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https://theconversation.com/flunkies-goons-and-managerial-feudalism-why-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-is-the-book-that-keeps-on-giving-233775>
"The late David Graeber was an American professor of anthropology at the London
School of Economics. His best-known writings challenged views in liberal
economics about the origins of money, attempting to reconceive the historical
relationship between debt and social institutions. He was also known for his
political activism, notably as one of the original organisers of the Occupy
Wall Street movement.
In 2013 Graeber wrote an article for obscure left-wing magazine Strike!
entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. He had no inkling it was about
to cause something of a minor sensation.
The response from readers was unlike any he had experienced, prompting him to
expand his ideas into a book,
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, first published in
2018.
A “bullshit job”, according to Graeber, is a job where even the person doing it
secretly believes the job shouldn’t exist. But part of their conditions of
employment is to pretend it’s not as pointless as they know it to be.
Bullshit jobbers, he writes, can include “box tickers”, “flunkies”, “goons” and
“taskmasters” (more on them later). Such roles are prevalent in areas such as
finance, admin, law, marketing and human resources. The book has been
translated into many languages and while it has been criticised for some rather
broad generalisations, he clearly struck a chord.
In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes had suggested we were fast
approaching a time where our new “labour-saving technology” meant we’d have to
confront the issue of “technological unemployment”. Due to the prodigious gains
in productivity, wrote Keynes, we’d soon be working half as much – or less. By
the postwar period this had become a widely held belief.
Keynes, writes Graeber, was right. But rather than embrace more leisure time
for workers, our response was “to make up a raft of new jobs ” resulting in
“huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular”, spending
“their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe[d]” did not
really need to be performed.
The “proliferation” of these “bullshit jobs”, Graeber suggests, is a
significant part of the reason we don’t have a 20 – or even 15-hour work week."
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
