Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  There are whole minor industries that exist just to facilitate such box-ticking gestures. I worked for some years for the Interlibrary Loan Office in the University of Chicago Science Library, and at least 90 percent of what people did there was photocopy and mail out articles from medical journals with titles such as the Journal of Cell Biology, Clinical Endocrinology, and the American Journal of Internal Medicine. (I was lucky. I did something else.) For the first few months, I was under the naïve impression that these articles were being sent to doctors. To the contrary, a bemused coworker eventually explained to me: the overwhelming majority were being sent to lawyers.22 Apparently, if you are suing a doctor for malpractice, part of the show involves assembling an impressive pile of scientific papers to plunk down on the table at an appropriately theatrical moment and then enter into evidence. While everyone knows that no one will actually read these papers, there is always the possibility that the defense attorney or one of his expert witnesses might pick one up at random for inspection—so it is considered important to ensure your legal aides locate articles that can at least plausibly be said to bear in some way on the case.

  As we will see in later chapters, there are all sorts of different ways that private companies employ people to be able to tell themselves they are doing something that they aren’t really doing. Many large corporations, for instance, maintain their own in-house magazines or even television channels, the ostensible purpose of which is to keep employees up to date on interesting news and developments, but which, in fact, exist for almost no reason other than to allow executives to experience that warm and pleasant feeling that comes when you see a favorable story about you in the media, or to know what it’s like to be interviewed by people who look and act exactly like reporters but never ask questions you wouldn’t want them to ask. Such venues tend to reward their writers, producers, and technicians very handsomely, often at two or three times the market rate. But I’ve never talked to anyone who does such work full-time who doesn’t say the job is bullshit.23

  5. what taskmasters do

  Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. This job can be considered bullshit if the taskmaster herself believes that there is no need for her intervention, and that if she were not there, underlings would be perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves. Type 1 taskmasters can thus be considered the opposite of flunkies: unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates.

  Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs. One might also refer to them as bullshit generators. Type 2 taskmasters may also have real duties in addition to their role as taskmaster, but if all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others, then their own jobs can be classified as bullshit too.

  As one might imagine, it is especially difficult to gather testimonies from taskmasters. Even if they do secretly think their jobs are useless, they are much less likely to admit it.24 But I found a small number willing to come clean.

  Ben represents a classic example of type 1. He is a middle manager:

  Ben: I have a bullshit job, and it happens to be in middle management. Ten people work for me, but from what I can tell, they can all do the work without my oversight. My only function is to hand them work, which I suppose the people that actually generate the work could do themselves. (I will say that in a lot of cases, the work that is assigned is a product of other managers with bullshit jobs, which makes my job two levels of bullshit.)

  I just got promoted to this job, and I spend a lot of my time looking around and wondering what I’m supposed to be doing. As best I can tell, I’m supposed to be motivating the workers. I sort of doubt that I’m earning my salary doing that, even if I’m really trying!

  Ben calculates that he spends at least 75 percent of his time allocating tasks and then monitoring if the underling is doing them, even though, he insists, he has absolutely no reason to believe the underlings in question would behave any differently if he weren’t there. He also says he keeps trying to allocate himself real work on the sly, but when he does so, his own superiors eventually notice and tell him to cut it out. But then, when he sent in his testimony, Ben had only been at the job for two and a half months—which might explain his candor. If he does succumb eventually and accepts his new role in life, he will come to understand that, as another testimony put it, “The entire job of middle management is to ensure the lower-level people hit their ‘productivity numbers’ ”—and will therefore start coming up with formal statistical metrics that his underlings can try to falsify.

  Being forced to supervise people who don’t need supervision is actually a fairly common complaint. Here, for instance, is the testimony of an Assistant Localization Manager named Alphonso:

  Alphonso: My job is to oversee and coordinate a team of five translators. The problem with that is that the team is perfectly capable of managing itself: they are trained in all the tools they need to use and they can, of course, manage their time and tasks. So I normally act as a “task gatekeeper.” Requests come to me through Jira (a bureaucratic online tool for managing tasks), and I pass them on to the relevant person or persons. Other than that, I’m in charge of sending periodic reports to my manager, who, in turn, will incorporate them into “more important” reports to be sent to the CEO.

  This kind of combination of taskmastering and box ticking would appear to be the very essence of middle management.

  In Alphonso’s case, he did actually serve one useful function—but only because his team of translators, based in Ireland, was assigned so little work by the central office in Japan that he had to constantly figure out ways to finagle the reports to make it look like they were very busy and no one needed to be laid off.

  • • •

  Let us move on, then, to taskmasters of the second type: those who make up bullshit for others to do.

  We may begin with Chloe, who held the post of Academic Dean at a prominent British university, with a specific responsibility to provide “strategic leadership” to a troubled campus.

  Now, those of us toiling in the academic mills who still like to think of ourselves as teachers and scholars before all else have come to fear the word “strategic.” “Strategic mission statements” (or even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instill a particular terror, since these are the primary means by which corporate management techniques—setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do and less and less time actually doing it—are insinuated into academic life. The same suspicions hold for any document that repeatedly uses the words “quality,” “excellence,” “leadership,” or “stakeholder.” So for my own part, my immediate reaction upon hearing that Chloe was in a “strategic leadership” position was to suspect that not only was her job bullshit, it actively inserted bullshit into others’ lives as well.

  According to Chloe’s testimony, this was exactly the case—though, if at first, not precisely for the reasons I imagined.

  Chloe: The reason that my Dean’s role was a bullshit job is the same reason that all nonexecutive Deans, PVCs [Pro-Vice Chancellors], and other “strategic” roles in universities are bullshit jobs. The real roles of power and responsibility within a university trace the flow of money through the organization. An executive PVC or Dean (in other words, s/he who holds the budget) can cajole, coerce, encourage, bully, and negotiate with departments about what they can, ought, or might want to do, using the stick (or carrot) of money. Strategic Deans and other such roles have no carrots or sticks. They are nonexecutive. They hold no money, just (as was once described to me) “the power of persuasion and influence.”

  I did not sit on university leadership and so was not part
of the bunfights about targets, overall strategy, performance measures, audits, etc. I had no budget. I had no authority over the buildings, the timetable, or any other operational matters. All I could do was come up with a new strategy that was in effect a re-spin of already agreed-upon university strategies.

  So her primary role was to come up with yet another strategic vision statement, of the kind that are regularly deployed to justify the number crunching and box ticking that has become so central to British academic life.25 But since Chloe had no actual power, it was all meaningless shadow play. What she did get was what all high-level university administrators now receive as their primary badge of honor: her own tiny empire of administrative staff.

  Chloe: I was given a 75% full-time equivalent Personal Assistant, a 75% full-time equivalent “Special Project and Policy Support Officer,” and a full-time postdoctoral Research Fellow, plus an “expenses” allowance of twenty thousand pounds. In other words, a shed-load of (public) money went into supporting a bullshit job. The Project and Policy Support Officer was there to help me with projects and policies. The PA was brilliant but ended up just being a glorified travel agent and diary secretary. The Research Fellow was a waste of time and money because I am a lone scholar and don’t actually need an assistant.

  So, I spent two years of my life making up work for myself and for other people.

  Actually, Chloe appears to have been a very generous boss. As she spent her own hours developing strategies she knew would be ignored, her Special Projects Officer “ran around doing timetable scenarios” and gathering useful statistics, the Personal Assistant kept her diary, and the Research Fellow spent her time working on her own personal research. This in itself seems perfectly innocent. At least none of them was doing any harm. Who knows, maybe the Research Fellow even ended up making an important contribution to human knowledge of her own. The truly disturbing thing about the whole arrangement, according to Chloe, was her ultimate realization that if she had been given real power, she probably would have done harm. Because after two years as Dean, she was unwise enough to accept a gig as head of her old department and was thus able see things from the other side—that is, before quitting six months later in horror and disgust:

  Chloe: My very brief stint as Head of Department reminded me that at the very minimum, ninety percent of the role is bullshit: Filling out the forms that the Faculty Dean sends so that she can write her strategy documents that get sent up the chain of command. Producing a confetti of paperwork as part of the auditing and monitoring of research activities and teaching activities. Producing plan after plan after five-year plan justifying why departments need to have the money and staff they already have. Doing bloody annual appraisals that go into a drawer never to be looked at again. And, in order to get these tasks done, as HoD, you ask your staff to help out. Bullshit proliferation.

  So, what do I think? It is not capitalism per se that produces the bullshit.26 It is managerialist ideologies put into practice in complex organizations. As managerialism embeds itself, you get entire cadres of academic staff whose job it is just 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.

  On this, I will leave Chloe the last word.

  Chloe at least was allocated her staff first and only then had to figure out how to keep them occupied. Tania, who had a series of taskmaster jobs in both the public and private sectors, provides us with an explanation of how entirely new bullshit positions can come about. This last testimony is unique because it explicitly incorporates the typology developed in this chapter. Toward the end of my research, I laid out my then nascent five-part division on Twitter, to encourage comments, amendments, or reactions. Tania felt the terms fit her experience well:

  Tania: I might be a taskmaster in your taxonomy of BS jobs. I was one of two deputy directors of an administrative services office that handled HR, budget, grants, contracts, and travel for two bureaus with total resources of about $600 million and a thousand souls.

  At some point as a manager (or as a duct taper helping to fill functional gaps), you realize that you need to hire a new person to meet an organizational need. Most of the time, the needs I am trying to fill are either my own need for a box ticker or a duct taper, or the needs of other managers, sometimes to hire people for non-BS work or to hire their ration of goons and flunkies.

  The reason I need duct tapers is usually because I have to compensate for poorly functioning program-management systems (both automated and human workflows) and, in some cases, a poorly functioning box ticker and even a non-BS-job subordinate who has job tenure and twenty-five years of outstanding performance ratings from a succession of previous bosses.

  This last is important. Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. As in government bureaucracies, the easiest way to deal with such people is often to “kick them upstairs”: promote them to a higher post, where they become somebody else’s problem. But Tania was already at the top of this particular hierarchy, so an incompetent would continue to be her problem even if kicked upstairs. She was left with two options. Either she could move the incompetent into a bullshit position where he had no meaningful responsibilities, or, if no such position was currently available, she could leave him in place and hire someone else to really do his job. But if you take the latter course, another problem arises: you can’t recruit someone for the incompetent’s job, since the incompetent already has that job. Instead, you have to make up a new job with an elaborate job description that you know to be bullshit, because, really, you’re hiring that person to do something else. Then you have to go through the motions of pretending the new person is ideally qualified to do the made-up job you don’t really want him or her to do. All this involves a great deal of work.

  Tania: In organizations with structured job classifications and position descriptions, there has to be an established and classified job to which you can recruit someone. (This is a whole professional universe of BS jobs and boondogglery unto itself. It’s similar to the world of people who write grant proposals or contract bids.)

  So the creation of a BS job often involves creating a whole universe of BS narrative that documents the purpose and functions of the position as well as the qualifications required to successfully perform the job, while corresponding to the format and special bureaucratese prescribed by the Office of Personnel Management and my agency’s HR staff.

  Once that’s done, there has to be a narrative job announcement of the same ilk. To be eligible for hire, the applicant must present a resume incorporating all the themes and phraseology of the announcement so that the hiring software our agency uses will recognize their qualifications. After the person is hired, their duties must be spelled out in yet another document that will form the basis for annual performance appraisals.

  I have rewritten candidates’ resumes myself to ensure that they defeat the hiring software so I can be allowed to interview and select them. If they don’t make it past the computer, I can’t consider them.

  To present a parable version: imagine you are a feudal lord again. You acquire a gardener. After twenty years of faithful service, the gardener develops a serious drinking problem. You keep finding him curled up in flowerbeds, while dandelions sprout everywhere and the sedge begins to die. But the gardener is well connected, and getting rid of him would offend people you don’t feel it would be wise to offend. So you acquire a new servant, ostensibly to polish the doorknobs or perform some other meaningless task. In fact, you make sure the person you get as doorknob polisher is actually an experienced gardener. So far, so good. The problem is, in a corporate environment, you can’t just summon a new servant, make up an impressive-sounding title for him (“High Seneschal of th
e Entryways”), and tell him his real job is to take over when the gardener is drunk. You have to come up with an elaborate fake description of what a doorknob polisher would, in fact, do; coach your new gardener in how to pretend he’s the best doorknob polisher in the kingdom; and then use the description of his duties as the basis of periodic box-ticking performance reviews.

  And if the gardener sobers up and doesn’t want some young punk messing with his business—now you have a full-time doorknob polisher on your hands.

  This, according to Tania, is just one of the many ways that taskmasters end up creating bullshit jobs.

  on complex multiform bullshit jobs

  These five categories are not exhaustive, and new types could certainly be proposed. One compelling suggestion I heard was for a category of “imaginary friends”—that is, people hired ostensibly to humanize an inhuman corporate environment but who, in fact, mainly force people to go through elaborate games of make-believe. We will be hearing about forced “creativity” and “mindfulness” seminars and obligatory charity events later on; there are workers whose entire careers are based on dressing up in costumes or otherwise designing silly games to create rapport in office environments where everyone would probably be happier just being left alone. These could be seen as box tickers of a sort, but they could equally be seen as a phenomenon unto themselves.

  As the previous examples suggest, it can also sometimes be clear that a job is bullshit but still be difficult to determine precisely which of the five categories it belongs to. Often it may seem to contain elements of several. A box ticker might also be a flunky, or might end up becoming a mere flunky if the organization’s internal rules change; a flunky might also be a part-time duct taper or become a full-time duct taper if a problem arises and, instead of fixing it, the boss decides it would be easier to just reassign one of his idle minions to deal with the effects.