yves clot - intervening for transforming

Theory & Psychology21(5) 681 696

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Intervening for transforming: The horizon of action in the Clinic of Activity

Yves Clot and Katia KostulskiConservatoire National des Arts et Mtiers

AbstractThe article provides an account of the theoretical and methodological principles of the interventionist approach called the Clinic of Activity. A case is presented of educators working within a youth judicial protection service in centers for emergency placement of minors. As an intervention, the case did not proceed as expected and could be regarded as a failure. Ultimately what was commissioned to be an intervention for developing the professional profile of the educators in the organization became an analysis of the organizations institutional crisis. The diagnosis proposed by the interventionists was that the impersonal dimension of workthat is, its institutional featureswas underdeveloped while at the same time personal defenses among educators were increasingly manifesting themselves as ways to indicate the unbearable crisis in the organization.

KeywordsClinic of Activity, crossed auto-confrontations, prescribed activity, reality of activity, realized activity

In this contribution we highlight the dimension of action within the intervention approach called the Clinic of Activity. We will focus on an intervention recently commissioned by the French youth judicial protection service (Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse), con-cerning the professional profile of the educators who work in centers for emergency placement (Centres de Placement Immdiat) of minors set under the authority of the Ministry of Justice. The intervention project involved a multidisciplinary team of psy-chologists and adult educators.

In order to convey what was at stake, we will first present the contents of the assign-ment which initiated the study. After a presentation of key concepts and methods of our approach, we will analyze the intervention, aiming at explaining how a Clinic of Activity

Corresponding author:Katia Kostulski, CNAM, 41 rue Gay-Lussac, 75005, Paris, France. Email: [email protected]

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intervention acts upon the work and transforms it, within the activity but also beyond the activity, in the work organization and in the institution.

Our aim here is not to describe the methodology of the Clinic of Activity with the help of an empirical case, as such descriptions exist elsewhere (Clot, 2009; Clot, Fernandez, & Carles, 2002; Kostulski, 2011; Yvon & Clot, 2003). Neither is our aim to describe this methodology as a ready-made tool. Our aim is to understand, with the help of the empirical case, the obstacles that we interventionists face in the course of our own action and to identify new clinical questions that need to be addressed, as well as to discuss the theoretical implications that these obstacles allow us to explore. In other words the methodology is seen here more as an object of analysis than as a final product or a model to follow.

The intervention analyzed here did not proceed as expected. The constraints of a dif-ficult situation interfered with the course of our own activity as interventionists. In fact, an intervention never takes place as expected. Unexpected constraints, obstacles, and adjustments emerge in the situations in which we find ourselves while applying and developing our clinical methodology. It is by facing these obstacles that we can tackle the question of possible ways to develop work. This article is an opportunity for us to under-stand how these unexpected constraints and obstacles can become meansalthough fragile and elusiveof an intervention in the Clinic of Activity.

The work of educators in centers for emergency placement

The youth judicial protection service was established half a century ago, and since then it has continuously developed new ways of helping young criminal offenders and endangered youth. An essentially political metronome dangles between educating and punishing and taps the tempo of institutional transformations, elaborations, revi-sions, disappearances, and changes in the assistance service for criminal minors. The training and research center of the school for educators in the youth judicial protection service contacted CNAM1 in 2006 with a very detailed commission. This was a time of very important institutional changes, after a radicalization of the state policy of assis-tance for criminal minors. The pendulum at that time leaned strongly toward a punitive response. A decision was announced to close some of the most educationally oriented centers of the youth judicial protection service. It was also decided that new prisons for minors would be opened.

The youth judicial protection service envisioned at the same time a structural transfor-mation: as the training school of educators prepared to leave, a new training organization had to be established instead. Departments, services, missions, and means of the future school were taking shape step by step. Those responsible for training and research in the school wanted to initiate a study which would give new answers to questions concerning the work of the educators and the transmission of the associated knowledge. Simultaneously two teams at CNAM were approached to work on the project: the team of Adult Education and the team of Psychologists of the Clinic of Activity.

Numerous meetings with the school led us to reach the following understanding of the commission: the transmission of work-related knowledge was traditionally a transmis-sion of the professional experience in the youth judicial protection service. An educator


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(ducateur) becomes, after some years of experience, a trainer (formateur) and thus transmits to future educators what she or he has acquired through her or his professional history. The personnel in the school also said that this hand-crafted transmission defies an endogenous formalization of the work and knowledge of the work by the institution itself. They therefore asked if we interventionists could conduct an analysis of the activ-ity aimed at formalizing and rethinking the professional activity of the educators who work with minors in emergency placement.

The blindness of the institution to its core work bothered us, and this same blindness finally became the object of our analysis throughout the intervention.

Analysis of the work activity

In psychology, as in other fields, theoretical and epistemological assumptions orient our actions as interventionists. We draw on a clinical interpretation of the Russian psycho-logical tradition of Vygotsky. Following this tradition, psychology is less a descriptive science of human functions than a science of human development. The psychologist who studies work must build methodological frameworks that allow practitioners in specific historical circumstances to develop their own individual and collective experience, in order to develop the work itself and to turn it into a renewed resource for thinking and acting. Within this orientation, psychology is first and foremost a means of action and only secondarily a means of knowledge. More precisely, because psychology is a means of action, it can also become a means of knowledge (Vygotsky, 1981).

In our tradition of psychology of work, the analysis of activities is based on an essen-tial distinction between prescribed workthat is, the task that is given to practitionersand real workthat is, what practitioners actually do to perform the given task. This distinction implies the necessity of individual and collective interpretation of the task in order to perform it.

Work activity is always a compromise between prescribed and real work, sometimes also between what is requested from the practitioner and what her or his work would rather require (Bguin, 2007; Clot, 2008). In order to remain effective, the practitioner looks for a dynamic compromise between sense and efficiency of the action, or also for a compromise between what would be needed to do and what seems futile to try. From a psychological point of view, working is continuously arbitrating. In a beautiful text, Vygotsky (1997) writes that man is every minute full of unrealized possibilities (p. 70). Each one of mans actions is the result of arbitrating between multiple possible actions, at the crossroad of multiple conflicting horizons.

This arbitration, these tensions and non-realized possibilities lead to a second distinc-tion concerning real work. We distinguish between the realized activity (lactivit rali-se), on the one handthat is, what the practitioner actually does and which is observable through the result of her or his workand the reality of the activity (le rel de lactivit), on the other handwhich represents the non-realized possibilities, as Vygotsky called them. These non-realized possibilities refer to what the practitioner does not do, what she or he tries without succeeding, what she or he gives up doing, what she or he thinks she or he would do if the circumstances were more favorable, or even what she or he eventually does to avoid responding to the expectations of others.



This reality of the activity is not easily observable and yet it actively operates at a psychological level. Beside the work of the practitioner, it concerns her or his preoccupa-tions, intuitions, and sometimes the feeling of leaving the task incomplete. In this sense this reality can weigh heavily on psychological well-being at work and outside work, in particular within strongly constrained work activities. The practitioner faces this reality even by arbitrating with her or his own defensive body. Efficiency and the sense making of the action are two conflicting and sometimes contradictory objectives for the practi-tioner. Working is therefore not reducible to the observable results of professional actions. It consists at the same time of both the effort and the result.

The Clinic of Activity particularly focuses on this relation between the realized activity and the reality of the activity, because health issues and issues of individual and collective professional efficacy play a key role in this relation.

As the realized activity and the reality of the activity do not coincide, the activity does not follow a straightforward single direction. The activity is directed toward a double destination. It is always at the same time directed by the subject toward her or his object and toward the activities of others on this object. The activity is therefore triadic and opposed to itself. Without this tension it would not be possible for an activity to develop. Work connects those who work not only to the object of the activity but also to other workers in the organization. As Leontev (1978) points out: Equipment mediates activ-ity connecting man not only with the world of things but also with other people (p. 59). Interventions in the Clinic of Activity concern all these perspectives of development related to the work as an instrument, the object of the activity, and the people who are involved in the activity. It is not possible, however, to predict where development will happen, or where it will start or stop, as the case in this article will show.

Work as tension between different aspects

Work is at the core of our analysis, from a methodological point of view as well as from the point of view of the commission that CNAM received from the youth judicial protec-tion service. Work and activity are not synonyms: While work provides resources for the activity, conversely the activity modifies work (Clot, 2008, p. 261).

If Taylorism still gave the impression that work and thinking can be separated, the work of the educators in the youth judicial protection service makes the illusion mode difficult to maintain. The aim and quality of the work in this service are affected by the dilemmas of what is just and what is unjust, true and false, and even good and bad. Technical skills in this work concern the mastery of oneself and of others. It is there-fore a type of work which is psychologically very intense and particularly dependent on affective questions and on the relation to the other. We must add that the result of this work is also not very easily identifiable; therefore its evaluation remains complex and uncertain.

We distinguish work (mtier; Clot, 2008; Roger, 2007) from the work collective or even from a community of practices (Lave, 1988). We define work as an architectural structure with four aspects in tension with one another. Work within this perspective is at the same time personal, interpersonal, impersonal, and transpersonal. Health and efficacy at work depend on the fluidity of these tense relations. The four aspects are all structurally



connected, or at least they should be connected to limit the dispersal of psychological energy necessary to professional vitality.

Let us define these four aspects. At the level of the institution and the organization, the first essential dimension of work resides in the impersonal: that is, the description of the work, its prescriptions, and the organization of the tasks. In the work in centers for emer-gency placement, the impersonal is manifested in a legal text issued in 1999 which cre-ated these centers, as well as in the prescribed work hours of the educators.

This aspect alone is not sufficient to define work. Work is also nourished in dialogues between professionals. Work is therefore also interpersonal. Interventions in the Clinic of Activity particularly rely on this second aspect in order to activate the other aspects.

The interpersonal aspect is actually like a lever that can maintain and develop the third aspect, the transpersonal: from the collective history which connects these practi-tioners to one another, and also to their historical predecessors and to the next genera-tions. This third aspect concerns the historical memory of the profession, of the techniques and of the contexts which traveled across the work and which the work went through, and that contribute to make the work doable. This is what we also call pro-fessional genre (Clot, 1999, 2008).

Finally, the fourth aspect, the personal, is inherently in tension with the three oth-ers: As a professional, I enact my work as my individual activity and I do it in my own way.

Each one of these aspects must play its role in order to keep the tensions between them creative. The suppression of the impersonal or the elimination of the transpersonal (Litim & Kostulski, 2006) is at the core of work-related health problems. Work is rooted in this creative tension between the four aspects.

Methodological obstacles and obstacles of work

Too many people suffer today at work. This is mostly because practitioners lose their ability to act upon their work (Clot, 2008). The work itself is suffering and it is therefore the work that must be treated (Fernandez, 2009). Work should not be approached from the point of view of the psychological well-being of practitioners to the detriment of the question of efficacy at work. On the contrary, many psychological studies show that, rather than having a lot of work, what damages well-being and generates suffering is being unable to accomplish the work in an acceptable way. Psychological well-being concerns what allows a worker to reorganize and accomplish her or his activity and what allows the worker to efficiently arbitrate in difficult situations. The person in these situ-ations is basically dependent on the possibility of doing well. The available resources are heterogeneous: connected to the institution, the work organization, the division of labor with other practitioners, work history, and personal experience. That is why practi-tioners power to act is at the core of our interventionist research (Clot, 2008).

In each situation we study not what is wrong or dysfunctional, but ways to accom-plish good work, in spite of the obstacles. The power to act at work is a keystone of health and efficacy. This implies a vibrant work which activates the history of ways of doing in order to address unresolved issues. By this continuous work of reorganizing ways of doing, a practitioner can preserve and develop her or his power to act.



Let us come back to the role of dysfunctions in our approach. Our methodology contributes to their articulation in the course of the intervention. The intervention rein-vents these dysfunctions. We aim at making the work visible in the course of its actions. This aim necessarily collides with the obstacles accumulated in the given work and with what limits the movement between the four aspects defined above.

In the intervention commissioned by the youth judicial protection service, we had to respond to the request of the institution. In order to do so we needed to create a group of educators who would focus on the key issues at stake in their work and take part in an individual and then collective analysis of their work activity. We start from the individual in order to anchor our analysis in the reality of the activity and therefore better approach its collective, transpersonal nature. Work does not belong to anybody. The collective is there-fore not a mythological entity but a privileged means. The collective is the condition of development of the analysis of an object: that is, the work, which is located at a collective rather than individual level. If work is built on the condition of collective development, this development itself is the condition of the analysis.

In the course of an intervention we bump into concrete obstacles such as resistance toward speaking about work or the impossibility to debate about work. These obstacles, revealed by the methodology, signal conflictual development. The obstacles do not refer only to the ongoing intervention, but also to the current work context and the activity of the involved practitioners. Our aim is not to mask or bypass the obstacles in order to enter at any cost into the analyses of concrete activities. Our aim is instead to bring up for discussion and potentially to transform the real obstacles that impose themselves on interventionists as well as on practitioners in their daily work. The practitioner is not omnipotent with regard to the tensions between the aspects of her or his work, or to the history of the work within the history of the organization and the institution that are always beyond her or him. That is why those who manage the work and the institution are also involved in the analysis and the possible overcoming of the obstacles. They authorize, support, or prevent the development of the work.

The confrontation with the obstacles is a means to focus within the institution on the conditions and social frameworks of the activity of the practitioners, in order for them to acquire new resources in the course of the development of their work. The object of the commissioned interventionthat is, in our case the professional competence of the edu-cators and its transmission in centers for emergency placement of minorsemerges with those who are primarily concerned with this object. But it also needs to be worked out with those who represent the institution and commissioned the intervention.

If this object did not represent a problem for the institution itself, it would not be at the core of a commissioned intervention. Yet the psychologist cannot have the function and the ambition of eliminating the historical obstacles of an institution. The psycholo-gist can only identify these obstacles and make them the focus of dialogue. A failure to conduct an analysis of the professional competence of the educators within their activity can become a means to awaken the institution to reflect on its ways of managing itself, to work out the necessary controversies concerning theories, the missions and the tools that the institution makes available to the practitioners. The amputation of the interven-tionists power to act can even become a forced way to act for the practitioners in and on their institution.



The method of crossed auto-confrontations

In order to understand the individual and collective psychological reality of the work activity, it is necessary to bring the work to the center of a focused analysis among the practitioners. The method of crossed auto-confrontations (Clot, 1999, 2008) serves this purpose. The method follows three phases.

The first phase consists of observations of situations and the professional context. This is accomplished by defining with a collective of volunteer practitioners character-istic situations of the activity of the educator and the conditions of realization of their mission. These observations aim at producing analyses that are then brought to collec-tive discussion. In the case of the educators, the analyses focused on typical situations in their activity, the most important situations of emergency placement and orientation of the minors.

The second phase is devoted to videotaping the identified situations, which will then be specifically analyzed together with the practitioners with the help of crossed com-mentaries. The educators experienced at this point the diversity of ways of doing while pursuing the same goals. More concretely, the interventionists video-record sequences of the activity of volunteer participants. Soon after that the practitioner is filmed while com-menting in interaction with the interventionist on the video of her or his own activity. This is what we call a simple auto-confrontation, namely a confrontation which involves the participant, the interventionist, and a videotaped sequence of the activity. Finally the volunteers are grouped in dyads with the purpose of commenting on the videotaped sequence of another colleague. This is what we call crossed auto-confrontation, namely a confrontation which involves two participants, the interventionist, and the videotaped sequence of the activity of one of the two participants. The crossed auto-confrontation session is also videotaped. The entire filmed material, comprising the sequences of the activity, the sessions of simple auto-confrontation and of crossed auto-confrontation, is then edited into a single video montage.

The third phase consists in using this video montage to share the analysis with the collective. A cycle is established at this point between what the practitioners do, what they say they do, and, finally, what they do of what they say. This phase pursues a double objective: disseminating the knowledge produced during the study and reworking with the wider collective the work issues highlighted in the analyses, namely what is possible and what is impossible within the activity, the contents of the experiences, implicit knowledge, what can be expected and what cannot be expected. In this way, the practi-tioners are supported in their attempt to develop their activity and to rethink, if possible, the issues of transmission of competences.

We use the video in order to transform the status of the work experience. In the begin-ning, the ways of carrying out ones daily work activity appear to a practitioner personal and self-evident. As far as the interventionist is concerned, work is neither personal nor self-evident. Of course work is dependent on the ways in which each practitioner carries on and enacts her or his work. Beside that, however, work depends also on the way the practitioner can support and transport what has been transmitted to her or him, in order to explain it together with the prescription, the work organization, together with the other practitioners and together with herself or himself in each particular situation. It is first of



all against this common idea that everything is up to the person that we work in our interventions. Everything does not depend on the person. It is rather the person who must explain herself or himself with all the rest in order to be able to act.

Filming the work for us is, on the one hand, a way to denaturalize the work, because the practitioners themselves are the first ones who experience within the analysis that what they do does not go without saying. Filming is, on the other hand, also a way to depersonalize work, because the practitioners measure the collective dimension of the challenges, resources, and obstacles which they are necessarily facing at work. The filmed activity rooted in real work conditions can support the elaboration by the practi-tioners on their work. On this basis, collective experience can become a means for the analysis of work and its development. In the present study of the activity and training of educators, this method of crossed auto-confrontations could also provide useful analyti-cal tools for training.

An intervention without a respondent

During the intervention at the youth judicial protection service we encountered numer-ous and obstinate difficulties. The formal success of an intervention sometimes covers up unexpected obstacles. The resistance of the reality toward the interventionists actions has some virtues. In the remaining sections of this article we aim at illustrating these virtues.

The youth protection service has various centers and institutions for the placement of minors set under the judicial authority. Different institutions typically correspond to differ-ent situations for the criminal minors or to different levels or crimes that they have commit-ted. Therefore within the service institutions receiving minors, very different situations coexist. Foster custody institutions, for instance, primarily accommodate endangered minors to protect them from a deleterious social or family environment. These institutions are different from the centers for emergency placement, which for a few months receive minors who have been found guilty of a crime, or minors from the prisons in which they serve their sentences.

Within a political context which was more favorable to imprisonment than to educa-tion, those who are responsible for training and research, previously themselves educators, wished to promote the educational tradition of the centers for emergency placement. They wished to question the intermediate institutional mechanisms that pursued at the same time educational and repressive concerns. The lifetime of the different institutions mentioned above depends on the swinging of the institutional and political metronome. Generally they have a very short life of a few years.

As what was at stake in the commissioned intervention was the formalization of the activity and the promotion of the profession of the educators, we insisted on the necessity to conduct our work in a relatively stable institutional framework. In 2006 the oldest institution was represented by the centers for emergency placement, established 7 years earlier. This choice was also motivated by a recent internal evaluation report which pre-sented a very critical overview of these centers. This report, according to those who commissioned the intervention, did not take into account the work of the educators, which is so difficult to observe as it is almost invisible to others.



Fostering and orientation were referred to as the primary missions of these centers. The concrete work of the educators corresponding to these missions was, however, not perceptible by the institution. For us interventionists the question was to conduct an analysis of the activity which would account for the professionalism of the educators in the centers for emergency placement with regard to the main missions of these centers, namely fostering and orientation of the criminal minors.

The choice of the precise center to be approached for starting the analysis was also connected to this objective of accounting for the professionalism of the educators. A center for emergency placement needed to be located. This center needed to be one which functioned well or, to use terms of those who commissioned the intervention, a center that is not in crisis. Those who commissioned the intervention negotiated for a long time before locating such a center. Several months passed before they were able to come up with a contact for such a center for us. Since then we have been emphasizing to our inter-locutors that the crisis is recurrently and iteratively a way of functioning of the overall institution of the centers.

Our attempt to approach a stable institution turned out to be an illusion. In the very course of our study, these centers disappeared and were replaced by new institutions called establishments for educational placement. We designed the study for a period of one year within the first center, and we planned to continue then for a second year in another center. It looked absolutely sensible to us to compare ways of working and the professional genres of two different centers. Yet we eventually needed 19 months of relentless work to conduct the first two phases of the Clinic of Activity intervention only in the first of the two centers. The third phase of the intervention remained suspended for a long time. It seemed that there were no more conditions for launching such a phase. This phase was eventually reduced to a meeting in which the analysis of the previous center was presented to a team of educators. In other words, our intervention became an analysis of the institutional crisis.

The first observation phase: Fragile work in its institutional context

Once the first center was selected, we interventionists had a meeting with its educational team and those who originally commissioned the study. After the meeting, following the impetus of their director, the team of educators accepted to work with us in the interven-tion. The intervention started with an observation phase covering different moments of the daily work of the educators with the minors, including night shifts. This phase lasted 6 months. During this phase we suggested establishing a group of volunteers with whom we could work more closely and engage in analysis of the specific questions of the study. Our suggestion raised contradictory reactions.

This was a period in which the practitioners were facing numerous difficulties in their organization. Sick leaves were more and more frequent while interpersonal conflicts and resentment were flourishing. Everybody seemed to be interested in the work of our team of interventionists, yet nobody wanted to directly engage in it. Some of the educators said that they were burned out, clearly indicating that they had passed the limits of what could be bearable in their work. It seemed to us that the generic resources of the educators were no



longer available to them. In their work they had to face minors with increasingly complex mental disorders and violence that sometimes went beyond juvenile delinquency. It looked like the resources of the educators were not in line with their needs and the prescriptions of the institution.

One particularly important event also occurred in this period. The decree concerning the profession of the educators fell on them like the blade of a guillotine. According to them, the institution decided that they had to work nights also and this appeared to them as a serious devaluation of the competence of the educators, now to be used as guards of sleeping criminal minors.

The suggested engagement of the educators in the intervention was set against a harsh reality: emergencies following events that occurred the same morning or during the night, such as an outbreak of a scabies epidemic on the morning of a meeting with us, and the announcement of the decree which would shortly bring them to work nights. Unexpected events in their daily work (the attack on of an educator by a minor, one of the minors run-ning away, etc.) as well as institutional transformations (the decree) seemed to turn the educators away from the opportunity to work with us in the intervention.

When we were just about to give up, understanding that the practitioners clearly had other things on their minds, two educators declared their availability to work with us and two others said that they could also join in.

What emerged from this first phase was the fragility of the work as well as of our intervention. These two are related to one another. They actually appeared in the course of the intervention as intertwined phenomena.

The second phase: A series of obstacles

Several months passed before we could have the first analysis session with the two volunteers. The crisis was at this time very present in the center. When the meeting took place, several questions were raised concerning the work itself and its possibili-ties of development.

During this second phase, methodological questions became acute, in particular the status of the videotaped activity. The video recording and its uses were discussed at length.

A refusal to allow videotaping of the activity is often a significant fact in itself. It brings up real or imaginary threats represented by those who would end up watching the recordingthemselves, colleagues, the direct hierarchy, the institution. A filmed activity cannot recreate endogenous difficulties encountered at work. In other words, the video recording questions the relations between work and the diversity of the insti-tutional parties.

Moreover, a video recording in itself never says anything of an activity. This is the very reason why the Clinic of Activity uses video recordings: they do not speak on their own and this tenacious silence fills an essential function for the analysis. The video recording provides more gaps than illustrations. What can say something about an activity is the dialogical construction that goes with the video recording: that is, the narrative which transpires from the video montage and the controversy which arises during the dialogue between practitioners in the intervention sessions. It is pre-cisely because a video cannot say anything of an activity by itself that the practitioners



can grab hold of the details shown in it and say things that they could not have said without the input of the video.

We made sure that the contents of the videos would be not used without the consent of those filmed. Hence, the use of the video for the sessions of crossed self-confrontation was eventually compromised by the practitioners who did not give their consent. Also the possibility of using the video for training purposes with novice educators became unrealistic. It seemed to us more productive to openly discuss these obstacles concerning the use of the video with the team of educators as well as with those who commissioned the study. We also initiated similar discussions between the team of educators and those who commissioned the study. By initiating these discussions, we aimed at transforming these obstacles into means for pursuing the intervention.

An intervention in spite of the practitioners?

The analytical sessions encountered the same difficulties that we saw in the first phase of the intervention. The centers for emergency placement seemed to go through a new cri-sis and the sick leaves of some practitioners forced others to withdraw from the inter-vention. The entire year went into a series of crises impossible to anticipate. Almost all our attempts to pursue the intervention failed: our interlocutors could not agree on the availability of the educators for organizing the auto-confrontation sessions. Even when we succeeded in scheduling a session, the interventionists trip to the center was in vain as the educator turned out to be absent. The team of educators at this point was working without three full-time practitioners, and there was no chance that one of those at work could take part in the intervention.

The study, its object of analysis, and its goals became therefore anecdotal for the educa-tors harassed by the crisis. The effort that the intervention required competed with the effort required by the critical work situation. A silent sick leave can also be a means to suspend work issues which have become overwhelming for a practitioner. This withdrawal of the practitioners may be seen as an inevitable defense, and their refusal to engage in analytical sessions with interventionists can be seen as a result of exasperation of professional affects.

The impossibility of pursuing analysis

Our interventions involve direct observations, then construction of the video montage, followed by simple auto-confrontations and crossed auto-confrontations, and finally a further development of the analysis with the extended work collective. The last phase of our intervention in the center for emergency placement turned out to be just an account of our work in the institution presented to the entire team of educators.

In the Clinic of Activity, observation is not only a phase of data collection. While the practitioners are observed, they also observe themselves. This shift has the potential to develop inner dialogue on the activity: the relation of the professional to her- or himself within her or his activity is mediated by the relation to the otherthat is, the interven-tionist. This phase of observations is also a phase of exchanges which allow the partici-pants, including the interventionists, to reorient themselves and build up together the object of the forthcoming analysis.



During the simple and crossed auto-confrontations, the practitioners, by watching the videos, can and must explain what can be seen of the activity on the screen. Most importantly they must explain it to themselves and argue with it. During the simple auto-confrontation the practitioner talks to the interventionist, while in the crossed auto-confrontation the practitioner talks to a colleague and to the interventionist. Through these different phases of the intervention the discourse of the practitioners develops around different views on the object of the activity, different arguments, and different interpretations. In this way, new possibilities for the activity can be explored.

In an analysis of the work activity, the very act of explaining ones own work to different interlocutors (the colleague, the interventionist, the director) generates new contents of the activity, such as worries and obstacles which are otherwise invisible. In other words, by supplying the reality of the activity with new contents, the work is brought up as a matter of debate among the parties in the intervention.

From this point of view, simple and crossed auto-confrontations do not have the same status. The first ones serve as means to conduct the crossed auto-confrontations. It is by comparing these two contexts that the analysis takes shape with regard to the constraints and resources of the entire collective. Simple auto-confrontations have the status of a sometimes quite intimate deviation into the personal activity. It cannot serve the analy-sis outside its comparison with crossed auto-confrontation.

We were able to videotape each one of the four volunteer educators for one hour while the minors were waking up. After multiple attempts we succeeded in conducting the simple auto-confrontations, then with great difficulties we managed to conduct the crossed auto-confrontations. The crossed auto-confrontations in particular carry the marks of the difficult conditions in which they were realized. Productive controversy is not easy to maintain within fragile workall the more so as the work in itself was extremely chaotic because of continuous unexpected events that the practitioners could barely cope with. In such circumstances, in order to protect their fragile work, practition-ers turn their dialogue quite naturally into a consensual agreement without controversy on the very personal character of their work which cannot really be discussed.

Crisis of the service, crisis of the intervention, or crisis of the work?

During the intervention it became clear to us that the work of the educators in the center for emergency placement could turn out to be impossible in certain circum-stances. In addition to this, the fieldwork observations and our exchanges with the practitioners bring us today to reflect upon what is naturally indicated by the repeatedly used word crisis. This crisis throughout our study turns out to be a recurrent func-tioning modality of the service in the institutional and organizational circumstances at the time of the intervention. The nature, the reasons, and the function of this crisis deserve to be questioned.

This crisis seems to be part of the habitual functioning of a service such as the one we studied. This recurrent and tacitly accepted crisis naturalizes the instability of the institution and its professional hardships. If the crisis is not overcome, practitioners leave in order to avoid burnout. A new educational team takes over, new minors are



placed, and perhaps a new project is initiated while waiting for the next crisis which can or cannot be overcome.

Concretely the crisis was manifested in absenteeism, in an incident where an educator was attacked by a minor, and in continuous interpersonal conflicts. Each event was inter-preted as a new crisis of the service which in its own way explained or justified the outbursts, but which also prevented the practitioners from facing questions at stake in the work. When the crisis becomes too strong, the composition of the team itself is ques-tioned. A new team is created with a new educational project.

The origin of a crisis and its status are difficult to identify. In the case of this institu-tion, some key events may allow us to see some of its features. The various obstacles that we encountered in conducting the intervention lead us to point out an underdeveloped impersonal aspect of the work (the weak and unstable institutional prescription). For instance, after the director submitted an application of transfer to another center of emer-gency placement, a number of educators also submitted their own transfer applications. It seemed that from one center to another, the most elementary rules could be different. For instance, the simple question whether or not the door of the center is kept locked was not resolved in a unified way across the centers. The educators ways of working there-fore depended to a large extent on the individual director.

In view of the vagueness of the institutional prescription of the missions of the centers for emergency placement and in response to the transpersonal fragility of the educators collective, the director, her or his way of doing, her or his educational point of view, embodied in itself the impersonal aspect of the work.

The director of the center therefore takes on far too great a responsibility: she or he defines the theoretical frame of reference of the educational activity as well as the rules of internal functioning. This fusion and confusion of the directors function and of the impersonal aspect is even more problematic if one considers the chronic deficit of the transpersonal aspect. The crisis in fact invites the educators to protect themselves to avoid burnout. The educators therefore no longer know how to read the situations, how to act, how to anticipate violence. The impersonal and the personal face one another, immobilized in front of the reality. The crisis may be considered a conventional dis-course and even a ready-made interpretation of this paralysis. As a discourse in use, the crisis is one of the main obstacles to the reconstruction of the professional competence of the educators.

In this, the crisis seems astonishingly functional. It allows practitioners to escape the questions that their daily activity poses both to the work and to the institution. The crisis authorizes an artificial denial of the reality. We insist on the Vygotskian principle that the psychological instrument connects those who work to the object of the activity and also to the other human beings in the organization. This connecting function is to a large extent realized within the repetitive discourse on the crisis. This connection is therefore a risky one. Actually it may be seen as a disconnection because it protects the practition-ers from a reality that they cannot grasp. This defensive discourse is a sort of pact of denial (Kas, 1993), an anesthesia of the action. It acts as if organizing passivity. The psychological instrument of the activity can turn into an instrument of passivity.

This is in line with the Vygotskian tradition as we are ultimately talking about the contri-bution of a psychology of possible or prevented human development to the psychopathology



of work. The atrophy of the activity also needs psychological instruments which allow practitioners to accomplish false tasks imposed on them. We see in the case of the educators in the center for emergency placement forced compensations of a frustrated activity which become new sources of decrease of agency.

Conclusion: On the institution and its functioning

By relating the initial commission of the intervention to the events which followed, we can better understand this commission by the institution and further the conditions of the educators in this institution. Our analysis connects the blindness of the institution toward its core work and the failure of an endogenous elaboration of the educators work at the collective and transpersonal level. The difficulties encountered during the intervention reveal issues for which the intervention method must take responsibility.

One can understand that the realized auto-confrontations could not serve in such a distorted context the expected development of the work. In these conditions the develop-ment was played out elsewhere. The Clinic of Activity must take the responsibility for this type of shift of the object of the intervention and move to where the development of the work is actually prevented. In our own actions as interventionists there is a life of the object (Engestrm & Blackler, 2005) because one cannot predict where develop-ment will happen, where it will start, and where it will stop. In the case discussed in this article the development stopped at two knots within the organization. It came up against weak impersonal procedures and underdeveloped transpersonal instruments of the work collective. If professional mobilitythat is, the possibility for the practitioners to trans-fer to another center (defined and developed by the institution and therefore imper-sonal)becomes an encouraged means to escape interpersonal dialogue on the real work and its traps, in order for the practitioner to personally protect her- or himself, then it is the development of the transpersonal which is at risk.

Analysis of work in our approach can illuminate the role of the institution or the work organization in the development of a profession or in the daily realization of the activi-ties. However, the institution alone cannot break the deadlock of work in which institu-tional underdevelopment and overdevelopment of personal defenses confront each other. A collective initiative is needed to treat the institution of work within the work organiza-tion. This is the main lesson of the intervention case discussed in this article. A Clinic of Activity does not avoid the conflicts. It develops the conflicts, aiming at preserving the opportunities for another relation to reality.

We interventionists did not want ourselves to avoid the conflicts of the intervention itself. It is by facing the contradictions of the intervention that new possibilities can be created for the institution which commissioned the study as well as for our own action. We had to confront ourselves with the knots of the prevented development of the work. The work of untangling these knots and re-establishing the circulation of the professional energy in the organization proved to be impossible within this intervention with the edu-cators on the center for emergency placement.

Those who commissioned the study are now in a position of better understanding their role with regard to the work of the educators. It is now possible for them to engage in the



development of the organizational choices of the direction of the centers and of their strategy. The collective of the educators may now question the object of its activity and the underdevelopment of its work. Did we underestimate the work to be done at the beginning with the directors who commissioned the intervention? That is possible. However, a zone of proximal development of the work is open and it can be closed again. Work questions are continuously asked within the details of the professional actions. These actions always bring about more or less distant horizons.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Acknowledgement

This article was translated from an original manuscript in French by Annalisa Sannino.

Note1. Conservatoire National des Arts et Mtiers (CNAM) is the teaching and research institution

in Paris to which the authors belong.

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Yves Clot is Professor of Work Psychology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Mtiers (CNAM), where he is also director of the research team Clinic of Activity within the Laboratory of Psychology of Work and Action. He is a leading French authority in Vygotskys theory. His research interests include the relations between activity and subjectivity, and the development of the method of crossed auto-confrontation in workplaces. Address: CNAM, 41 rue Gay-Lussac, 75005, Paris, France. [email: [email protected]]

Katia Kostulski is Associate Professor in Psychology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Mtiers (CNAM). After her Ph.D. in Pragmatics in 1998, she joined the Clinic of Activity group at CNAM to conduct research on the role of language in professional daily activities and on method-ologies of psychological interventions. She also teaches Psychology at CNAM. Address: CNAM, 41 rue Gay-Lussac, 75005, Paris, France. [email: [email protected]]


yves clot - intervening for transforming

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