Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs grew from a 2013 essay in Strike! magazine that went viral, then turned into a survey of hundreds of workers who reported their own jobs as pointless. Graeber builds a five-part taxonomy of bullshit jobs, flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, and taskmasters, drawing on testimonies from corporate lawyers, middle managers, HR staff, and academics. The book argues that contemporary white-collar capitalism has produced a class of jobs that exist for political and managerial reasons rather than economic ones, and that the spiritual cost of pretending those jobs matter is one of the great unspoken crises of the modern workplace.
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Anthropologist David Graeber surveys workers who consider their own jobs pointless and builds a five-part taxonomy of meaningless labor under contemporary capitalism.
Bullshit Jobs is more sociological argument than empirical research. The testimony-based methodology has been challenged for sampling bias. Subsequent academic surveys have found smaller percentages of workers who view their jobs as pointless. The book remains influential as cultural commentary.
Bullshit Jobs was written by David Graeber, published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster.
Bullshit Jobs is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Bullshit Jobs takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Bullshit Jobs is a standalone novel by David Graeber, not part of a series.
Bullshit Jobs is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
