David Graebers idé om s k bullshit jobs är suggestiv (här är en föreläsning av honom). Men stämmer den? Man kan onekligen ha synpunkter på Graebers empiriska metod, att be alla som tycker sig ha meningslösa jobb maila Graeber och berätta om detta.'

Och mycket riktigt kommer nu forskning som ifrågasätter om fenomenet är särskilt vanligt:

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.

Ur abstract till Soffia M, Wood AJ, Burchell B. Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs. Work, Employment and Society. June 2021.