|
1 导读 帕金森定律 2 听力|精读|翻译|词组  无用“工” 英文部分选自经济学人Business版块 Bartleby 录事巴托比专栏 注释： Bartleby 是《经济学人》开辟的一个新专栏，自5月26日这期开始。Bartleby 的专栏名字取自Herman Melville的短篇小说，余光中老先生给这篇小说取得中文名字是《录事巴托比》。欲了解详情，请阅读5月26日那期的《经济学人》，后台回复2018即可获得或参看以下链接 http://www.sohu.com/a/233135559_697978 Not working properly 无用“工” 你是否也深陷于“扯淡的工作”? A modern author rediscovers Parkinson’s Law，David Graeber’s thesis about modern office jobs is less groundbreaking than it seems 当代作者重新定义帕金森定律，大卫·格雷伯（David Graeber）研究当代白领工作的论文看起来具有开创性，实则不然。 SISYPHUS, king of Corinth, was condemned for all eternity to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again. David Graeber, an anthropologist, thinks that many modern workers face the same fate today, forced to perform pointless tasks, or “bullshit jobs”, as his new book* calls them. 西西弗斯，（希腊神话中）科林斯的国王被众神罚以巨石之刑：要将巨石推到山顶，而巨石太重，每每未到山顶就又滚落下山，西西弗斯只好眼睁睁地看着，一遍又一遍，永无止境地重复这件事。人类学家大卫·格雷伯认为如今很多雇员也面临相同的命运：被迫从事着无意义的工作，或者“扯淡的工作”-他的新书也如此命名。 Mr Graeber defines a bullshit job as one “that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”, though they may have to pretend that they believe in it. This definition, and indeed much of the book, combines two categories of roles. In the first are jobs that Mr Graeber tends to think are socially worthless, such as corporate lawyers or investment bankers. (Some of those workers may take an equally dim view of the utility of anthropologists.) In the second group are jobs where employees find themselves with little or nothing to do and, worse, must still look as if they are frantically busy. 格雷伯先生将扯淡的工作定义为：完全没有意义的、不必要的或有害的工作，甚至雇员都不知道其存在的意义，尽管他们可能不得不假装相信这份工作有意义。正如书中所言，这个定义包含两条分类法则。第一种是格雷伯先生认为毫无社会价值的工作，例如公司律师或投资银行家。（此类人员里也有部分可能对人类学家的作用也持否定态度）。第二种工作中，雇员发现自己整天无事可做，更糟糕的是他们还必须装作忙得不可开交。 注释： 1.大卫·格雷伯 美国人类学家 无政府主义者，现任伦敦经济学院人类学教授。最为人知的是参与策划“占领华尔街”运动，格雷伯至今出版了多本关于人类学的专著，最著名的是2011年出版的《Debt: The First 5000 Years》 https://en.m./wiki/David_Graeber 2.Parkinson's Law帕金森定律 是官僚主义现象的一种别称，被称为二十世纪西方文化三大发现之一。也可称之为“官场病”、“组织麻痹病”或者“大企业病”，源于英国著名历史学家诺斯古德·帕金森1958年出版的《帕金森定律》一书的标题。 https://wapbaike.baidu.com/item/帕金森定律/751627?fr=aladdin 3.西西弗斯 （希腊神话，科林斯国王） 西西弗斯是人间最足智多谋的人，最后被众神以“巨石之刑”惩罚：西西弗斯要将巨石推到山顶，而巨石（由于太重），西西弗斯只好眼睁睁看着巨石未到山顶又滚下山，（于是西西弗斯只好周而复始地做这件事）。 https://en.m./wiki/Sisyphus 4.短语 take a dim view of sb/sth to disapprove of sb/sth; to not have a good opinion of sb/sth 对…持不赞成（或怀疑）态度；对…没有好感 栗子：She took a dim view of my suggestion.她对我的建议持否定态度 What is his evidence? The author places a lot of faith in anecdotes and a couple of opinion surveys which found that only 37-40% of workers in Britain and the Netherlands felt they “made a meaningful contribution to the world.” He doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that modesty might govern their answers. 那么他的证据是什么？作者对奇闻轶事和一些民意调查充满信心，调查发现在英国和荷兰只有37%-40%的雇员认为自己“对世界做出了贡献”。他似乎没有考虑到谦虚可能会左右他们的回答。 In any case, the contention that many of us are wasting much of our time at work is hardly a new one. C. Northcote Parkinson coined the idea that “work expands to fill the time available” in an essay in The Economist in 1955, adding that “there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned.” The futility of many middle-class jobs is also an old theme, being the plot driver of the 1970s British sitcom “The Good Life”. 无论如何，我们很多人都在工作中浪费了大量时间，这并不是什么新鲜事。早在1955年，C·诺斯科特·帕金森（C. Northcote Parkinson）提出了这种观点：“工作会不断吞噬一个人所有可用的时间”，相应的文章发表在当年的《经济学人》上）。他还补充道，“要完成的工作量与工作人数之间几乎没有关系。”由此看来，很多中产阶级的工作都是徒劳无益的，这一陈旧主题始终推动着上世纪70年代英国情景喜剧《美好生活》(The Good Life)的情节发展。 Nor are feelings of boredom and pointless activity confined to the arena of work. Anyone who has been a schoolchild can remember being forced to write essays, or take tests, about subjects that seemed neither interesting nor likely to be of any use in later life. Indeed, many teachers are probably as bored marking the schoolwork as pupils are producing it. 无聊和毫无意义的活动也不仅仅限于工作领域。任何一个上过学的人都记得，他们被强迫写文章，参加考试，而那些考试科目看起来既无趣又不太可能在日后的生活中发挥任何作用。其实，许多老师在批改作业时，可能和学生在做作业时，一样倍感无聊。 Nevertheless, some workers will feel that Mr Graeber’s analysis is timely. Both meaningless job titles and mindless tasks seem to have proliferated. A study† by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, two management theorists, estimated that there are nearly 24m corporate “bureaucrats” in America, or about one for every 4.7 workers. Reassigning them to more productive tasks could give the American economy a $3trn boost, they reckon. 然而，一些雇员会觉得格雷伯先生的分析非常及时。毫无意义的职衔和无需动脑的任务似乎都在与日俱增。管理理论家加里·哈默尔 （Gary Hamel）和米歇尔·扎尼尼 （Michele Zanini）进行的一项研究估计：美国有近2400万企业“官僚”，大约每4.7名雇员中就有一名冗员。他们认为，重新分配冗员去从事产生更高生产效率的工作，美国经济可以增收3万亿美元。 Mr Graeber constructs some elaborate theories as to why this problem has arisen. He suggests that automation in recent decades did cause mass unemployment but that society conspired to create a bunch of illusory jobs to disguise the fact. He also argues that while executives in the Reagan/Thatcher era prided themselves on how many low-level workers they could lay off, they then hired lots of management flunkies to enhance their status. And he postulates that it is all part of a system of social control, in which young people are loaded up with debt and then pushed into meaningless jobs in order to pay it off, thereby keeping them docile. 格雷伯先生为了了解这个问题的原因，提出了一些详尽的理论。他认为，近几十年来的自动化确实造成了大规模失业，但这个社会又秘密地创造了大量虚假的工作来掩盖这个事实。他还认为里根/撒切尔时代的高管以裁掉低水平雇员为傲，随即他们又雇佣很多阿谀奉承的管理层雇员来巩固他们的地位。他假设这是社会控制体系的一部分，在这个体系中，年轻人负债累累，然后被推入毫无意义的工作中，以便还清债务，从而使他们变得听话、驯服。 But these explanations seem inherently unlikely. Modern executives are motivated by share options which usually require them to meet profit targets. They are pursued by activist investors, who may get them fired if they underperform. Given those threats, bosses would hardly employ lots of useless, profit-sapping staff. 然而究其本质，这些解释看起来难以令人信服。当下高管的动力是获得股票期权，这就需要他们达成利润目标。他们被激进的投资者驱赶，同时很有可能因表现不佳而被开除。鉴于这些风险，老板几乎不会雇佣大量无用，还要瓜分利益的雇员。 Instead, the problem lies in the nature of a services company. In a factory, you can count the widgets made each day, which limits the scope for bullshit. In a service business, it is harder to monitor the quality and quantity of output. Like the old quip about advertising, executives may know that half of their workers’ time is wasted, but not which half. 相反，问题在于服务公司的性质。 在工厂中，你可以数出每天生产的零件数量，这就限制了无意义工作的范围。在服务业中，却很难量化服务的数量和质量。 就像广告中经常讥讽的一样，高管们可能知道他们有一半雇员的时间被浪费了，但不知道是哪一半。 In response to this lack of knowledge, executives create a host of targets, and hold a lot of meetings to try to understand what is going on. As Messrs Hamel and Zanini put it, “A growing percentage of employee time gets consumed in efforts to keep the organisation from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.” 为了应对这种了解匮乏的局面，高管们制定了一系列目标，举行了很多会议试图探明正在发生的事情。正如哈默尔和扎尼尼两位先生所言，“越来越多的雇员把时间耗费在努力防止组织的崩溃上面，而组织自身的臃肿复杂恰恰是其崩溃的根源”。 In other words, there is no need for Mr Graeber to construct elaborate theories about neoliberal conspiracies to explain the phenomenon of wasted effort. Parkinson nailed the issue six decades ago: “Officials make work for each other.” 换言之，格雷伯先生不需要创立新自由主义阴谋的详尽理论来解释浪费精力的现象。帕金森60年前就鞭辟入里地分析了这一现象，官员之间总喜欢给对方添点活干。 翻译组： Louise，女，会计民工，经济学人爱好者 Pamela，女，新闻民工，经济学人爱好者 Roxanne，女，媒体民工，经济学人爱好者 Vambie，女，互联网民工，经济学人爱好者 Xiaofeng，女，好奇心重的医疗民工，经济学人粉丝 校核组： Li Xia, 女， HR, 经济学人发烧友 VeRy，男，电气设计，经济学人爱好者 3 观点|评论|思考 本次观点由Button独家奉献 Button，男，自由职业，经济学人爱好者 读罢此文，小编不禁感慨，自己工作近十年了，尚还在找寻工作的意义。 人为什么要工作，要选择怎样的工作，无时不刻地困扰着所有人。撇开养家糊口不说，工作其实是一个认识自己、认识世界的过程。通过工作，你可以更加清楚地意识到自己究竟是怎样一个人，能做什么不能做什么。自己的喜好、弱点等都可以进行定位，自己认为的自我形象和实际应有的能力展现出来的形象有何种区别。 工作的社交属性也给你一个机会去验证，如何对待自己与他人的关系、自己与世界的关系，并且推动你主动学习如何更好地处理这些关系。 工作带来的各种新体验也帮你打开了一个世界，给你一个接触到同自己不一样的生活的渠道。 从另一个角度说，如果自己的工作不能带来这些了，恐怕就是时候换工作了。而频繁地换工作并不意味着对企业不忠诚或者是自己心浮气躁，很有可能是在找寻与自己价值观相符合匹配的而已。 4 愿景 小组 现有一经济学人大群,如果您也有兴趣，可联系小编WeChat : foxwulihua。大群的规则如下: 1.每个人每个月至少看两篇经济学人并发表自己的看法(上半月入群的算当月) 2.每周工作日我会抛出1-2个话题(主要来自经济学人),大家进行讨论，中英文都可，相当于脑力风暴，希望大家有空积极参与 3.大家发表观点的时候，尽量以两句话或者三句话发一次，或者以整段形式出现，不然很容易引起刷屏(养成一个好习惯)，谢谢 4.任何经济学人相关的资料都是允许的，但是有一点要求:对自己发的文章者内容做个简单的阐述加观点（30个字左右），而不仅仅是冷冰冰的纯粹发文章，谢谢大家 5.流水不腐，每周有进有出，每周群主会请人出去，望谅解 |
|
|
