“Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs”, Magdalena Soffia, Alex J. Wood, Brendan Burchell2021-06-02 (economics)⁠:

David Graeber’s ‘bulls—t jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research.

We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test 5 of its core hypotheses.

Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions.

Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.

See Also:

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• A Pay Change and Its Long-Term Consequences

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• Going to political extremes in response to boredom

• Work Ethics and the Collapse of the Soviet System

• The Culture of Poverty: An Ideological Analysis