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Yves Clot
To cite this article: Yves Clot (2014) The Resilience of Occupational Culture in Contemporary
Workplaces, Critical Horizons, 15:2, 131-149
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critical horizons, Vol. 15 No. 2, July, 2014, 131149
labour in English, or the German terms of Beruf or Leistung are such rich
terms and concepts. The metier encapsulates the set of specialized technical
knowledge, bodily and mental skills, accepted interpersonal conventions and
modes of behaviour, which characterize what could be called in English an
occupational culture, the specific culture and ethos of a professional occupation.
Can the word metier, and, beyond the French context, the explicit reference to
professional occupation as a specific social institution combining technical,
interpersonal and ethical dimensions, become a key concept in the psychology of
work? And, first of all, ought it to? This is what I try to argue in this paper.1
1
This text is a slightly amended version of the conclusion to Y. Clot, Travail et Pouvoir dagir (Paris: PUF, 2008).
2
O. Bloch and W. von Wartburg, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue francaise (Paris : PUF, 1991), 406.
3
M. Descollonges, Quest-ce quun metier ? (Paris : PUF, 1995).
4
S.Volkoff and F. Bardot, Departs en retraite precoces ou tardifs: a` quoi tiennent les projets des salaries
quinquagenaires?, Gerontologie et Societe 111 (2004): 7194. C. Montandon and J. Trincaz (eds), Psychologie
sociale des relations a` autrui (Paris: LHarmattan, 2007).
5
M. Cerf and P. Falzon, Situations de service: travailler dans linteraction (Paris : PUF, 2005). F. Hubault (ed.) La
relation de service, opportunites et questions nouvelles pour lergonomie (Toulouse: Octare`s, 2001). J.-L. Roger,
Refaire son metier. Essai de clinique de lactivite (Toulouse: Ere`s, 2007).
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 133
metier has conserved its vitality. Right when the traditional movement of the
manual craft or trade is no longer central, the word metier remains in
circulation. Why? The inertia of language? I do not think so.
With the development of services, in which the object of work a word that
one is almost obliged to write in inverted commas for this type of function has
increasingly become the life of the other, the aims to be attained and the means
used to arrive at them are by nature more and more controversial and
fundamentally debatable. Industrial work was still able to make credible the
Taylorian illusion according to which work is separable from thought. But service
work complicates further still all attempts at separating the carrying out of
operations from the meaning of action. Work, here, imposes a renewed
responsibility as to the object and, as a result, defining the tasks turns out,
more so than elsewhere, to be shot through with conflicting evaluations. The
worked object, thus made subject, gives workers less peace of mind than
previously. It multiplies the problems of conscience.
Hugues wrote puckishly: Perhaps it is necessary to recall that to serve [servir] is
the opposite of to do a disservice to [desservir], and that the border separating
them is thin, indistinct and moving.6 Work aims and quality, which have become
points of conflict and nodes of professional antinomy, stand at the core of
dilemmas concerning the just and the unjust, the true and the false, and even good
and evil. More than in the case of physical things, the techniques used include uses
of the self and of others. Everything in services thus seems to complicate the
reference to the metier and to occupational culture, and, in particular the
mixture of kinds that this work encourages between professional and private
life. In all senses of the word, it puts back to work the affective transports from
person to person that each subject entertains in his own history.7
Psychologically it is more intense and more charged. It is also more inward,
and far less delimited by the physical or chemical properties of matter.
All this has not only failed to cause the use of the word metier to subside, but
in fact it seems to have revived it in the language of service professionals. If one
adds to this the words inflated use in sectors of industrial engineering and
management, or in teacher training, or again if one considers the scope taken on by
the use of electronic mailing lists among professionals (gens de metier),8 then
Ostys diagnostic must be taken seriously. Among the words used to express work,
that of metier is not residual: Far from being marginal, this social phenomenon
of affirming metiers might well intensify, under the blow of new production
stakes, thus rehabilitating the metier as a social and organizational configuration
of modernity. It remains to be understood why and above all in what sense its
6
E. Hugues, The Sociological Eye. Selected Papers (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1971), 305. G. Fernandez
et al., Nous conducteurs de trains (Paris : La Dispute, 2003). M. Buscato, M. Loriol and J.M. Weller, Au-dela` du stress
au travail: une sociologie des agents publics au contact des usagers (Toulouse : Ere`s, 2008).
7
D. Lhuillier, Le sale boulot, Travailler 14 (2005): 7399. R. Villatte, C. Teiger and S. Caroly, Le travail de
mediation et dintervention sociale, in P. Falzon (ed.) Ergonomie (Paris : PUF, 2004). P. Molinier, De la condition de
bonne a` tout faire au debut du XXe`me sie`cle a` la relation de service dans le monde contemporain, Travailler 13 : 9
35.
8
Barcellini et al. User and Developer Mediation in an Open Source Software Community: Boundary Spanning through
Cross Participation in Online Discussions, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 66(7) (2008): 558570.
134 YVES CLOT
Recognition?
This analysis immediately ushers in a paradox. Its interest is indisputable. But
despite being situated in the field of sociology, its motivation is psychological;
or, more exactly, this analysis mobilizes a longstanding and key concept in a
current of the clinical approach to work, namely the concept of recognition as it is
used in the psychodynamics of work. To this paradigm it undoubtedly contributes
through the hybrid notion of nearby hierarchy (hierarchie de proximite).
Nevertheless, the introduction of this new concrete protagonist into the
psychodynamics of recognition does not necessarily enter into conflict with the
presuppositions of the psychodynamics of work. In the latter, the judgement of
utility made by management on the work accomplished by operators is presented
9
F. Osty, Le desir de metier. Engagement, identite et reconnaissance au travail (Rennes : PUR, 2003), 228.
10
Osty, Le desir de metier, 230.
11
Osty, Le desir de metier, 226.
12
Osty, Le desir de metier, 227.
13
Osty, Le desir de metier, 227.
14
Osty, Le desir de metier, 230.
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 135
15
C. Dejours, Conjurer la violence (Paris : Payot, 2007), 2029.
16
Osty, Le desir de metier, 205.
17
G. Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies precaires (Paris : Le Seuil, 2007), 282.
18
Y. Clot, Apre`s le Guillant, quelle clinique du travail ? Presentation a` L. Le Guillant, Le drame humain du travail
(Toulouse : Ere`s, 2006); Le statut de la critique en psychologie du travail, Psychologie francaise 53(2) (2008): 173
193. Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, 246247.
19
See E. Renault, Reconnaissance et travail, Travailler 18 (2007): 119137. The conceptual confusion between
activity and doing in Renaults article unfortunately closes the door that he had half-opened. See also H. Kocyba,
Reconnaissance, subjectivation, singularite. Travailler 18 : 103119.
20
J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).
136 YVES CLOT
21
Writing occupational collective here is meant as a foreshadowing since the metier exceeds the bounds of the
professional collective.
22
S. Caroly and Y. Clot, Du travail collectif au collectif de travail. Des conditions de developpement des strategies
dexperience. Comparaison de deux bureaux de poste. Formation et emploi 88 (2004): 4355.
23
N. Zaltzman, Le garant transcendant, in E. Enriquez (ed.) Le gout de lalterite (Paris : Desclee de Brouwer, 1999),
256.
24
M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (University of Texas, 1993).
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 137
in common. Yet this is simultaneously to forget the resources that can be drawn
from it. Since there is a quid pro quo to performing, through ones own activity,
ones share in renewing the collective bearing of individual activity: this bearing
also provides the means to take liberties with this collective history and thus to
enhance ones own power to act. Each time this bearing is altered, it equips
individual action. The subject, by developing it with others, enhances in themself
this social contact with oneself, that is, the collective guarantee of individual
action.25 This general bearing thus inscribes the metier in a history that is at once
technological, cognitive and even corporeal.
But when it exists and still further when it has vanished this generic bearing
also stands as the object of a singular affectivity. It exists in the form of a very
particular feeling: that of living the same history,26 with whose aid the ordeals
affecting professionals are categorized and digested. Embodied, this professional
bearing can become an instrument of work. Deprived of this generic instrument,
individual activity is confounded. In sum, in terms of activity, the metier is, in this
very function, and for each subject, both a technological instrument and a
psychological one. It exists relative to the worked object as well as to oneself and
to others.27
We know now that in professional situations where, for reasons that always
have to be rediscovered anew, the recreation of this common guarantor is not
assured, the psychopathology of work is never far away. When the professional
genre by which I mean that collective memory is mistreated, workers no longer
recognize themselves in what they do. Their activity is emptied of content (est
delestee). And it is here, first of all, that a bottomless desire for recognition takes
root, becoming displaced onto management hierarchies that destine it to take on
the distorted forms of which we are very well aware. Besides, these forms have
no hope of fulfilling this desire for recognition, but run every risk of fostering
misunderstanding as to its object.
It is because they no longer recognize their metier in what they do since it has lost
its inner psychological function as a guarantor that increasingly many professionals
no longer recognize themselves in their metier and so massively request to be
recognized. In the absence of available generic reasons, the professional collective is
thus reduced to a collection of individuals opened to isolation. Pending the collective
production of a metiers generic reasons (attendus), each person as an individual thus
finds themself confronted with the bad surprises of a work organization that, when
standing face to face with the unexpected element of the real, can leave one feeling
bereft of a voice. Which is to say, bereft of a guarantor. This has to be understood,
however, in a strong dialogical sense: one is without a superaddressee, to use
25
L. Vygotsky, Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology of Behavior, in N. Veresov (ed.), Undiscovered
Vygotsky (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999), 256281.
26
This feeling, which makes it possible to recognize oneself in a history that is different to ones own, is galvanized
particularly through interventions using the approach I call clinique de lactivite, the clinical diagnostic of activity.
Sometimes this feeling disappears. Attempts are then made to restore it by fostering, on the basis of traces of everyday
activity, the wonderment apt to reawaken professional emotions in order to enrich them and, with the collective, to
cultivate them.
27
L. Vygotsky, The Instrumental Method in Psychology, in L. Vygotsky. The Collected Works (New York: Plenum
Press, 1997), 8589.
138 YVES CLOT
28
Of course, it would be necessary to add qualifications. Indeed, the manufactured object escapes its producer more
easily, which renders it far more indifferent. One recognizes oneself in it less directly. A service rendered is less
detachable from ones own activity and from the activity of the other. One can recognize oneself in it more easily, but
being able to recognize the quality for the other is a completely different thing. As a result, the collective production of
the metiers template becomes vital.
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 139
feel a greater need to recognize themselves in their metier, in the professional genre
itself, in the collective as superaddressee of the effort afforded and even in their
official function.29 This, as I see it, is what explains the words revival in the
everyday language of work.
But the metier does not merely come down to a memory of the generic reasons
contained in a history. Metier and professional genre are not synonyms.30 It is
necessary now to give a better definition of the words conceptual architecture and
above all of the developmental perspective we are applying to it, so that it can be
modelled in the psychology of work. First, the metier is at once personal,
interpersonal, impersonal and transpersonal.31 It is therefore structurally
conflicted. We can, in this matter, reprise Vygotskys expression, which I have
often used in this work: what a metier is, is shown in movement. And when this
movement is prevented or thwarted, work becomes a health risk.
Everything is linked together. Or, at least, everything should be in order to
prevent any extensive squandering, in work milieus, of the psychological energy
required for professional vitality. The metier has many simultaneous lives, and this
makes its development possible. Impersonal, it exists in organizations and
institutions, written down in the form of prescribed tasks. But the metier does not
reside there in its entirety. So that it may go on living there, it must also be alive
elsewhere. Hence it also lives or dies between professionals and in each of
them, in the motives guiding the dialogues in which intrapersonal and
interpersonal exchanges on the real of work are realized, or not. The professionals
concerned are directly accountable for this life. It is a matter of their working
collectively to accomplish the task and of rethinking it together in their joint
activity. This responsible activity both produces and maintains the metiers
fourth modality of existence, this something that has retained our attention:
history and professional memory, which cannot remain a means of acting in the
present, and of seeing the future coming, if maintained by them. Memory is
designated here as transpersonal, since it belongs to no one, is a means available to
each and all, and is passed down through the generations and even through each
professional. Relayed in activity, it is always also potentially defunct, and most
often organized through implicit understanding it is a link that is always
susceptible to being erased in between subjects and in each of them. It sets the tone
and, as generic tuning fork, indicates that the collective work-in-process concerns a
working collective that is both inscribed in a history and able to orchestrate
activity.32
29
Y. Clot, La verticale de laction. Preface a` Roger, J.-L. Refaire son metier. Essai de clinique de lactivite (Toulouse :
Ere`s, 2007).
30
J.-L. Roger, Refaire son metier. Essai de clinique de lactivite (Toulouse : Ere`s, 2007).
31
The issue here really does concern the metier. Once I incorrectly wrote that these four instances were instances of
activity. However, this is not the case. The impersonal concerns the task and the transpersonal concerns the
professional genre. These latter can actually be the instruments or the objects of the activity of subjects but never the
activity itself. They are instituted by personal and interpersonal activity. And the latter are constitutive.
32
S. Caroly and Y. Clot, Du travail collectif au collectif de travail. Des conditions de developpement des strategies
dexperience. Comparaison de deux bureaux de poste, Formation et emploi, 88 (2004): 4355.
140 YVES CLOT
33
M. Henry, Du travail au langage sur le travail : un developpement, Education permanente 171 (2007), 149161.
34
This is how I currently understand Lhuilliers very legitimate concern about the problem of institution. On this very
point it would also be necessary to discuss the contribution of Cornelius Castoriadis, Sujet et Verite dans le monde
social-historique (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 2255.
35
P. Malrieu, La construction du sens dans les dires autobiographiques (Toulouse : Ere`s, 2003), 69102. See also A.
Baubion-Broye (ed.), Evenements de vie, transitions et constructions de la personne (Toulouse: Ere`s, 1998).
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 141
into conflict. This is precisely what keeps a metier alive and gives it a general scope
in becoming. Nonetheless, a metier in general does not dissolve in any of the
generic realizations through which it passes. On the contrary, it is refracted in
them and can detach from them. The impersonal aspect of the metier can emerge
larger and altered from being crossed with transpersonal genres, and personal and
interpersonal activities. And yet, the risk of emerging diminished from these
displacements cannot be a priori excluded. The movement thus described has no
other guarantee than the mediating activity of subjects across all of a metiers
registers.
36
Y. Clot, G. Fernandez and L. Scheller, Le geste de metier : proble`mes de la transmission, Psychologie de
linteraction, 23(2007): 109139.
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 143
another. They even enter into conflict, since each of them has different sorts of
advantages. It continues to be necessary to juggle, test out, compare. The novice
emerges from this conflict, having digested the prescription, as an experienced
worker able to take liberties both with the task and with the professional genre,
having mastered both of them. Paradoxically, professional activity finally becomes
personal, something that it was not at the start. It ends up appropriating the
impersonal and transpersonal aspects of a metier via the interpersonal resources of
the collective. Thanks to the freedoms the subject can now take with the three
aspects of the metier they have appropriated, and with which they can play so as to
work, they are ready to assume responsibility for the act. They can take charge
of the metier in its becoming.
But the novice is by no means compelled to do this. They have become like the
others. And they can remain content with that. As popular language so
beautifully puts it, they are in the trade (il est du metier). However, if they do not
try to cheat the real that is, that which remains difficult to accomplish and which
resists all they will, in developing this activity, encounter the limits of their
metier. They are then confronted no longer as a novice but as an expert with
another conflict: one which curbs them from doing the task, for which the
professional genre has too poorly equipped them to have any hope of it being
effective. To respond to the convocations of the real, in which the impossible and
the possible marry, one must be able to take up the history of a metier in ones own
activity, through ones own activity. If this activity is to be passed on by the
individual, they must persist in inventing. And for this to happen, it is also
necessary to defer to the inventory of what has already been done and said in a
given metier, for the sake of navigating its issues and attaining the limits at which it
is held back. In collective work, the novice must also be able to find new means to
enable them to push back the borders with others, overcoming the naiveties and
illusions that necessarily envelop every work collective. A professional genre will
become stylized only through this responsible act; this act, however, is never a
solo performed by the ego, nor a solitary break. But that is what it costs for the
novice, metamorphosed into an expert, to become a sort of author of their metier.
They are no longer in the trade (metier). They possess a part of it. They take its
development into their charge.
What matters most to me here is to note the extent to which the metier only
becomes personal at the end of this cycle. At the start it is profoundly impersonal
in each person. Time and risks are necessary for a professional to become a
professional in a personal capacity. Recognition of this fact is all the more crucial
as the development of a metier in each person thus becomes a good criterion by
which to judge its social vitality. More personal at the end for the experienced
worker, a metier is, once the cycle described here is complete, also more
impersonal, if this is understood as the possible enrichment of the task, based on
that task and going beyond it. This is because the collective work sustained by the
working collective renders possible these mutually independent developments. Its
intervention enables the psychological function of the metier to develop in each
subject as well as its social function within the organization. Its intervention
also enables each person to free themself from the transpersonal memory of the
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 145
37
There is no opposition between the localization and the delocalization of these instances. And, besides, we know the
extent to which their de-differentiation, by abolishing the professional borders of the subject vis-a`-vis the other, of the
organization, and even these delimitations in themselves, organize a confusion in which anxiety finds its source.
38
M. Litim, and K. Kostulski, Le diagnostic dune activite complexe en geriatrie, Nouvelle revue de
psychosociologie, 1(2006): 4555.
146 YVES CLOT
they have done with the possibilities and impossibilities that the real of their
activity has presented them with, the occasions that they have grasped, those they
have missed, the options that they have taken, and the renunciations to which they
are subjected. They search for, find or lose themselves, in the accomplishments that
ultimately eventuate from these conflicts, in which the real of activities places
them. They seek to recognize themselves not only in the realized activity, but also
in that which they have refused or postponed, or in that which they still imagine
possible to do. It is necessary for them, at least a certain number of times, to be
able to live a different relation to work than one of subjected complacency with
external reality, engendering that feeling of futility evoked by Winnicott;39
they have to be able to rediscover this subject in what they do, one that is
defensible in their eyes and that does not cheat the real in the name of received
ideas and the arrangements of the moment. Otherwise said, they have to be able to
recognize themselves in what they do, together or alone to find a certain truth
of their activity. This is to be understood, beyond acts which ring false, as an
activity authentically turned towards the dynamic efficacy of doing well;40 a
creative activity engaged in exploring still unrealized possibilities. They must be
able to recognize themselves in the passion of the real and not only in the work
accomplished. For, it is this passion which maintains the possibility of being able
to experiment over and over again with their capabilities. It is also this passion
that, within the profession, conserves this conflictual vitality between differen-
tiated instances, one from which each worker can draw. It is this passion, once
again, that sustains the movements of linking and unlinking between the instances
in which they are able to recognize themselves. This possibility of finding
themselves in their metier also enables a given set of workers to defend it not
directly but indirectly, by circuitous means. Since the best means of defending a
metier a recurrent problem today is perhaps by launching into it. This is what
justifies the developmental perspective that we have adopted.41
39
D. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005).
40
This is the main source of well-being, to take up a widely used word, but one that is difficult to take as a concept,
by specifying that the main interest of doing [ones job] well is perhaps that, in the matter, there is no last word. It
cannot be defined once and for all. It is, by nature, the object of controversial judgements in which values can be
precisely measured against each other.
41
Y. Clot, La verticale de laction. Preface a` Roger, J.-L. Refaire son metier. Essai de clinique de lactivite (Toulouse:
Ere`s, 2007).
42
That is to reprise, through a slight modification, an idea put forward by the ILO in opposition to the untenable
work that has been so well described in recent research, see L. Thery (ed.), Le travail intenable. Resister
collectivement a` lintensification au travail (Paris : La Decouverte, 2006).
THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 147
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THE RESILIENCE OF OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACES 149
Notes on contributor
Yves Clot is Chair Professor of Psychology of Work at the Conservatoire National
des Arts et Metiers, Paris. His research focuses on work collectives, work activity
and dialogism, and the clinical diagnostic of work activity. He has published
extensively in these areas including the following monographs: La Fonction
psychologique du travail (Paris: PUF, 6th edition, 2006); Travail et pouvoir dagir
(Paris: PUF, 2008); Le travail sans lhomme ? (Paris: La Decouverte, 3rd edition,
2008); Le Travail a` coeur (Paris: La Decouverte, 2010).
Correspondence to: yves.clot@cnam.fr.