It's not a charade of productivity if it is producing value for some stakeholder.
"some people get fulfillment from their jobs" is a very very banal take. The pitch for Graeber's book is that he's going beyond this banality and actually claiming the jobs are generating no value at all.
Depends on your perception of value. Plenty of things are valuable for a company but clearly useless for the world. Some things aren't even valuable for the company but is to a manager, etc.
Some things are clearly valueless. For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless. There are a lot of jobs which have components like that in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due dilligence etc.
For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public administration officials who hired us to do the audit never seemed interested in the contents of our audit report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that provided no value to them.
> For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless.
It seems plausible at least that you could evaluate a potential path forward, decide it is a dead end, let everyone know it is a dead end, have the report there just for backup in case anyone asks, and then not actually have anyone ask (maybe you have a really good reputation). I’d say the report there was still useful, even if only as an insurance policy.
> in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due diligence etc.
agree 100%. The commonality there is that these are things where the profit motive can't discipline wasteful management.
I'd also throw in the non-profit sector in general, in addition to what you listed. Without ongoing hard work by donors to prevent waste, non-profits become very good at incinerating all their money on excessive overhead.
The problem is that the "stakeholder" is (more often than not) Bob, the manager from the neighbouring department. So, "producing value for the stakeholders" is essentially "doing what Bob perceives as useful", so Bob can in turn appear as useful to upper management. So yes, it's a charade.
If you're doing something useful for Bob, and he's doing something useful for upper management, and upper management is doing something useful for shareholders... then transitively you're probably doing something useful for shareholders. Or at least to reject that hypothesis you'd need a lot of visibility into what Bob is doing, and what the upper management is doing, and what their respective goals/priorities/strategies are.
You could still be doing a bullshit job, though. Shareholders are institutional nowadays and what they ask for can very easily not be aligned to their needs. Not to speak of needs of the wider society.
Pension fund manager wants bonus, not to ensure livable conditions for the next couple of generations whose funds he's managing.
There are lots of jobs that make the world less livable but are clearly not bullshit jobs. Like if you work in marketing at a cigarette company you are probably a bad person, and you are advancing bad goals, but you are doing real, non-bullshit work every day.
The bullshit job concept is not "this is making the world worse off", it's "no one would notice if this job ceased to exist".
There is a real theory out there that index funds are making companies less cutthroat and competitive, but there's pretty limited evidence to support the theory. And if you can identify any companies with a notably high amount of fat to cut, there's a lot of money to be made working for an activist investor trying to get those companies to fire all their bullshit workers.
If you can't identify such companies, you may just be a bullshitter yourself though.
when people (like you) use "productivity" and "value" and "stakeholder" i generally write them off because they are uselessly vague abstractions. its so irritating to simplify things in this way, there's basically nothing to talk about at that level.
Trying to assess productivity without a clear stakeholder and value metric is what's pointlessly abstract. "Did this generate additional profits for shareholders" is a concrete way to measure productivity. "Did this make Mother Earth's vibes better" is not.
"some people get fulfillment from their jobs" is a very very banal take. The pitch for Graeber's book is that he's going beyond this banality and actually claiming the jobs are generating no value at all.