Pathologies of Work
• Bullshit Jobs

References for Theme: Bullshit Jobs

• Christensen, Lars Thøger; Kärreman, Dan; Rasche, Andreas
• "Bullshit and Organization Studies" (2019)

• Fagerberg, Johan; McKee, Kevin; Paulsen, Roland
• "The unreflective practitioner: a pilot study on functional stupidity and social work" (2020)

• Graeber, David
• "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: A work rant" (2013)

  (p.2) productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away […]. But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job...

• "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: A work rant" (2013)

  (p.5) This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment.

• "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: A work rant" (2013)

• "Are you in a BS job? In academe, you’re hardly alone" (2018)

• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

• Hoffmann, Maja; Paulsen, Roland
• "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research" (2020)

  impacts that work induces structurally, independently of the labour process itself. Work induced Mobility comprises phenomena such as commuter traffic or business travel; mobility that only exists because work necessitates it. Notably, it needs to be fast, i.e. energy intensive, owing to business-people's busyness and employees' time constraints (Feenberg 1999). Work induced Infrastructure includes built infrastructure such as office buildings, factories, warehouses and industrial estates, their water, power and hea ting/cooling supply, ancillary power plants, roads, tracks and parking sites, as well as technical and supportive service infrastructure. This infrastructure is built and maintained only for the purpose of allowing abstract workto 'take place', which is ecologically...

• Jaeggi, Rahel
• "Pathologies of Work" (2017)

• Morris, William
• "Useful Work v. Useless Toil" (1999)

• Paulsen, Roland
• "Slipping into functional stupidity: The bifocality of organizational compliance" (2017)

• "In the mood for obedience: Despair, cynicism, and seduction among employment service employees" (2018)

• Soffia, Magdalena; Wood, Alex J; Burchell, Brendan
• "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" (2021)

  (p.2) The BS jobs theory suggests that many workers experience their jobs as being comprised of meaningless tasks in which they have to appear productive. As a result some academics writing on the future of work, and the post-work and anti-work traditions, have suggested that if, as Graeber claims, 30–60% of work is ‘bullshit’, radical reductions in the length of the working week could be easily achieved (e.g. Frayne, 2019; Susskind, 2020). It is important to recognise that Graeber is not simply stating that some people have useless jobs but is instead proposing a theory that seeks to explain why these...

• "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" (2021)

  (p.20) ... the empirical data do not support any of Graeber’s hypotheses. Therefore, the BS jobs theory must be rejected. Not only do our findings offer no support to this theory, they are often the exact opposite of what Graeber predicts. In particular, the proportion of workers who believe their paid work is not useful is declining rather than growing rapidly, and workers in professions connected to finance and with university degrees are less likely to feel their work is useless than many manual workers.

• "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" (2021)

  (p.21) BS jobs are a rare phenomenon. Therefore, this article debunks Graeber’s (2018) claim that millions of workers are engaged in BS jobs of no social value and that the solution is that they be set free by a universal basic income. Instead, it suggests the need for unions that are willing and able to engage in what Umney and Coderre-LaPalme (2017) term ‘meaning of work conflicts’ so as to overturn those social relations in which people’s work is devalued by toxic workplace cultures that leave workers feeling their labour is pointless and of no use.

• "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" (2021)

  (p.3) Our findings demonstrate that while Graeber’s (2018) specific account of BS jobs and managerial feudalism cannot be empirically sustained, his work has uncovered an important and largely unresearched social ill. The scale of the problem is far from that predicted by Graeber’s theory. Nevertheless, millions of European workers suffer from work which they feel is not useful. Moreover, this experience is strongly associated with poor wellbeing. We, therefore, finish our analyses with our own tentative explanation, inspired by Marx’s writings on alienation, for why people think their job is useless.

• "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" (2021)

  (p.6) Graeber (2018) believes that when individuals report their jobs as being useless, this is an accurate appraisal by the individual of their job’s social value. This, Graeber goes on to argue, is harmful to an individuals’ wellbeing as it provides little identity or purpose and, moreover, requires workers to pretend this is not the case. Graeber states this is a source of ‘spiritual violence’ that ‘makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person’s power’. This is held to be a psychologically damaging experience, because humans need to conceive of ‘themselves as capable of acting on the...

• "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" (2021)

• Spicer, André
• Business bullshit (2017)

• "Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations" (2020)

• Sułkowski, Łukasz; Others,
• "On bullshit management--the critical management studies perspective" (2019)

• Thomas, Suzanne L; Nafus, Dawn; Sherman, Jamie
• "Algorithms as fetish: Faith and possibility in algorithmic work" (2018)