Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
A little later than promised I thought I write a few things about the latest book I’ve read, Bullshit Jobs – subtitled The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It – by anthropologist David Graeber. The book, published in 2015, was inspired by an essay Graeber wrote in 2013 on the same subject and is largely based on anecdotal testimonies sent to him by social media in reaction to that original piece.
I don’t have time to go into every issue raised by this book but I will make some comments based on my experience as someone working in a university, though I should point that it’s not a book about specifically universities. A huge amount of what is this book rings very true and I urge all my colleagues to read it. I suspect however that the people responsible for the proliferation of bullshit jobs in higher education institutions won’t bother.
It is useful to mention the definition of a bullshit job that Graeber settles on:
A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
pp. 9-10
In addition, Graeber divides bullshit jobs into five main types:
- flunkies,
- goons,
- duct tapers,
- box tickers,
- and task masters.
I think each category is fairly self-explanatory, but you can find each described in detail in Chapter 2. In a typical modern university you will find examples of all five; and many people have jobs in more than one category of bullshit.
An academic and former Head of Department at a UK university is quoted thus
As managerialism embeds itself, you get an entire cadres of academic staff whose job it is to keep the managerialist plates spinning – strategies, performance targets, audits, reviews, appraisals, renewed strategies, etc., etc., – which happen in an almost wholly and entirely disconnected fashion from the real lifeblood of universities: teaching and education.
pp. 53-54
This is very true, but it’s not only the exasperation of the “disconnect” that is the problem. There’s also the level of resources being taken away from teaching and research to sustain the ever-increasing bullshit which is extremely damaging. I would contend that it’s in the interest of the managerial class to keep the academics under as much pressure as possible because by labelling individuals and departments as “struggling” they have an excuse for even more managerialism. And so it goes on.
It’s worth pointing out an even clearer mechanism by which bullshit jobs proliferate in universities. This is that managers generally get paid according to how many people they manage. Appointing more flunkies, goons, and the rest is a sure-fire way of getting ones job “re-graded” and salary increased. A genuinely good administrator should aim to reduce administrative costs so as to maximize the investment in core activities, i.e. teaching and research. This is the exact opposite of what happens now.
Particularly irritating bullshit activities include systems that require one to download data (e.g. coursework marks) from one system only to reformat them for upload to another. Why not just integrate these applications? And the excruciatingly painful process of claiming minor expenses. That is something could easily be automated with AI, but instead every sandwich and cup of coffee is scrutinized by individuals whose wages cost more than could ever be saved by identifying incorrect claims. Financial control of this sort is emphatically not about saving money. It’s about asserting control. The message from the Management is “We have the power, and we don’t trust you. You will have to jump through many hoops for everything you get from us. Or better still, give up and just bear the cost yourself.”
Here is another comment from an “anonymous British academic” that will strike a chord with everyone who works in a university:
Evert dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of a university.
pp. 181-2
I could write more about this – and may do so in the future – but I’ll leave it there, except to say that bullshit jobs are only part of the problem. There are entire bullshit industries whose existence satisfies the criterion that they are “pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious”. Academic publishing is just one example of a bullshit industry; University rankings are another.
Anyway, this is an enjoyably vigorous polemic written by a man with a very inventive mind. It’s very sad that he passed away in 2020. David Graeber would, I think, have described himself as an anarchist. Not in the sense of the Black Bloc lunatics who smash up buildings for fun, but in the sense of being opposed to excessively hierarchical institutions and systems and the power structures they encourage. I agree with him on that. There’s no doubt in my mind that hierarchies allow bullshit jobs to proliferate just as they also allow abuse and harassment to do likewise.
In the Dark 
December 5, 2023 at 8:04 pm
David Graeber sounded like a man after my own heart. Particularly agree with his denouncement of the weaponization of antisemitism for political purposes, which was used to discredit Corbyn.
Talking about bullshit jobs, by latest task at work is re-branding of a legacy WPF, type of user interface, Application, making it very white as far as I can tell, to blend in with the other applications it is used with. Was pulled off a major performance issue for a Hospital site, because management think the “rebranding” is more important.
December 6, 2023 at 3:23 pm
Corbyn didn’t need any dirty tricks to discredit himself. The other day he repeatedly refused to say Hamas was a terrorist organisation when asked it as a binary question multiple times by a TV interviewer. Given that Hamas itself had uploaded footage of its men committing terrorism on a scale that killed more than 1200 people in one day, that speaks for itself.
December 9, 2023 at 4:02 pm
At the time of David Graeber’s, who was himself a jew, support of Corbyn the Hamas attack hadn’t happened. The conservatives successfully labelled any criticism of the Israel state as antisemitism. So, for example, floating voters in my company that provides software for the NHS, were undecided who to vote for in the last election.
Currently the IDF in their war against the terrorist’s Hamas are killing and wounding an awful lot of innocent Palestinians. It is not a very black and white situation.
December 10, 2023 at 5:48 pm
Plenty of leftwing Jews gave a sigh of relief when Starmer took over from Corbyn.
I agree that criticism of the State of Israel is not the same as anti-semitism. When Israel is held to different standards than its neighbours, however, what else would you call it?
On October 7th Hamas killed more than 1200 Jewish women, men and children, gang-raping some women first and beheading some babies. Hamas uploaded videos of these actions to the internet. 5500 more Israelis were wounded and 244 hostages taken. The IDF response in Gaza is principally an action to ensure that Hamas can never do it again. Israel is not seeking to harm non-Hamas civilians (its artillery and jets could flatten Gaza in days if it wanted), but it is prioritising its own security and if you watch the material Hamas uploaded then you will see why.
December 6, 2023 at 3:56 pm
[…] A blog about the Universe, and all that surrounds it « Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber […]
December 6, 2023 at 4:00 pm
Here is David Graeber’s essay on Bullshit Jobs, which he expanded into this book:
https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/
The reason I didn’t buy the book (unlike his superb history of debt/money and his final, remarkable, book on deep history and anthropology) is that I don’t agree with his view of the origin of bullshit jobs, that “the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger” and hence created those bullshit jobs. I fully accept the category of bullshit jobs but I don’t believe this conspiracy theory about how they arose. Bureaucracies grew in a far more oganic way. One reason is that people enjoy wielding power over other people (as Shakespeare says repeatedly in many ways in his history plays about the struggle for England’s crown). They want someone else to blame if things go wrong. Rising litigiousness in a society in which people (rightly or wrongly) trust each other less is another reason. Also, big companies have got bigger because more people can afford more stuff.
Another reason is that universities started up business schools. Little known is that they then had no idea what to teach in them apart from a little applied psychology about how to handle people plus some basic accountancy. The remarkable book “The Puritan Gift” by the Hopper brothers, as Leftist as Graeber in their way, is largely about US business schools and the invention of marketing. Business schools (much life academic conferences) are really for networking, but they can’t admit it.
In unviersities, academics have incentive to reduce admin. Administrators have incentive to increase it. The solution, if academics still have enough power to impose it, is to give most administrators generous notice, drastically cut back the amount of administrative tasks, and then have academics DIY re admin, with very rare exceptions for eg financial administrators, who must answer directly to an academic. Could it be any worse for productive academic time than today?
If academics no longer have the power to impose such a solution, they are screwed. It’s that simple.
December 6, 2023 at 4:13 pm
The essay is reproduced as the preface of the book. Being much longer the book is wider ranging and more nuanced.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence however that the rise of managerialism has happened at the same time as the proliferation of Business and Management Schools at universities.
December 6, 2023 at 6:04 pm
Academic prostitution is what that is.
December 18, 2023 at 4:07 pm
The book elaborates on the reasons for the existence of bullshit jobs, and in it Graeber explicitly states that this is not due to a conspiracy by the ruling elites.
December 6, 2023 at 6:10 pm
Perhpas ‘politician’ should be regarded as a bullshit job…
December 9, 2023 at 2:08 pm
[…] a high salary threshold for skilled migrants, reminded me of something that struck me when I read David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. It’s really just a side issue in the context of that book, and it’s probably something […]
June 4, 2024 at 11:23 am
30min lecture by Graeber on the subject from 2018, with extensive Q&A:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kikzjTfos0s
March 9, 2025 at 3:01 pm
[…] As you probably imagined, the piece borrows some themes from the book Bullshit Jobs (subtitled The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It) by anthropologist David Graeber that I wrote about here. […]