Abstract

In his paper ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant’, David Graeber (2013) argued that since the beginning of the 20th century, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs. Not only in the service sector, but also in the administrative sector, such as financial services, telemarketing, corporate law and academia. Graeber claimed that a large part of these jobs can be defined as bullshit jobs, which he describes as: “meaningless jobs that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though at the same time the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” (Graeber, 2018:19).

The ballooning of higher education administration and professional staff has been well documented (e.g. Delucchi et al. 2021; Ginsberg 2011). In the controversial book ‘The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University’, Benjamin Ginsberg (2011) wrote that: “Little would be lost if all pending administrative retreats and conferences, as well as four of every five staff meetings, were cancelled.” (p41). Such a statement directly challenges the relevance and contribution of Research Management & Administration (RMA) jobs, both for academic institutions and societies at large.

This begs the question: is there a rise of bullshit jobs in RMA? And if so, what can we do about it? In this presentation, I will explore these malodorous questions and try to find some freshening answers.

References

Delucchi, M. Dadzie, R., Dean, E. and Pham, X. (2021). What’s that smell? Bullshit jobs in higher education, Review of Social Economy, DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255

Ginsberg, B. (2011). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University, Oxford University Press.

Graeber, D. (2013). On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. Strike! Magazine, Issue 3, August. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster, New York.