The Instinct of Workmanship and the Incidence of Bullshit Jobs

Abstract

Throughout his work, Thorstein Veblen argued that humans are guided instinctively by a desire for purposeful, useful effort. Yet anthropologist David Graeber's recent volume, Bullshit Jobs, has revealed that many workers find themselves in jobs that do not contribute anything of value to society. This article first synthesizes the ideas of Veblen and institutional economists with Graeber’s to indicate how the co-evolution of the institutions of modern capitalism and technology has encouraged the proliferation of socially useless (or “bullshit”) jobs. We then formulate a series of hypotheses from this theoretical synthesis to be tested with data from the National Survey of College Graduates. A preliminary exploration and analysis of this data set is executed, followed by evaluation of the hypotheses through a series of logistic models. Results provide support for the arguments of Graeber and institutional theory as they concern the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

Keywords:

• bullshit jobs
• instinct of workmanship
• managerialism
• bureaucracy
• white-collar occupations

JEL Classification Codes:

• B52
• J3
• J4
• J5
• L2

Notes

1 Dewey used the term “impulse,” rather than “instinct,” but equally emphasized the preeminence of habit and intelligence in the determination of actual human behavior (Jensen 1987). The use of an instinct-habit psychological framework has a long and contested history in institutional economics (see Asso and Fiorito 2004) that continues in the present (e.g., Cordes 2005; Ranson 2005). These historical and methodological issues are, however, largely set aside in the present article, though we will periodically address issues concerning the measurement of instrumental and ceremonial values through survey responses.

2 The AFL-CIO’s Department of Professional Employees estimates that 59.8% of the workforce is comprised of professionals (AFL-CIO 2021). As of January 2020, production employees in goods-producing industries (not including those primarily involved in management, sales, accounting, and the like) accounted for only 11.7% of total private nonfarm payrolls, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

3 The point need not detain the present analysis, but is worth noting nonetheless: while standard neoclassical theory concludes that workers in competitive markets are paid according to their marginal productivities, there are arguments—for instance, Robert Dur and Amihai Glazer (2008)—to the contrary. These typically indicate motives for employees beyond compensation, which can act as substitutes for pay (cf. Frey and Kucher 1999). In this manner, arguments can be made within the neoclassical framework for the existence of the inverse relationship Graeber observes. It may be most expedient to dismiss these extensions of utility theory, along with the standard conclusions of neoclassical economics, as tautologies; though it may be more productive to note their fundamental misspecification of the matter in terms of supply and demand (see Dugger 1981; Peach 1987, Gordon 1996, 201-203).

4 Other job characteristics in the NSCG focus on advancement, benefits, intellectual challenge, independence, location, responsibility, salary, and job security.

5 While Graeber includes corporate lawyers among his examples of the “goon” variety of bullshit jobs, he notes that the people he spoke to in this field were not in the higher ranks (2018, 40).

6 Individual characteristics include age, gender, marital status, and race, and bachelor’s degree is used as the reference group for the highest level of education attained.

7 We indicate that these primary work activities, typically associated with industrial, rather than pecuniary, employments, have an implied expectation of instrumentality; however, there is reason to suspect otherwise as well. In addition to the duct-tapers discussed above, Graeber (2018, 15) relays the story of a Spanish engineer who, having been deprived of any responsibilities on the job, opted simply to stop showing up—collecting a paycheck for six years before anyone noticed. Graeber also relays the experience of an Egyptian man who, after studying at a renowned engineering school, secured a job as a control and HVAC engineer “only to discover immediately that I hadn’t been hired as an engineer at all but really as some kind of a technical bureaucrat. All we do here is paperwork, filling out checklists and forms, and no one actually cares about anything but whether the paperwork is filed properly” (2018, 78). Hence, further development of the analysis in the second section of this article would be required to fully understand the actual work experiences of, as well as the institutional conditioning of responses from, engineers, researchers, and production and maintenance workers.

8 It could have also been the case that, lacking the same suggestion of tacit deception found in Graeber’s term, the survey’s question of satisfaction with the job’s social contribution simply did not elicit the same “sober reflection” from respondents. As a result, one could argue, responses in our data are more colored by contaminating social values than Graeber’s interviews. If this were the case, however, we would expect to see results contradicting Graeber’s own findings concerning, for example, IT workers. Again, this was not the case, specifically with regard to H-5, but more generally as well.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erik Dean

Erik Dean is an instructor at Portland Community College.

Richard B. Dadzie

Richard B. Dadzie is an assistant professor at Seattle Pacific University.

Xuan Pham

Xuan Pham is an independent researcher; opinions expressed are her own and do not express the views or opinions of her employer.