The theory of “bullshit jobs” was substantiated by a recent study where 19% of employees felt their jobs were socially useless. The findings, published in the journal Work, Employment and Society, suggest that a significant portion of the U.S. workforce — particularly those working in administrative support occupations, sales occupations, and business and finance occupations — perceives their roles as unnecessary and lacking value.
The concept of “bullshit jobs” was popularized by anthropologist and activist David Graeber. He argued that many jobs in modern society are socially useless and do not contribute meaningfully to society or individual well-being. These jobs, according to Graeber, are often characterized by a lack of purpose, repetitive tasks, and a feeling that the work could be easily done away with without any negative consequences.
Graeber’s argument struck a chord with many people who had felt a sense of frustration or disillusionment in their jobs. He proposed that these jobs were a byproduct of what he called “managerial feudalism” and the increasing financialization of the economy. In this economic system, he argued that elites focus more on extracting wealth and maintaining power rather than producing goods or creating value for society. This shift has led to the proliferation of jobs that serve to maintain appearances, manipulate consumers, or fulfill bureaucratic roles that don’t contribute to the greater good.
“When Graeber’s book on ‘bullshit jobs’ was published in 2018, I was just writing my master’s thesis and thinking a lot about different career options,” said Simon Manuel Walo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich and the author of the new study.
“I did not really know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew that I wanted to do something useful to society. Reading Graeber’s book therefore had a big impact on me because it showed me that many people work in jobs they consider socially useless. This felt – and still feels – like an important social problem that needs to be addressed.”
Occupations that involve a lot of “BS jobs,” as described by Graeber, fall into a few categories. Some jobs, like administrative assistants, elevator operators, and receptionists, mainly exist to make someone else seem important or feel good. Then there are jobs are actively harmful to society, like corporate lawyers and lobbyists, military jobs, and finance sector occupations. Finally, managers also play a role in this, as they can contribute to the creation of more socially useless tasks.
To test hypotheses derived from Graeber’s theory of bullshit jobs, Walo used data from the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey (AWCS), which is based on the RAND American Life Panel—a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States who participate in regular online surveys. The sample included 1,811 working adults.
To measure how workers perceive the social usefulness of their jobs, the AWCS offered two relevant variables. Respondents were asked how often their work provided them with “the feeling of making a positive impact on [their] community and society” and “the feeling of doing useful work.” These variables were rated on a five-point scale from “never” to “always.” Respondents who answered “never” or “rarely” were categorized as perceiving their job as socially useless.
Walo found that about 19% of the respondents in the 2015 AWCS sample perceived their jobs as socially useless. Workers who considered their jobs useless were unevenly distributed across occupations. The proportions of socially useless jobs ranged from 4.6% (education, training, and library occupations) to 31.7% (transportation and material moving occupations).
Several of Graeber’s occupations — sales, office and administrative support, business and finance, and managers — were statistically associated with a higher likelihood of workers perceiving their jobs as socially useless compared to other occupations.
“I think the most important point is that people actually consider their jobs socially useless more often if they work in occupations that Graeber described as ‘bullshit,'” Walo told PsyPost. “This supports his argument that certain types of work are in fact useless to society. We should therefore start thinking about how to stop this waste of people’s time and resources. Especially in light of the current climate crisis, it seems unjustifiable to let people work for no good reason.”
To account for alternative explanations and potential influencing factors, the researcher included several control variables such as alienation, self-employment, social interaction, and demographic variables. But Graeber’s occupations consistently ranked high in terms of their association with perceived job uselessness, even after account for these variables.
“I was really surprised by the clarity of my findings,” Walo said. “I already expected that people working in Graeber’s occupations would consider their jobs socially useless more often than others. However, I did not expect to find that these occupations would all be at the top of the list together.”
But the study, like all research, includes some caveats. The research is based on survey data collected at a single point in time, which means it can’t establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. In addition, while the study supports Graeber’s theory that certain jobs are perceived as socially useless, it doesn’t definitively prove that these jobs are indeed devoid of social value.
“Of course, my article cannot prove that certain types of work are truly useless to society,” Walo explained. “It is up to the reader to decide if the presented argument is convincing. Also, it would be interesting to see similar analyses for other countries. For me personally, however, the most important question today is how to create an economic system that focuses more on people’s actual needs. This clearly deserves more attention.”
“I think it is also interesting to note that my article explains a psychological problem (feeling of doing useless work) at least partly by actual problems in society. This means that, to address the problem, we should not only focus on the affected individuals but on the real social problems that make people feel this way. As far as I know, this is related to ideas found in the ‘critical psychology’ literature.”
The study, “‘Bullshit’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless“, was published online July 21, 2023.