Some workers understand their own jobs to be pointless, and that perceived uselessness tracks worse wellbeing.
Graeber's 2013 essay drew an unusually large response from people recognising their own jobs. Representative European survey evidence does not support his stronger claim that a large and rapidly growing share of paid work consists of such jobs, though perceived uselessness does track worse wellbeing.
In practice
- A compliance analyst produces a monthly report that is filed unread, and knows it, and produces it.
- An organisation creates a role to coordinate between two teams that would coordinate faster if the role did not exist.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation Graeber offered is managerial layering: organisations add coordination roles faster than productive ones. Another is that work in large bureaucracies is judged by process rather than output, so the link between a task and any result becomes invisible to the person doing it.
- In its favour
- Surveys do find a minority of workers who call their own work socially useless, and that judgement tracks lower wellbeing, which is the part of the claim with data behind it.
- Against it
- Representative European evidence puts the share at a few per cent and finds it falling rather than rising, against the central claim. Self-report also measures how visible a job's value is to the worker rather than whether it has any.
- Standing
- The stronger prevalence claim is not supported by representative European survey evidence; the phenomenological account is the defensible part.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline