Many people feel they work in pointless, meaningless jobs, research confirms https://t.co/9fdJWP4gHT via @physorg_com
— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) August 2, 2023
From the linked article:
The theory that many people feel the work they do is pointless because their jobs are "bullshit" has been confirmed by a new study.
The research found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or unhelpful to others.
The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were "bullshit"—socially useless and meaningless.
Researchers had since suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work, but Mr. Walo found this was only part of the story.
He analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the U.S. working in 21 types of jobs, who were asked if their work gave them "a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society" and "the feeling of doing useful work."
The American Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2015, found that 19% of respondents answered "never" or "rarely" to the questions whether they had "a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society" and "of doing useful work" spread across a range of occupations.
Mr. Walo adjusted the raw data to compare workers with the same degree of routine work, job autonomy and quality of management, and found that in the occupations Graeber thought were useless, the nature of the job still had a large effect beyond these factors.
The original research: Simon Walo, "Bullshit" After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless, Work, Employment and Society (2023). DOI: 10.1177/09500170231175771
No comments:
Post a Comment