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Has the “Bullshit Jobs” Theory Been Debunked?
David Graeber’s tactical error, and his theory’s underlying strength
In his book Bullshit Jobs, the anthropologist David Graeber argued that there’s been an explosion of “pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious” jobs since the 1980s, owing to the rise of managerial feudalism and to the financialization of capitalism.
Graber’s analysis posits several types of BS jobs:
Flunky positions are created because those in powerful positions in an organization see underlings as badges of prestige; goons are hired due to a dynamic of one-upmanship (if our rivals employ a top law firm, then so, too, must we); duct-taper positions are created because sometimes organizations find it more difficult to fix a problem than to deal with its consequences; box-ticker positions exist because, within large organizations, paperwork attesting to the fact that certain actions have been taken often comes to be seen as more important than the actions themselves; taskmasters exist largely as side effects of various forms of impersonal authority.
Instead of proving his thesis with statistics, though, Graeber illustrated it in a dramatic way, by featuring the firsthand reports of many workers who felt their jobs were BS. (These workers sent Graeber their descriptions in response to his viral article on BS jobs, which prompted Graeber to elaborate on his thesis in book form.)
Highlighting these admittedly unscientific (self-selected), but compelling confessions, Graeber went as far as to incorporate this subjective aspect of BS jobs — the personal sense that a job is BS — into his definition of BS jobs:
Final Working Definition: 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 part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
Graeber justified this subjective definition by saying that “since there is such a thing as social value, as apart from mere market value, but since no one has ever figured out an adequate way to measure it, the worker’s perspective is about as close as one is likely to get to an accurate…
