France Culture - From "bullshit jobs" to neo-crafts: a generation in search of meaning

Cultures Monde by Florian Delorme, September 6, 2017

Decidedly, the media is interested in what they call "neo.craft" to designate the fair revaluation of craftsmanship.

Be happy at work. This is the trend that has invaded start-ups, imposing a "cool" management model. Is this type of salary management the solution to restore meaning to work? How to understand the attraction of young graduates for manual trades that were once devalued?

Nearly a century ago, John Maynard Keynes announced the advent of a society where people would only work fifteen hours a week. Technical progress, he wrote in 1930, was to free the human species from slavery to work. Finally, something else is happening, with a society undermined by burn-out, but also "bore-out", boredom at work, or even "brown-out", the loss of meaning. Because, indeed, many workers suffer from meaningless, superfluous, uninteresting jobs, what the American anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”.
A generational depression which undoubtedly explains the appearance of a new phenomenon: the retraining of young graduates, who are more and more likely to turn to craft trades or to open local shops.

"Individuals are beginning to rewrite the codes of social success and fulfillment at work [...] There is a disenchantment with the imagination of the conquering senior executive of the 90s." Jean-Laurent Cassely, journalist.

This is what Mattew Crawford sketched in his world-renowned essay, Eloge du carbureteur (La Découverte, 2010) in which he explained how he had given up his job in a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop.

So, at a time when “feel good managers” are appearing in companies and when mass unemployment has set in for the long term, can we still be happy at work? How to understand this attraction - especially of young graduates - for manual trades, formerly devalued? And what do these reconversions reveal about the current world of work and its excesses?

https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/cultures-monde/le-monde-au-travail-34-des-bullshit-jobs-au-neo-artisanat-une-generation-en