing their unnecessary jobs. He collated those stories, with seemingly little verification of their accuracy, onto a book. And that's about it.He tries to put up a convincing case that most jobs are not needed but fails to give any even remotely convincing evidence so you really have no idea how many unnecessarily jobs actually exists. This undermines the rest of the book when he tries to answer why so many people are paid to do jobs that aren't needed and why they get created in the first place.If this book was just a bunch of amusing anecdotes that would been fine but it tries to go way beyond that and ends up becoming a long, boring, pointless rant.

One of the most insightful and liberating books I've ever read. Graeber unrolls a convincing and substantial critique of the dire state of employment, and our modern conceptions of work. I only wish I'd read it sooner.Ignore the reviews saying the book is just a rehash of his 2013 essay or that it doesn't really go anywhere. They must not have gotten very far, as the book spends about 2 chapters on classifying BS jobs and the rest on a deep dive into the effects of pointless employment, the political and cultural reasons that it might exist, and the way that "jobs for the sake of jobs" damages us. It then takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the history of managerialism, the roots of "the protestant work ethic" and how it informs some of the ideas that proliferate this type of employment. It ends on what might be done about the situation. It interrogates directly some of the unspoken assumptions about work and human nature itself we've been socialised to accept at face value.There are also other reviews complaining the book doesn't back everything up with numbers, a sadly common complaint in a world where political and rhetorical literacy is dead. Despite the fact the book does actually use quite a few graphs and figures to inform its argument, its main strength is of course the rigourous qualitative analysis Graeber engages in, as should be expected in a book about human social structures and organizations. How do you come up with a number to show how many people don't actually need to be employed? (Beyond asking them of course, as the book does.)The book was also just a joy to read. Graeber's work is never dry, he really channels his animated way of speaking and thinking into the text.Read this book if you've ever felt like something is wrong with your job, or the modern workplace. In fact, read it even if you don't. You'll learn a lot either way.