Finding the Meaning in Bullshit Jobs

I’ve been reading Bullshit Jobs by LSE anthropologist David Graeber (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Graeber defines a bullshit 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” (pp. 9-10), and identifies five major types: 

• Flunky jobs make someone else look or feel important without any other real purpose,
• Goon jobs are those with an aggressive element that exist only because someone else has also created them and has an advantage if they are unmatched,  
• Duct-taping jobs fix problems that shouldn’t exist,
• Box-ticking jobs make an organization look like it’s doing something when it’s not,
• Taskmaster jobs manage others who don’t need managing.

The common theme here is that these are all pointless jobs. They are not bad in the conventional sense of having lousy pay and working conditions—indeed, Graeber notes that many bullshit jobs are corporate and government jobs with good pay and safe working conditions—but they don’t have any real value. Citing the fact that 37% of survey respondents said that their job does not make a meaningful contribution to the world, Graeber then claims that “if 37 percent of jobs are bullshit, and 37 percent of the remaining 63 percent are in support of bullshit, then slightly over 50 percent of all labor falls into the bullshit sector in the broadest sense of the term” (p. 62). 

Suppose that this is true, and, as Graeber argues, it’s largely a post-war phenomenon. Then this means that in that time period, “upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work” when we equate work to doing something meaningful (p. 265). That’s a provocative way to think about what might be happening in the world of work. Moreover, Graeber also points out that “if you combine this with the bullshitization of useful occupations (at least 50 percent in office work; presumably less in other sorts), and the various professions that basically exist only because everyone is working too hard (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen, to name a few), we could probably get the real workweek down to fifteen hours—or even twelve—without anyone noticing much” (pp. 62-3).

Admittedly, I’m not convinced that the true magnitudes are as large as claimed. In Bullshit Jobs, the supporting anecdotes perhaps represent the worst cases and I'd be surprised if we couldn't find dsyfunctional examples in all occupations. But it's entire occupations that are then characterized as being bullshit, as in this description of goon jobs: “If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers” (p. 36). By the end, pretty much all administrative and finance-related jobs have been labeled as useless, including human resources. So I think we need to be concerned with fallacies of composition. But even if the actual number of bullshit jobs is (a lot?) less than claimed, the implications in the previous paragraph are still important to confront, albeit perhaps better phrased as questions (e.g., how many people have essentially been put out of (meaningful) work?).

On a personal level, having a bullshit job is a problem because work should be providing meaning and rewards beyond a paycheck (as I’ve written about in The Thought of Work and elsewhere). In this way, the micro-level problems with bullshit jobs are contained within Karl Marx’s articulation of the problems of worker alienation under capitalism. But I’m not seeing how this aspect of Bullshit Jobs improves upon the concept of alienation. In fact, it seems that workers in bullshit jobs are all alienated, but the concept of alienation importantly also draws attention to the ways in which non-bullshit jobs can also be alienating.

Graeber goes onto argue that bullshit jobs create a moral envy in which workers with bullshit jobs feel resentment toward those with meaningful jobs, even though in Graeber’s eyes these meaningful jobs often have worse pay and working conditions. In fact, envy and resentment among managers, who are all seen as occupying bullshit jobs, towards those below them who are doing real work “is a key part of the justification of underpaying such workers” (p. 248). Frankly, I’m skeptical of this. Indeed, I would argue the opposite—blue collar and service workers are paid less because of prejudice and bias (not envy) that subconsciously allow managers to overstate their own importance while devaluing the contributions of manual and service work. Graeber also gives a lot of power to the finance industry and government officials in intentionally creating processes that lead to bullshit jobs in order to line their own pockets or prevent others from being able to navigate social safety nets. The former seems compelling but I’m not sure how much of the big picture it can explain, while the latter might be the unfortunate result of other priorities that are seen as legitimate by policy-makers (e.g., fraud).

But in some respects, these might just be second-order squabbles. For what Graeber really seems concerned about are the polarization in society (which is connected to work in one way or another) and freeing up work so that individuals can choose their own meaningful paths (including the freedom to find fulfillment without working at all). These are critically important issues that deserve all the attention they can get, and Graeber's ideas on the primary concerns are worth serious reflection. So in the end, if the provocatively overstated style of Bullshit Jobs causes more to confront these deeper issues, then I can overlook—OK, you know I have to say it—the bullshit.


Update (January 14, 2019): Just published research finds that the fraction of workers who report that their jobs are socially useless is a lot lower than what's claimed by Graeber, but it's still non-negligible.  

What Happens at Work Doesn’t Stay There: (Poor) Workplace Democracy Promotes (Poor) Political Democracy

The workplace is not like Las Vegas—what happens at work, often doesn’t stay at work. Nearly 250 years ago, the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, worried that mind-numbing jobs would cause workers to lose the ability and motivation to be thoughtful, engaged citizen-people outside of the workplace (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article II). This is perhaps one of the few areas where Karl Marx would have agreed with Smith, and Marx’s rejection of capitalism is deeply rooted in his concerns with the far-reaching, negative effects of work. The detrimental effects on someone’s personal life and on their community might be fairly obvious for workplace injuries, and there is increasing recognition of the mental health risks of lousy work. But does the nature of the workplace affect other aspects of society, like political participation?

Some argue that the workplace can be a breeding ground for pro-democratic attitudes and political behaviors. That is, the use of deliberative and other participatory skills in one’s work can give someone the confidence and the skills to want to participate in the political arena. And hearkening back to Smith and Marx, the absence or repression of autonomous decision-making in the workplace can undercut attitudes and skills that promote political participation, thus weakening political engagement. But does this actually happen in practice, at least to a magnitude we can observe across many workers?

To investigate this, my co-authors and I analyze European Social Survey data on over 14,000 workers across 27 European countries. These workers reported their level of political participation in nine activities (such as voting, contacting a politician, wearing a campaign badge, and belonging to a political party) and also their interest level in politics. Moreover, they also answered several questions on the extent to which they have autonomy and participate in decision-making in their jobs. We combined these several questions into an index of individual voice or workplace democracy.

We then undertake a number of multivariate analyses and find that that employees with greater levels of individual voice at work are indeed significantly more likely to engage in a broad array of pro-democratic behaviors, and we find strong results even when controlling for a wide-range of employee and job characteristics. Or to put this in a negative frame reminiscent of Smith and Marx, dictatorial and authoritarian workplace practices are likely to be related to reduced political participation in the democratic arena.

This relationship appears just as strong as the commonly-accepted relationship between labor unions and political participation. We further show that the results do not appear to be driven by a small number of specific countries; rather, the relationship between workplace democracy and political democracy is one that is apparent across diverse countries, and hence across diverse institutional environments.

These results imply that the importance of organizational practices extends beyond the workplace, and public policy interventions might be warranted to prevent dictatorial work regimes that dampen political engagement. And while we use accepted econometric techniques to account for the possibility that the causal arrows runs from the workplace to the political arena, our findings are still important if causality actually runs from the political arena to the workplace. In such a case, then a participatory workplace should be seen as an important outlet for individuals valuing political involvement. In particular, workplace participation can prevent individuals from getting frustrated or losing their deliberative skills, thus reducing the likelihood that they withdraw from the political arena. So regardless of which way the causal arrow points, the workplace-political engagement nexus is an important one that deserves greater attention.

What happens at work, doesn’t stay at work. Rather, work is an inseparable part of our lives and our communities. As such, it deserves continued scrutiny by all of us. 

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Source:  John W. Budd, J. Ryan Lamare, and Andrew R. Timming (2018) "Learning about Democracy at Work: Cross-National Evidence on Individual Employee Voice Influencing Political Participation in Civil Society,"  ILR Review (https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793917746619).
Click here to read the full paper.

Working with Purpose…Not Just for the Productive

In April I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Woods (@ArthurWoods), a co-founder of Imperative, who was in Minneapolis to speak at a couple of our events, including our annual HR Tomorrow conference. Imperative emphasizes working with purpose—creating a measure of purpose, identifying the importance of purpose, and helping companies facilitate purpose. In his presentation, Arthur eloquently articulated the meaning of purpose (“Purpose is something that we gain daily from relationships, doing something greater than ourselves, and from personal and professional growth”), and documented the value and importance of purposeful workers.

At the end of this stimulating and important presentation I commented that the only thing missing from his presentation was a picture of Karl Marx. It’s common to popularly associate Marx with communism, but first and foremost Marx was a profound social theorist of work whose concern with workers’ suffering led him to seek a more humane society. He thought that the commodification of work under capitalism leads to the loss of one’s essential humanness, a loss that Marx labeled “alienation.” In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx identified four ways in which workers are alienated under capitalism:

1. Individuals are divorced from the product of their labor—the business owns and controls what the workers produce.
2. Since business owners control how things are made, workers surrender control of their actions to someone else.
3. Creative work is seen as an essential feature of being human so #1 and #2 deprive humans of their essential nature.
4. Because people relate to each other through their work, they are alienated from each other.

If we set aside the fact that Marx’s alienation is inherent in capitalism and is not a subjective feeling of job dissatisfaction or a result of  undesirable job characteristics, in important ways the dimensions of alienation match Imperative’s emphasis on the importance of relationships, autonomy, and personal meaning in work. I think this is important because it reinforces the gravity of these issues, even if there are important differences. 

Imperative’s business case for organizations to embrace the importance of working with purpose is that purposeful workers are better workers. Since it is a business enterprise itself, I understand why Imperative makes this case. But there is an unsettling conundrum here in which the deep, non-instrumental importance of work is being justified on instrumental grounds. This seemingly implies that in cases where purposeful workers are not more productive, then imbuing work with greater meaning isn’t something important to pursue. Or that only purposeful workers are worthy of efforts to improve their working conditions. This is analogous to the problem with justifying corporate diversity programs solely by the business case (then these programs become subjected to the vagaries of executives’ perceptions of which employees, if any, are a source of competitive advantage, rather than diversity being seen as important for human reasons). From an industrial relations perspective in which labor is more than a commodity, the improvement of work (and diversity) is an important imperative for all workers, even when it doesn’t improve productivity or other instrumental outcomes.

Returning to Marx’s alienation, I raised this connection with Arthur as a way to emphasize that these are longstanding concerns in the world of work (so bravo!), and there have been numerous movements between Marx and now to try to give work and workers deeper meaning and respect (for example, the field of industrial relations). By bringing new data and case studies to the issue, I hope that Imperative can successfully expand upon earlier movements to embrace of the deep importance of work, which is also a goal of my book The Thought of Work. This is a deeply important issue, and a longstanding one. Unfortunately, history doesn’t seem to be on our side.

Happy May Day!

Conceptualizing Work: A History of Powerful Ideas

What is work? Why do we work? How is work valued? These questions are fundamental to any human society. Without a written record, we cannot know with certainty how the earliest humans thought about work, but the importance of sharing food and other resources means that prehistoric work embodied at least an element of serving a community's needs rather than just the needs of an individual and his or her immediate family.

With the emergence of social differentiation in hierarchical societies, work continued to be a way to serve others, especially the ruling elite, as was the case for slaves in the ancient Greek city-states and for the conscripted peasants building the Egyptian pyramids or working for the emperors of the Tang dynasty. By claiming the divine right of kings, working to serve the elite was legitimized by portraying this work as serving the gods. And later, God. Within the early Christian church, work was seen as a way to serve God's kingdom by preventing idleness (and therefore sin), providing for one's family, and supporting charitable giving. But given the medieval power of the church and visions of royalty and feudal lords as varying extensions of God, doing the (Holy) Lord's work was often inseparable from doing the (feudal) lord's work in concept and in practice.

In indigenous societies, providing for the community is frequently seen as an activity in harmony with nature. But when one works many hours a day to slave for a ruler, make corvée payments to a lord, to tithe to a church, or to provide for more than a modest standard of living for one's household, then it is more difficult to see work as being in harmony with nature. Rather, work becomes a struggle to extract more than one needs from nature, and the idea of work is thus seen as a curse. This is seen quite starkly in the Judeo-Christian tradition in which humans are cursed with hard work "by the sweat of your brow" (Genesis 3:19) as punishment for human imperfection and weakness. In a related vein, the elite classes of some societies propagate an ideology in which lousy work is the curse of the lower classes. The caste system in India is rooted in a belief that it is the will of the gods that specific castes must endure lousy work. And Aristotle reasoned that nature creates humans of varying intellectual abilities such that the intellectually inferior are naturally suited to be slaves whose role in life is to carry out menial tasks. In contemporary societies, the marginalization of some tasks as "women's work" or fit only for minorities or immigrants can similarly reflect a belief in a natural social hierarchy, and the resulting cursed nature of work for members of these groups.

Thinking of work as a curse or as serving others are arguably the dominant pre-modern conceptualizations of work. While these powerful ideas continue to have relevance today--whether in the form of an unquestioned acceptance of work as a necessary evil, modern slavery, or serving others through volunteering--the ascendancy of the individual in Western thought between the 1500s and 1800s brought new complexities to the thinking on work. In particular, the importance of the individual in modern Western thought yielded multiple conceptualizations of work as an activity that serves the individual rather than someone else.

First, work can be seen as a source of individual freedom. In Western anthropocentric societies, nature is something to be mastered for human needs. An increasingly scientific and decreasingly religious view of the natural world during the Middle Ages made nature seem conquerable. Work, then, became seen as mastery over nature, a way to create freedom from the vagaries of the natural world and unlock humans from the slavish pursuit of the food and shelter needed to survive. Today, we frequently think of this freedom as creativity.

In the 17th century, work also came to be seen as freedom not only from nature, but also from the coercion of others when John Locke asserted that labor establishes ownership of private property. This political liberalism thinking then laid a foundation for economic liberalism--if work is seen as one's own property, then you are free to sell your labor services for pay if desired. And thanks to Adam Smith's influence in the 18th century, work came to be viewed as an economic commodity--an abstract quantity of productive effort that has economic value traded in economic markets.

And once people achieved the liberty to trade their work--conceptually as well as in practice--work became seen as various forms of free activity distinguished by differing views on the nature of human self-interest. In mainstream economic thought, human behavior is characterized by a quest for the consumption of goods, services, and leisure, so work is thought of as an activity to support this quest. Work itself is not desirable--either because it is stressful and arduous, as was articulated by early economists such as W. Stanley Jevons, or because it is less fun than leisure as assumed by mainstream economists today--but is tolerated in order to directly or indirectly procure goods, services, and leisure. This is the often-unstated intellectual foundation for using hefty incentive payment schemes to motivate investment bankers, corporate executives, and many others.

If human self-interest is instead characterized by needs for achievement, mastery, self-esteem, and self-worth, then work can instead be thought of as a source of personal fulfillment and psychological well-being. In the 19th century, the ideal of achieving joy in work was reflected in the writings of the French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier and the French author Émile Zola, and was championed to the greatest extent by Karl Marx's exaltation of work as the highest form of human activity. In contemporary scholarship in psychology and related fields, this ideal of joy has largely been reduced to job satisfaction. Modern human resource management is also rooted is this thinking of work as personal fulfillment because effective human resource management practices are assumed to be those that satisfy workers' psychological needs and therefore enhance job performance.

The material self-interest emphasized in mainstream economics or the desire for intrinsic rewards emphasized in psychology fail to recognize that work is embedded in complex social phenomena in which individuals seek approval, status, sociability, and power. The social context also provides constraints, whether in the form of social norms that define the boundaries of acceptable behaviors or work roles, or in the form of power relations that define access to resources. This gives rise to another important way of thinking about work--that is, work as a set of human interactions that are experienced in and shaped by social networks, social norms and institutions, and socially-constructed power relations.

Beyond satisfaction and social approval, human self-interest might also be the search for an understanding of who we are and where we fit into the broader world. In this way, work can be thought of as a source of identity. This can occur on several levels, such as through biographical information that includes descriptors related to one's work, by identification with various groups such as occupation, employer, and class, or through the self-presentation and social feedback that comes from making our work roles public. At perhaps the deepest level, work can be seen as a fundamental aspect of creating a human identity not as individuals or classes, but as a species. This centrality of work for humanness was most famously advanced by Marx's argument that "In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being" (1844: 76-77). It is from this belief that self-directed work is the essential quality of being human that Marx further argued that the commodification of work under capitalism causes alienation, and then led him and others to search for alternatives to capitalism.

Marx, of course, was not the only critic of the conceptual commodification of work that has occurred over the past three centuries or so. Feminist scholars and activists challenge the prioritizing of paid employment and the devaluing of reproductive work that comes from the equation of work to the production of economic commodities. Rather, it is argued, care work--the physical, cognitive, and emotional effort required to attend to and maintain others--should be thought of as "real work" instead of purely instinctual activities done out of love and not worthy of workers' compensation, social security, recognition of full economic value in divorce proceedings, and other culturally-produced expressions of value.

Heterodox economists, sociologists, philosophers, industrial relations scholars, theologians, human rights activists, and others also reject the thinking of labor as a commodity that treats workers simply as factors of production. Rather, it argued that workers are human beings and are therefore entitled to rights and standards of dignity and self-determination irrespective of what the market provides. This way of thinking is a descendant of the 19th century concerns with wage slavery, but the contemporary focus is on adding labor standards to make work consistent with citizenship rather than rejecting paid employment as incompatible with the independence required for full, participatory citizenship. This contemporary perspective, then, forms the intellectual foundation for labor market regulations that provide for minimum wages, mandated benefits, the promotion of labor unions, and other labor standards.

So what is work? Why do we work? How is work valued? The importance of these fundamental questions is reflected by the range of historical figures and intellectual giants who have wrestled with and shaped societal views on them--philosophers Aristotle and Confucius, sociologists Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, economists Adam Smith and Karl Marx, political scientist John Locke, psychologists Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow, theologians St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, management experts Frederick Winslow Taylor and Mary Parker Follett, feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. As I illustrate my book The Thought of Work, the answers to these questions matter. Thoughts on work are not simply alternative perspectives on work; rather, how work is seen actively structures our understandings of and our experiences with work by providing frames of references, norms, values, and attitudes toward work that actors translate into specific practices.

Over two thousand years ago in ancient Rome, Virgil's poem The Georgics included the sentence:

labor omnia vicit
improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.

This has been popularized as "hard work conquers all" and labor omnia vicit is therefore the motto of schools, cities, labor unions, and even sports teams around the world. But this passage is a microcosm of the entire domain of work--the translation "hard work conquers all" is a gross oversimplification, and not the only possible interpretation. The phrase can be translated and interpreted negatively as "everything was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need" (Ferry 2005: 13), or more positively as "wicked effort has overwhelmed all things and oppressive need" (Putnam 1979: 33). And the fullest interpretations depend on the broader context of Virgil's milieu, and yield nuanced meanings in which work is intimately connected to the human condition, material progress, social beliefs, and visions of the good life as seen through the interpreter's eyes, and that also recognize the phrase itself as a beautiful piece of artistic work. Such is the nature of work--a complex, fully human activity that is experienced in many ways, that can only truly be understood by embracing a multiplicity of perspectives, and that can only be improved by recognizing the deep importance of how we think about work for how work is structured in practice.

References
Ferry, David (2000) The Georgics of Virgil: A Translation (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
Marx, Karl (1844) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Prometheus Books, 1988).
Putnam, Michael C.J. (1979) Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton University Press).
Note: This post original appeared on Berfrois.