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The phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs also seems highly relevant: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ If software causes so

The phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs also seems highly relevant: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ If software causes soft cost savings (reducing the number of required people) the savings may not actually be realized. The internal feudalism of large enterprises protected by monopolistic moats means people resist headcount reductions. And since these large enterprises still employ the majority of people, they are over represented in the statistics.

barry-cotter 5y ago
> Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs > David Graeber’s ‘bullshit 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 five 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. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
- thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  It should be noted that David Graeber was a marxist and 100% agreed that bullshit jobs are a symptom of alienation of the worker.

barry-cotter 5y ago

> Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs > David Graeber’s ‘bullshit 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 five 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. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067

thescriptkiddie 5y ago
It should be noted that David Graeber was a marxist and 100% agreed that bullshit jobs are a symptom of alienation of the worker.