Thank bureaucracy for ‘useless jobs’ that make more work

Ideas53:59Bureaumania: A ‘Granular’ Look at Corporate Red Tape

Maybe you have one, or used to have one. This kind of job is easy to spot as there are lots of them in Western economies.

Maybe you thought you’d be assuming important responsibilities when you got hired. But then came the paperwork, the time-allocation studies, the compliance forms — and of course all the meetings: online meetings, face-to-face meetings, even meetings to plan meetings. And then one day, you stopped believing that any of this had to do with the job as you’d imagined it. 

It’s called the bullshit job, a term coined by the late American anthropologist David Graeber to describe modern bureaucracy. 

“Bullshit jobs are useless jobs that no one wants to talk about,” Graeber wrote in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

David Graeber is sitting and smiling during his class with a chalkboard behind him.
Anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, David Graeber died in 2020. He’s the author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, published in 2018. (Michelle McLoughlin/The Associated Press)

In 2013, Graeber wrote a crucial essay, On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs for Strike! magazine. In the essay, he wrote that despite the promise of a shorter work week thanks to automation, “we have seen the ballooning [in the last 100 years] of not even so much of the service sector, as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing … corporate law, human resources and public administration.”

In other words, BS jobs are those where no one (including the employee) is ever sure what it is they’re actually doing every day. 

Imaginary job titles

BS jobs are also a rampant feature of what I like to call “bureaumania” — the seeming omnipresence of complex administrative scaffolding in the corporate sector with entities like Senior Brand Liaisons, Customer Identity Developers, Legacy Optimization Strategists. These are all made-up job titles created by an online tool called the Job Title Generator. But don’t they sound real? 

It wasn’t always thus. The idea of bureaucracy, or at least as a concept in a neutral sense, is credited to 19th-century German philosopher Max Weber, who saw the establishment of bureaus as a way for businesses to delegate responsibilities fairly and evenly.

Despite famously calling bureaucracy an “iron cage” for its inclination towards inflexibility, Weber chiefly considered bureaucracy to be a democratic good: there are no favourites or favours, and all who come within the orbit of the business or government agency are treated the same way, regardless of social class or workplace popularity. 

Max Weber 1907
Sociologist Max Weber considered bureaucracy as an efficient and rational way to organize human collective activity. He criticized it for dehumanizing workers as ‘cogs in the machine.’ (Public domain/Wikimedia)

So what happened?

Franz Kafka, the Czech writer who worked as an insurance clerk, was obsessed with bureaucracy as a kind of dark, mythical superstructure which toyed menacingly with human subjects the way cats toy with mice, or Greek gods with human beings — sometimes with the same fatal results.

His 1919 story In The Penal Colony is a tale of a modern prison which has no way out, and has often been seen as a parable about the entrenchment of bureaucracy and the impossibility of escaping it. For Kafka, writing around the time of the First World War, Weber’s benevolent system was already a dystopia. 

In The Penal Colony … tackled the problem of something that was not just dehumanizing but completely impersonal. Something you can actually feel, something that can kill you,” said Andrej Grubacic, an anthropologist at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine in California.

Even today, Grubacic says there’s no “other term for this specific effect of bureaucracy than the famous term: Kafkaesque.”

Kafka as a Doctor of Law, 1906
Franz Kafka earned a law degree in 1906 from the University of Prague. He worked as a clerk for civil and criminal courts, an obligatory service for lawyers. Afterwards, he worked in insurance, and pursued writing in his spare time. (Public domain/Wikimedia)

Other writers have taken on the phenomenon of bureaucracy, including American novelist Richard Yates in Revolutionary Road, which picked on suburban sameness and the junior bureaucrats who called it home, and Herman Melville with Bartleby the Scrivener, a 19th-century novel about the fear of change in the workplace.

More recently: David Foster Wallace, whose posthumous final novel (gathered from notes after his suicide in 2008) was entitled The Pale King, imagined a world of low-and mid-level tax auditors whose commitment to repetitive, highly detailed and mindless paperwork led them into states of religious-like mindfulness, which one senior auditor claimed was nothing short of heroism.

“The underlying bureaucratic key,” wrote Wallace, “is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.” 

‘I dared to be human’

Not all bureaucratic jobs are BS, at least not when seen through an ironic lens. In fact some bureaucratic jobs are indeed heroic.

Consider that of Charles-Hippolyte Labussière, a copy clerk during the Terror of the French Revolution who in 1794 secretly destroyed much of the paperwork which would have sent fellow citizens to the guillotine.

His counter-offensive against the lethal bureaucracy was unique: he soaked the files he was to process in a bucket of water, which was normally used to cool the afternoon wine in the office (bureau) where he and other functionaries worked. He’d tear up the files into smaller pieces, work them into a paste, then ball them up into tiny spheres, which he’d then sneak by the guards, and further mash together at the public baths — and finally dispose of in the Seine. 

After the Terror, Labussière — who was also an actor — was celebrated as a folk hero; little wonder, given his claim to have saved 1,153 lives.  

In an 1803 theatrical newspaper, Labussière  writes: “During this bloody period, horrible to remember, I had the pleasure of saving many victims from the revolutionary axe, at the risk of my life… I dared to be human, in an era when humanity was a crime.”

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*This episode was produced by Tom Jokinen.

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