by In the New Yorker, Nathan Heller reviews David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs.” In the course of Graeber’s diagnosis, he inaugurates five phyla of bullshit work. “Flunkies,” he says, are those paid to hang around and make their superiors feel important: doormen, useless assistants, receptionists with silent phones, and so on. “Goons” are gratuitous or arms-race muscle; Graeber points to Oxford University’s P.R. staff, whose task appears to be to convince the public that Oxford is a good school. “Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. (This is the woman at the airline desk whose duty is to assuage angry passengers when bags don’t arrive.) “Box tickers” go through various motions, often using paperwork or
Topics:
Dirk Niepelt considers the following as important: Bullshit job, Contributions, Corporate correctness, Corporate governance, Labor market, Meaning, Notes, Political correctness
This could be interesting, too:
Dirk Niepelt writes “Report by the Parliamentary Investigation Committee on the Conduct of the Authorities in the Context of the Emergency Takeover of Credit Suisse”
Dirk Niepelt writes “Governments are bigger than ever. They are also more useless”
Dirk Niepelt writes The New Keynesian Model and Reality
Dirk Niepelt writes Urban Roadway in America: Land Value
In the New Yorker, Nathan Heller reviews David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs.”
In the course of Graeber’s diagnosis, he inaugurates five phyla of bullshit work. “Flunkies,” he says, are those paid to hang around and make their superiors feel important: doormen, useless assistants, receptionists with silent phones, and so on. “Goons” are gratuitous or arms-race muscle; Graeber points to Oxford University’s P.R. staff, whose task appears to be to convince the public that Oxford is a good school. “Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. (This is the woman at the airline desk whose duty is to assuage angry passengers when bags don’t arrive.) “Box tickers” go through various motions, often using paperwork or serious-looking reports, to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t. (Hannibal is a box ticker.) Last are “taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more bullshit for others. …
Graeber comes to believe that the governing logic for such expansion isn’t efficiency but something nearer to feudalism: a complex tangle of economics, organizational politics, tithes, and redistributions, which is motivated by the will to competitive status and local power.
My view is that what Graeber describes is a reflection of growing “corporate correctness,” the tendency
- to structure and regulate everything, and often in an incompetent way;
- to focus on appearance rather than content (think of power point);
- to avoid responsibility by forming commissions and commissioning reports; and
- to replace common sense by a mentality of box ticking, buzz wording, and bull shitting.
Of course, corporate correctness transcends the corporate sector. Universities and the public sector are leading the way.