Critical Horizons

A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

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The Resilience of Occupational Culture in

Contemporary Workplaces

Yves Clot

To cite this article: Yves Clot (2014) The Resilience of Occupational Culture in Contemporary
Workplaces, Critical Horizons, 15:2, 131-149

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1440991714Z.00000000028

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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critical horizons, Vol. 15 No. 2, July, 2014, 131149

The Resilience of Occupational Culture

in Contemporary Workplaces
Yves Clot
Psychology of Work, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers,
Paris, France

In France, the notion of metier continues to represent a major reference

point in current discussions on work issues, both in theory and in public
discourse. 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 professional knowledge, culture and
ethos of an occupation. The article analyses the psychological and cultural
instances that make up a metier from the point of view of the working
individual, distinguishing between a personal, an interpersonal, a transper-
sonal and an impersonal dimension of the working activity. The article then
argues that the relationship between work and health relies upon a work
organization that allows these four instances to be constantly readjusted at
the individual level and at the level of the work collective.

keywords metier, occupation, Vygotsky, activity, work, health

In France, the notion of metier continues to represent a major reference point in

current discussions on work issues, both in theory and in public discourse. The
word persists in the daily vocabulary of many workers. It circulates in the most
diverse work milieus and even surprisingly seems to have found a new lease of
life among service professionals, just as the traditional, industrial manual act,
precisely, has receded. In the contemporary world of work, it is probably one of
the most generic of everyday concepts. This is why a sociologist like Florence
Osty can claim that today there is a newfound desire amongst workers to appeal
to the metier (un desir de metier), that is, the specific culture and ethos of their
professional occupation. This small word metier is typical of those notions
stemming from the world of work, which, in the course of a cultures history, have
accrued so many interrelated connotations, connecting so deeply to specific
religious, historical and cultural references, they become almost impossible to
translate even in germane languages. The distinction between work and

Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1440991714Z.00000000028

132 YVES CLOT

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

The revival of the word

Osty is right to link this contemporary desire with the words etymology. The
term metier first appeared at the end of the first millennium and corresponded to
the popular doublet of ministry.2 The ministerium implies the function of server
in the religious sense, and until the sixteenth century was associated with
mysterium, the sacred dimension cultivated in ceremonies. It is no doubt necessary
to examine the precise sense in which the words persistence today remains tied to
this history. Descollonges, however, ought to be credited for stating another reason
for why the word might have rediscovered a value. According to him, the historical
juncture in which we live today no longer supports the oppositions eschewed by
Hannah Arendt and so often reprised in conventional discourses: the categories of
work and of action are again vesting labour, and metier might well be the link
that reunites them.3 This, precisely, would make the word a sort of password to
express a growing professional sentiment, and perhaps even resentment. And this
extends beyond the interest that, increasingly, it generates concerning questions of
professional transmission from generation to generation.4
In the service domain, whether referring to service counters, commerce, health,
teaching, justice, or even social work in the broad sense,5 the vocabulary of metier
cannot, for multiple reasons, have the same meaning it had for pre-Taylorian
workers those trade workers nor in fact the one it was once lent by artisanal
corporations or even trade guilds. It is also difficult to make any direct link
between the words use in, for example, home-care services, and that which
dominated in industry. Today, it can doubtless still be seen as involving the same
sort of claim made by groups for the recognition of their difference and their
competence over a technological domain. Doubtless it is also possible to discern in
it a quest for stability, mingled with the concern for a guaranteed status. Yet right
when the old cultures of the metiers are being completely opposed, the very word

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

psychological meaning appears to be extending, even though its sociological one

seems to be disappearing. It remains to be seen in what sense a psychological
concept of metier can prove of use.
Before answering this question, I will recapitulate Ostys analysis. According to
her, this desire for the metier, expressed by the words persistence, is rooted in a
social construction involving three instances. Work and professionalism anchor
the metier in action concerning knowledge of how to deal with events. The
collective ensures socialization as well as identification with an occupational
community. Lastly, professionalization makes the rules stable. These various
instances circumscribe the social scenes in which three distinct processes unfold:
development of a specific competence; access to identity; and creation of social
rules.9 As company institutions currently prove unable to offer social scenes
for recognition in the subjectification process at work, peoples desire to be
recognized as having a metier, as belonging to an occupational culture, thus
shatters between the micro-collective level and that of the company.10 In fact,
the bigger the gap between the identity offer conveyed by the rules of
management and the individual and collective experience of subjectivation at
work, the greater the discontent felt over the construction of an occupational
identity.11 It is at this level that the role of middle management serves to reduce
tensions. This hybrid actor situated as it is both alongside control units and
alongside teams is the only one that can construct a tolerable synthesis between
logics that are a priori irreconcilable.12 Today, when all is said and done, only
this fragile link can inflect the movement of dissonance leading to the
stabilization of social forms of profession into organized universes.13 Thus,
close by hierarchical management regulation constitutes a privileged space, in
which the recognition that the subject is given is just as crucial as that of
expertise.14

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

as the indispensable complement of peer judgement. And, whatever the case,

the heart of the matter here is in actual fact about recognition from others.
Recognition here is intersubjective. Whether it bears upon usefulness or beauty,
whether the outcome of management or of peers, it is precisely the intersubjectivity
of recognition that appears constitutive of a metier. What makes the work one
does useful is symbolic remuneration and its associated, management-
awarded bonuses, whereas peer judgement is what vouchsafes ones belonging
to a metier. Metier thus becomes synonymous with community or belonging to a
collective.15 This is also the case in Ostys research, even if in it and this is
important the forming of social rules for management takes a wholly different
place than it does in the psychodynamics of work.16
I cannot dwell here on current general discussions about the strategies of
recognition being advanced in contemporary organizations. Neither can I deal,
in this framework, with the issue of modes of recognition of chronic social
precariousness, which is turning the relation to work upside down in
contemporary society. G. Le Blanc has recently done just that, taking a very
creative view of social work whose ambition can be unreservedly shared.17
Let us simply acknowledge the extent to which the recognition of suffering at
work, far from being the occasion for effective organizational transformations, can
also become a new site of human resource management, with its place on the
flowchart or market.18 It is occurring to such an extent that even Axel Honneth,
who has contributed so massively to establishing the notion of recognition in the
field of ideas, has written that this notion is an inextricable jumble of conceptual
confusions and unresolved questions. The diagnostic is without doubt one-sided.
But, in the wake of a few others, he has been led to make a distinction between
recognition and recognition. He has warned of the managerial ideologies of
recognition that set about ensuring a motivational disposition apt to having the
expected tasks and duties carried out without resistance. And Emmanuel
Renault, following Hermann Kocyba, has clearly noted the extent to which these
forms of skewed recognition actually amount to a repression of real activity in
which the people who are principally interested are not spared.19 The
conceptualization of recognition is therefore open. Even beyond strict questions
of work and social precariousness, it has already become the subject of heated
discussions.20

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

Recognizing oneself in something

At this point, in the field of the analysis of work, it is advisable to seek out an
alternative regarding a psychological conceptualization of the metier. As I have
tried to show in my recent research, interest must be taken in the metier within the
individual and not only in the individual in the given metier qua community of
belonging not only, in sum, sociologically. It is necessary to take an interest in
order to understand the inner psychological function of the occupational
collective.21 Of course, it is necessary to have a precise idea of the collective,
one that does not reduce it to the collective work of actual cooperation between
subjects.22 The collective is not merely situated here and now between them.
It must also be viewed as the history of the collective in each worker: as the
internal collective guarantor, memory, and professional tuning fork which each
individual has at their disposal deep down in themself and for themself in order to
act. The metier exists not only between professionals, but also in them. The
paradox, then, is that while it can only live on the basis of them, it exceeds them.
Subjects must doubtless belong to an occupational community for a metier to
exist. However, beyond the forms of cooperation that come to take place in
collective work, it is necessary to be able to preserve cooperation as such: for
any given work milieu, it is preserved in the repertoire of possible or impossible
professional activities, in the register of encouraged or suppressed actions, on the
keyboard of conceivable or misplaced acts. It is sedimented in the collective
heritage of acts and of words to be formed or not, to be said or not, and of
technologies of body and mind in a collective historys legacy of implicit
understandings.
Beyond the series of already worked templates and patterns, this history
retains, like a rebus, all of works ambiguities, its memory of failures, of
unanswered questions, of feats achieved, as well as of the mediocrities in which
the unrealized and the realizable hold in gestation. This history needs to be taken
on. By entering into the milieu of work in which the activity unfolds, one indeed
contracts this history as a debt, without wanting or knowing it; it is a debt to be
recognized and honoured, by each among their own kind, only by participating in
or refusing it, by recreating this common guarantor.23 It involves what Bakhtin,
in a wholly other context, designated as the responsibility of the act.24 For, this
collective history is something that can always be effaced. In view of the
prescribed task, it can even become a hindrance. So nothing guarantees its
transmission other than the verification, by the actors, that it is still appropriate as
a work means and merits being maintained. When, as is often the case, one is
driven by deleterious forms of work organization, it is possible to forget that doing
ones work amounts to implementing the generic weave of this something held

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

Bakhtins vocabulary, without any emergency addressee to whom to address

oneself. This addressee goes missing precisely because present and past, the world of
predecessors and that of contemporaries, the close and the far-away voices that ought
to respond to real concerns, are no longer united.
Whatever the case, those who work thus turn towards those at the top, the place
where, paradoxically, abuse of the metier nonetheless originates; they turn towards
managerial addressees, from whom they request imaginary compensation: that is, a
type of recognition from the other that, at the point where the possibility to recognize
oneself in something has disappeared, is liable to turn recognition into a fictitious
compensation. This something is what is abused by the organizational structure. It is
something that the words etymology, situated between ministerium and mysterium,
ultimately renders quite adequately. And this is so, even though this original possibility
of recognizing oneself in the metier as guarantor, of finding it in a superaddressee to
measure oneself against, remains without doubt the best way to deal with not being
recognized by another; regardless of whether this other is situated on the vertical axis,
on the hierarchy, or even, on the horizontal axis, in the community of peers. Instead, it
often transpires that, when one no longer recognizes oneself in the metier as it is
exercised, the demand for recognition becomes more insistent than ever. The reason for
this is that it has no root. However, recognizing oneself in something, which is also to
say, outside of oneself and of the other, is no doubt the best way to develop as far as
possible transformations in the organization of work.

Architecture of the metier

We will specify below what can be further understood by recognizing oneself in
ones activity. This is indispensable to carry to term the attempt to advance a
psychological and developmental model for the concept of metier. But I would like
to insist again on the importance of recognizing oneself in something as a way of
tolerating the disillusionment specific to the quest for other-addressed recognition.
But this something is not restricted to the above-defined professional genre. It is
also the practical result of action: the thing produced or service provided which
retains the trace of the works quality, that is, an object-relation with the user.
To recognize oneself in what one has done is tantamount to being assured of the
objects or services social utility as well as of its quality. We know that, even when
management or ones work colleagues recognize this something, one may still
entertain doubts about it. By contrast, one may be free of doubt despite the fact
that the management actually disputes its economic utility. To recognize oneself in
something can therefore take on a literal meaning. The precise point is, however,
that the physical properties of industrial objects lend themselves better to this than
do those of services. And only accordingly can we understand that, faced with the
greatest difficulty of recognizing oneself in a worked object,28 service operators

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

Linking, un-linking, re-linking

Hence a metier is not always alive for the same reasons. Impersonal prescription,
for example, is not necessarily doomed to necrosis. We psychologists of work often
insist, as I did above, on the risks of professional necroses, or of generic
destabilization, for which enterprises or organizations are responsible. But this is
not always the case and, above all, when it is, it forms such an obstacle on the path
to long-term efficacy that no one can see a lasting solution in it. It happens, then,
that impersonal prescriptions of managerial origin anticipate a metiers develop-
ment and that major institutional reforms are the source of renewal for
professional creativity. The organization of work is not doomed to merely
ensuring that existing professions are recognized. It can, and even must, work to
have the pertinence of new activities recognized, activities that are yet to exist but
amenable to engaging professionals in new objects, and new frameworks and
functions, with the potential to create jobs. In this way, leadership activity is also
instituting. When this social ability to institute new activities, or even to organize
tasks properly, is underdeveloped, it may in fact be considered an impediment to
developing the metier in metiers. Such instituting situations, in which the
creation or the recreation of tasks and of new social functions unfolds, would
merit a series of analyses to complement the already existing ones.33 The
impersonal, in its principle, is therefore not amorphous.34 But todays conjuncture
requires, above all, that professionals take on far greater responsibility, so as to
avoid the impersonal necrosis of metiers, which, ill-treated by organizations that
obstruct the development of these metiers, poisons their personal lives.
Otherwise said, everything is linked together, but everything can also be
unlinked. At work, the feeling of living the same history can fade, giving free reign
to rising dispute levels among persons. A metier, bereft of the vital resources of
interpersonal collective work without transpersonal guarantor can degenerate
into a destructive confrontation between an exercise that is solitary and personal,
and injunctions that are fictitious and impersonal. This degeneration can then
become the source of a personal desire for recognition which demands
compensation just at the point when it becomes impossible to obtain it.
Consequently, there is a generalization of real depersonalization of activity, that
is to say, the exact contrary of what Philippe Malrieu aptly designated as a
personalization of work.35
The clinical diagnostic approach to the work activity aims at countering the
unlinking of activity thanks to methods, which involve restoring professional
disputes as a means to reduce the growing poisoning of professional life through
interpersonal quarrels. This being done, these methods also seek to put the metier
back in motion to the point of transforming the prescribed task. For this, the
horizon is the development of an individual and collective power to act over and

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

beyond the impersonal organization of work, and the development of this

impersonal instance of the metier. If this impersonal instance contains a future,
it can constitute a resource for activity. Otherwise said, people can seek to organize
a transit or a transfer of the four dimensions into each other, to make one the
means to develop the other. I have no hesitation in speaking here of functional
migrations between the impersonal, personal, transpersonal and interpersonal
dimensions of the metier in subjects lives. Perhaps such functional reorganizations
of the metiers four instances, its agencies, may even be able to account for its
development. Its life is nomadic, both localized and delocalized.
Doubtless, this migratory process can as often occurs fail, and excessive
localization can win out. If to develop means to remove that which envelops,
then development can always remain beholden to the envelopes in which it is fixed.
Otherwise said, thus defined, no virtuous circle in the developmental process can
be guaranteed in advance. Vicious circles of impossible migrations also belong to
the possible destinies of every metiers development. Better put, they are often
what explain their degeneration. Degeneration ought thus to be viewed as a result
of unlinking a metiers four instances. This is why the development of a metier is
analysable either as a creative or destructive discordance between the different
functions that it occupies in social and personal life. But any naively systemic
approach must no doubt be guarded against. The dynamic impulse of metiers
would be better entrusted to disputes between professionals or experts,
including organizers. The approach based on the clinical diagnostic of the work
activity is essentially founded upon this given. For such disputes are sources of
professional vitality. They are that in which metiers are distilled. Without them, it
is difficult to keep personal activity or impersonal organization alive; conversely,
they also provide the essential resources which each individual can, in return,
mobilize for his own future.
In analogy with a Vygotskian approach to the development of word meaning,
we can present things as follows: metiers draw technical, cognitive and affective
contents from the professional contexts in which they are in fact performed; they
are nourished by these contexts and come to designate both more and less than
what is contained in the general definition of metier considered outside of any
context. More, because the circle of a metiers possibilities enlarges in accordance
with the effective power of acting in each singular situation. By taking shape in life
it acquires a generic scope qua instrument of the power of acting. Less, because a
metiers general value shrinks and is limited to the single scope of a given context.
If a metier equips activity, activity modifies that metier in return. Activity both
enlarges and shrinks it. A metiers field of application is developed by its utterance
in actual life and enriched thanks to the specialization of domains and activities in
which it is mobilized. But at the same time, the strict specialization of a metier will
impoverish it. Hence, the future of every metier in individual and collective activity
is in part unpredictable. The multiplication of its contexts of application thus
becomes decisive for the conservation of its vitality.
Fortunately, there is no rigorous and definitive harmony between a metier and
the professional genre in which, in activity, it takes place. Several professional
genres can intersect within one and the same profession and therein can even enter
142 YVES CLOT

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.

Entering the metier

I would now like to impress the fact of an approach based on the clinical
diagnostic of the work activity (clinique de lactivite): it does not make anything
up, but rediscovers the mechanisms, often the most invisible ones, of development
of metiers in activity. In so doing, I will use this multifunctional model to analyse
the cycle of a novices integration into a professional milieu. In effect, by following
this standard movement we can indirectly see what a metier is. We can see how it
passes from the outside to the inside of individual and collective activity; how it
exits it so as to return to it, if those who work put in the effort.
The person who enters into an unknown work situation initially has no other
choice other than to adhere to its prescriptions, which at first comprise the only
resource that this person has to be able to do what has to be done. This impersonal
element of the task, especially if well-conceived, thus turns out to be crucial for the
activitys development. For the novice, it initially forms the main source of action
from which he or she can draw the reasons for acting. But the discovery of
obstacles in the real cannot fail to expose the novice to the existing conflict
between impersonal prescription, which they seek to make use of, and the range of
personal activities, which they see unfolding around themself. There are many
ways to endorse a metier.
Sorting out this conflict is at once indispensable and difficult. In fact, direct
imitation of what ones superiors actually perform in their activity is no guarantee
of success. As we have been able to show in our research,36 direct imitation can
turn out to be an additional obstacle, since from the outside all that the novice can
see are observable automatisms. It is impossible to reproduce such automatisms
immediately, since the only basis on which they can take shape is through their
own repeated action, by which they end up becoming clearer. Now, the ins and
outs of this action are precisely invisible, not necessarily because older
practitioners conceal them, but mainly because for these latter practitioners they
are problems that have already been resolved, in all senses of the term. They are
no longer objects of thought, while for the novice they comprise the as yet
unresolved questions of a rebus.

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

In these conditions it is difficult to resolve the conflict between the impersonal

metier borne by the task and the personal metier exercised by each person
surrounding it. Even after those to whom one addresses ones questions give their
explanations, the novice may observe that these explanations barely match, or
even contradict, each other. However, wherever there is a deadlock, there is a
solution. Sorting out this common conflict most often results precisely from
comparing the activities of different persons. Such comparisons enable a
combination, or even a conjugation (conjugaison). Close to the grammatical use
of the term, they authorize especially if they can benefit from exchange and
dialogue between long-term practitioners a declension of the activity in
accordance with the circumstances. Otherwise said, the novice can use a metiers
interpersonal resources in order to resolve the difficulty. The novice thus turns
away, for a time, from the source of inspiration initially constituted by impersonal
prescription, which now comes to form an obstacle. This is because it provides no
help in understanding what might be done, or what others do but differently from
one another. These others, the novices peers, thus become the object of a
survey. By distinguishing them from one another, within the flux of joint activities,
the novice begins to discover the common tuning fork of which they make use, the
template of actions that these persons alter in their own ways, and the obligations
in which they recognize being together.

When the metier begins to be mastered

In order to be effective, however, these obligations are not prescribed. For the
novice, what emerges is notably when attempting these professional shortcuts,
grasped in the flow of action how the implicit understanding which the acts,
which initially they thought apt formally to imitate, in fact were misplaced. What
the novice begins to see with increasing clarity, above all if the older practitioners
speak about it amongst themselves, are the activitys generic reasons (attendus),
which enable them to get out of trouble when faced with the unexpected. The
interpersonal aspect of a metier thus opens up onto the transpersonal. And, while
initially an invisible obstacle causing the novice to stumble, the professional genre
then becomes matter for their reflection: in the best of cases, they begin to
recognize themself in something that they perform increasingly independently of
their colleagues. They free the professional genre from their joint activities. It
develops into something through which each person is viewed, but is confounded
with no one in particular. The novice appropriates it, makes it theirs, though
without considering that it will ever be possessed. And ultimately this
transpersonal aspect of metier, as the object of investigation and of survey,
changes into a means of acting in the real, an instrument of action. From a source
of actions to be attempted, it enters the service of attaining goals once long out of
reach.
But these obstacles nonetheless do not disappear. The reason is that the goals,
both those prescribed by the task and those reinvented by collective activity, lead
to another conflict. The generic templates and the general procedures do not
combine in the attainment of the goals, as they add to, but also subtract from, one
144 YVES CLOT

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

professional genre, making it more available for everyone. Differentiating a

metiers instances turns development into a reality.37
However, there is no advance guarantee of this play of functional migrations, in
which each of the metiers functions change places midstream, to maintain the elan
of the development of the whole. Initially the object of a task for the subject to
accomplish, it becomes one to be discovered between subjects, prior to becoming a
generic instrument of activity. By way of example, this play of functional
migrations can be rediscovered as the object of a possible stylization, remaining
the best way of accomplishing the task via its transformation. Today, of course,
too much is known about the considerable factors that frustrate this movement for
anyone to entertain even the slightest illusions about it. But it might also be
considered that attempting to turn the vicious circles that damage so many
professional existences back into virtuous circles, at least potential ones, is not
totally meaningless. This might be so considered even in circumstances where this
point is still far from being reached.38

Recognizing oneself in ones work (Sy retrouver)

This is so true that persisting in trying to restore this type of cycle seems to have a
real effect on the health of the professionals who become involved in it. The reason
for this is that it is a means for them to recognize themselves in their activity.
Recognizing oneself in ones activity: this is the point on which I would like to
conclude. I understand the phrase in two ways here: recognizing oneself in ones
results, that is, in the work accomplished, but also and this is wholly different
recognizing oneself in what one makes of oneself (faire de soi) in ones own
activity. Let us underscore this latter point. There is a strong parallel between
health and activity. Feeling oneself to be active is tantamount to being in good
shape. And being in good shape is tantamount to being the subject(s) of a
mediating activity in the course of which a power of acting is advanced. Without
experiencing, at least a certain number of times, the possibility of instituting
relations between things upon ones own initiative, a subjects work activity
becomes untenable in their own eyes. Then the prevailing feeling is that
professional life is not worth living. One no longer feels in possession of ones
capacities. One does not recognize oneself in it. And ones health feels the effects as
a result. Professional life becomes beset by subjective judgements and evaluations
about what is done as compared with what one would like to do, with what has
been accomplished as compared with what might have been, with what one
ultimately achieved in view of what one thought one had done.
After much of what ideally seemed desirable has had to be set aside, what often
remains possible is the realized activity, individual or collective. But there is yet
another thing. The workers evaluate this activity, judge it by the yardstick of what

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

The knot of the problem

The reader will be able to reflect on the role that the official organization of work
can play, at all levels of its hierarchy, in encouraging this process. This role is
without doubt decisive. Recognition of the metier in development by the
managerial hierarchy, throughout all its levels, is perhaps one of the major
problems in the world of work today. This is what decent work is about.42
Doubtless the first criterion for this is not to replace the temptations of distorted

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

recognition, individual by individual, for the recognition of the given metier. It is

better to avoid, if the concern is lasting effectiveness, breaking the sources of
authentic recognition, that is, a type of recognition which first goes via the
possibility of men and women to be able to recognize themselves in what they do.
But it is necessary for them to be able to recognize themselves in something that the
organization also recognizes, and respects in its development that is, a metier in
order to avoid that the moreover, understandable demand for recognition
becomes emptied of the real and enters wholly into the field of the imaginary,
where it is manipulable.
The organizational recognition of a metier in such potential developments is
thus effected by upholding its impersonal instance. There is a managerial
responsibility to perform in the conception and re-conception of tasks, functions
and professional references. But this duty is poorly carried out if the official
organization of work maintains a monopoly over the definition of a given metier in
the name of non-discussed imperatives. This impersonal aspect thus gets de-
indexed and, in general, it loses its vitality and poisons the organization. For it is
then deprived of the transpersonal resources produced by the collective. The
reason for this is that, in order to remain alive, a metier cannot remain static. It is
weakened if the knowers, which is to say the professionals, who are in contact
with the real, do not have the means to look after it, or no longer take pleasure in
doing so. The role of middle management therefore also consists in providing for a
regulated framework to foster the above-defined responsible act. Indeed, this
act also bears on it.
But we now know that, for them to feel accountable for the future of their
metier, workers have to be able to find interlocutors in middle management who
privilege the real of work over the management imaginary.43 If they do not, then
the link between the impersonal, the transpersonal, the interpersonal and the
personal becomes endangered. If they do not, then the instituting force of
mediating activity, beyond the instituted whether impersonal or transpersonal
also becomes endangered. For, it is in the real of ordinary activity that the knot of
the question resides. And perhaps also its solution. But confronted with the real,
developing a power to act requires a living metier that exceeds activity, though this
activity must be able to make use of it. This is, in a nutshell, the problem. It is a
constitutive problem of the approach based on the clinical diagnostic of the work
activity.
Translated by Steven Corcoran

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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.