https://phys.org/news/2023-08-people-pointless-meaningless-jobs.html
'The theory that many people feel the work they do is pointless because their
jobs are "bullshit" has been confirmed by a new study.
The research found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles
are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or
unhelpful to others.
The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to
give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American
anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were "bullshit"—socially
useless and meaningless.
Researchers had since 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, but Mr. Walo found
this was only part of the story.
He analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the U.S. working in 21 types of
jobs, who were asked if their work gave them "a feeling of making a positive
impact on community and society" and "the feeling of doing useful work."
The American Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2015, found that 19% of
respondents answered "never" or "rarely" to the questions whether they had "a
feeling of making a positive impact on community and society" and "of doing
useful work" spread across a range of occupations.
Mr. Walo adjusted the raw data to compare workers with the same degree of
routine work, job autonomy and quality of management, and found that in the
occupations Graeber thought were useless, the nature of the job still had a
large effect beyond these factors.
Those working in business and finance and sales were more than twice as likely
to say their jobs were socially useless than others. Managers were 1.9 more
likely to say this and office assistants 1.6 times.'
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
