Many people find their jobs pointless, study finds

Is it occupation or working conditions that make people feel their job is pointless? The study sought to find out. Keystone / Laurent Gillieron

Many employees see no social utility in their jobs, a University of Zurich study has found. This is true particularly in the finance, sales and management sectors.

This is the first study to “give quantitative support to the relevance of the occupations” in a feeling of pointlessness, says a University of Zurich (UZH) press releaseExternal link.

The late American anthropologist David Graeber theorised about this in his book “Bullshit jobs” (2018), while other researchers have suggested that the profession itself is of little importance and it is much more poor working conditions and a feeling of alienation that cause a feeling of pointlessness. Walo, a sociologist at UZH, wanted to find out for himself.

He analysed data from a survey of 1,811 people in the United States working in 21 different professions. The questions focused in particular on their feeling of “making a positive contribution to society” or “doing useful work”. He found that 19% of workers in all occupations answered “never” or “rarely”.

The researcher then compared data from employees with similar working conditions and found that there were indeed differences attributable to occupational sector. Workers in the finance and sales sectors gave the most negative responses.

On average, they answered twice as often as others that they considered their job to be socially pointless. This was also the case for managers and office workers (1.6 and 1.9 times more often). Walo also found that the share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless is higher in the private sector than in the non-profit and public sectors.

However, Walo’s study also confirms that other factors can influence employees’ perceptions of their own work, including alienation, unfavourable working conditions and social interaction. 

This study, entitled “‘Bullshit’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless” is published in the journal Work, Employment and Society.