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1995. Ethnography and Organizational Learning: In Pursuit of Learning at Work. In Organizational Learning and Technological Change. S. Bagnara, C. Zucchermaglio, and S. Stucky, eds. New York & Berlin: Springer-Verlag. . 1996. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Orr, Julian Ev and Norman C. Crowfoot. 1992. Design by Anecdote: The Use of Ethnography to Guide the Application of Technology to

Practice. Proceedings of PDC '92: The Participatory Design Conference, Cambridge, MA. Rethinking Work. 1994. Business Week. 1 7 Oct., pp. 74-11 7. Suchman, Lucy. 1987. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1988. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Paperbacks.

The Symbolic Narrative of "Anti-Management" or How Managers-to-be Express Their Resistance to the New Forms of Work
Angela Procoli Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale CNRS, College de France, Paris In a Stream of Continuous Change n a recent book, sociologist Richard Sennett explains how flexibility imposed by the new capitalism deeply modifies the rules of the game in the making of a career:
Flexible capitalism has blocked the straight roadway of career, diverting employees suddenly from one kind of work into another. (Sennett 1998: 9).

Workers now have to be permanently adaptable to the fluctuations of the job market. Sennett is extremely convincing when he shows how recurring changes erode personality, even though he could be criticized for having limited his observations to some professional aspects.1 While in the past a worker managed his career "along a straight line" (he worked hard, he accumulated experience, he could plan his future), today there is no such a thing as settling down; such a balance as he has achieved is perpetually threatened. In our flexible, re-engineered economy, Sennett asserts that we are unanchored from our pasts, our neighbors, and ourselves. "Time's arrow is broken; it has no trajectory in a continually reengineered, routine-hating, short-term political economy (98)." Sennett shows the superficiality to which modern individuals are doomed, unable as they are to grasp the sense of things. However, his essay leaves a question open: how can modern people survive in a system that imposes such discontinuities? This is a question that necessarily puzzles an anthropologist who has always been taught that continuity and transmission are necessary ingredients fora society to exist. So I decided to penetrate the heart of continuous change. I did my fieldwork in a group of trainees in personnel management, i.e., people who are allegedly, members of the "global and mobile elite." Learning to Be Flexible Today, against the background of a changing professional world, much has been said about "professional training." For instance, the French expression formation professionnelle, Angela Procoli is an anthropologist at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale at the College de France, Paris.

which translates as professional training, emphasizes the concept of human transformation (akin to the forming of character), while this connotation may be absent from the English training, where stress is laid on instruction. Apart from the fact that in French formation and transformation derive from the same root, the concept of human transformation dates back to the educational thought of the French Enlightment: a "life-long education" was thought to be necessary to become a "good citizen" of a State in which everybody, and even for the first time the poorest, could have access to knowledge. In the writings of Condorcet, who was a key figure among the intellectuals of the French revolution,2 the enlightened citizen is the one who, training himself continually, breaks out from the slavery to which ignorance dooms him (Condorcet 1989). Condorcet's idea of human progress re-emerges two centuries later as a law that institutes, for the first time in France, the right for workers to take time off for professional training. This law dates back to 1971 and states that professional training aims at ensuring "the forming and development of every individual, all his life long, allowing him to acquire all the knowledge, all the intellectual and manual skills directed toward personal fulfillment, as well as the cultural, economic and social progress of society." But during the next two decades, the meaning of training changes: it is more and more limited to the professional field. The changes in the world economy (deregulation and globalization affecting market, trade and labor) that took place in the 1970s and 1980ssometimes referred to as a new phase of capitalism called "disorganized capitalism" (Lash and Urry, 1987)resulted in the emergence of mass unemployment and precarious work.3 In the critical context of spiraling unemployment, professional training becomes in political cum media speech, a "shield", a defensive weapon against the ups and downs of the employment situation. Life-long professional re-training allows people to escape from the most negative effects of re-engineering and mass lay-off. Parallel to this defensive reasoning, flexibility is presented in a more favorable light (it is a challenge). In a global economy, people must not fear uncertainty; they will take up the challenge of being adaptable to any job

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and professional (or cultural) context (this essentially concerning managers). As it moves from the ideals of the French revolution to the modern world, the concept of professional training has, beyond doubt, undergone a deep transformation. It is not any longer a matter of enlightened citizenship; it is a matter of training to become amenable to the requirements of the market. Following the rules of the new economy, only those who are adaptable will survive in the professional world. If, however, economic conditions only produce a small e7/te of workers and a large mass of useless people, one may well wonder what citizenship means. Fieldwork For an anthropologist, a key issue is the meaning of professional training for people who are training themselves. Is training simply a means to learn to be flexible? Or is the issue much more complex? In other words what is the "imagery" of the traineesthat is, according to the definition M. Godelier gives, the articulation of their symbolic representations with their social practice (Godelier 1986). The question arises in connection with the inquiries I conducted from 1992 to 1997 in the so-called "Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers" (CNAM) in Paris. This institution, born at the end of the 18th century (at the time of the French Revolution), was intended to be a kind of university for any worker, technician or engineer who attended in the evening, at the end of his workday, to keep abreast of new technologies and to be initiated to the most recent techniques applying to the tools of his trade. Nowadays, two centuries later, CNAM looks for a compromise between loyalty to the Revolutionary idea that everyone has the right to have an education {omnes docet4) and the necessity to be adaptable to the rules of the market. Thus, in the 1970s, the Conservatoire, where people traditionally trained after work hours (from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.), adopted a new training program exclusively for executives with a long working experience, while traditional evening courses are open to technical personnel or the unemployed, or even to young people without any professional experience (Grignon 1976). From the point of view of the institution, traditional training is separated from the new mode of training. This introduces, for the first time in Conservatoire, the notion of selection. While evening courses are free, day classes are particularly expensive and employers cover the expenses. The arrangement is known as "leave with pay for training"; the law establishing this right for the first time in France was promulgated in July 1971. While evening courses are open not only to employed people but also to the unemployed, day classes are strictly reserved to those who have a job. These are middle or senior executives (they are 35-45 years old) and they come to CNAM intending to turn to a new employment or a promotion. To them, daytime training has a good brand image; they are monitored at close range by those responsible for training and they allegedly acquire "competence" to become adaptable to change in the labor market.5 Competence is guaranteed by switching (between workplace and training institution). This is supposed to give trainees the opportunity to adapt the theoretical learning acquired in CNAM to the firm's practical needs. Finally, the selection of trainees separates an e"//te (those who

are well-situated in the professional world, that is, executives) meant to become the "high performers," from the other ones, the "low performers"according to the expression used in the official discourse (of administration and coaches alike), that is, "young people who do not have any professional experience or people who are already excluded from the professional world" (i.e., housewives or the unemployed). But, as we shall see further on, the opposition "performer/non-performer," a basic tenet for the institution, can be challenged precisely by those who are supposed to be part of an e7/te. In fact, those concerned may not condone this division, because they often blur the line between evening and day training. For example, those who are not entitled to day classes manage nevertheless to join them (it is the case of unemployed people whose leave for training is paid for by their former employer or by themselves); or those who are in day classes extend training time by going to evening courses. I will refer here more specifically to a group I joined from 1992 to 1994. This group of about forty people was following the day classes, a week per month during two years, to become managers of human resources. Thus, during that time, I followed trainees inside the training institution and outside, where I met them in their domestic and professional lives, trying to understand how people who have very different professional histories (I met social workers, people working in hospitals, executive staff in state and private firms, in ministries) club together in Conservatoire to form a real group, framed in a well defined space and time, that of professional training. This group comes together as the result of a mode of training whereby trainees are continually encouraged to overstep family and professional patterns and to take a step away from the outer world (i.e., the world outside the training field). The purpose is to become a "new man": only those trainees who have learned to change themselves will be able to change the Other (the one who will be managed) and to involve him in the plans of the firm. This stands out clearly when training sessions are being analyzed. Trainees spend most of the week locked in what they call "atelierdeproduction" (production workshop) where, in a kind of role play, they create the new and flexible individual who will be able to adapt quickly to any alteration of the market. Possessing the data of a real firm, they break up into various components the profile of a ficticious character's performance in order to select those skills that will be developed during his training. They are taught to distinguish "jobs at risk" (doomed to disappear) from "good prospect jobs" (with a chance to develop). The first they will fail to mention altogether; they will make the second evolve in the direction wanted by the firm. Finally, what is asked of a manager is to be able to evaluate constantly the gap between today's competence and the one required tomorrow. The workshop is preceded and followed by two "guidances," in which trainees learn how to formulate their professional project. While the method (re-construction/de-construction) remains the same, it is no longer a question of working on a ficticious other, but on a real persononeself. Indeed, the management of human resources is learned via some kind of

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initiatory logic in which, to make the other productive, it is necessary first to be productive oneself. At the time of guidance, the trainee looks back at the time he has spent in the firm at some remove, to analyze his profession without any personal involvement, as if it were someone else's experience. He has to develop his capacity for self-evaluation. The professional experience, required when the trainee joins the session, is no more than some kind of raw material that needs to be remolded by the group, under the very discreet control of the session leader. Having accounted for his own professional history to his mates, the trainee lets them "de-construct" his past and re-construct his future in the light of their own experiences. Specific views are given up for the sake of a collective standpoint. The success of this operation will depend on one's awareness of the gap separating a personal view of reality from the collective one. For each trainee, the image of himself mirrored by the other trainees complicates his initial career project, which now encompasses a reflection on training and life itself. His (hi-)story is then analyzed in its globality, and the purely professional objectives, towards which the sessionleader leads him on, become secondary. As a collective story is being put together, it becomes clearer all along that the professional objective is taking second rank. Life Stories and the Account of a Collective Narrative The trainees' representations and practices observed during the training weeks lie within a far-ranging social field that embraces professional and many other sub-fields. This global aspect emerged from a collective discourse that was elaborated along the way as the actors advanced in their training. Trainees were encouraged, by the method itself, to work out their past. However, a collective narrative quickly overrode the individual discourses in all their diversity. Encouraged by this training method, trainees often talk about their life stories, marked by wanderings and discontinuity in their professional and family life. It is the case of a woman who explains that she gave up school at the end of her adolescent years against the wishes of her family. This was in the 1970s, and she left to go and live in a community in the south of France in the middle of nowhere. For several years she lived on odd jobs, got married and divorced two years later. Today, talking about that time, she says: I've made a lot of blunders, such as living in a community according to the custom of that time. But, finally, when I've understood that I needed stability, I left [the community]. Coming back to Paris, she lived on different odd jobs requiring no qualification. Meanwhile, she resumed her studies in a professional training institution and graduated at the end of high school. After that, she found a more stable job at "Electricite de France,"6 got married again and divorced a few years later. Today, she lives alone with her thirteen-year-old son. Discontinuity can be taken in the context of a family history of uprooting. This is the case of another trainee from a family of "forains" (i.e. who run a travelling merry-go-round) originating from Eastern Europe.

Forains are uneducated people, rustics, and really attached to their fairs, to their beliefs and to their speech.

She was born in France, where her family arrived after many wanderings. Throughout her childhood, she lived a very nomadic life. Her parents move all over France with their merrygo-rounds. She admits today that she did not like that nomadic life; she was made to suffer when at school she was considered to be a gypsy girl. She protests: "Forains and gypsies, it's not the same thing at all." Many of the choices she made in her life were motivated by her will to find roots somewhere, to escape from the nomadic life that means poverty and very modest social origins. To continue one's studies and to find a job is the way out. Like many people coming from poor families, she took a job as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, where she still works today. The hospital, to her, is a family home with a lot of friends.
In the hospital we were all uprooted people.... The hospital recruited people coming from rural backwaters or from the most disadvantaged sections of the population and who chose to study nursing because it was paid.

Professional training makes it possible for her to go on studyi ng for years and finally graduate to head nurse. Even if not all trainees are familiar with professional training, they still attempt to justify their current choice of training session by evoking a traumatic event that took place shortly before joining the training courses. This can be a breakup in family life (a close parent's death, a divorce, a long period of emotional deprivation) or a step taken away from an ideology such as former trade-unionist who becomes a manager, or a brutal lay-off putting an end to a long career in the same firm. This is also the case of another trainee who arrived at CNAM one year after the death of her ten-year-old son. As she tells the story of her life: "I haven't begun this training session by chance. I started it two years ago; what I now fear is the end of it." This is also the case of another trainee who, formerly a stock jobber, was fired after twenty years as the Stock Exchange was re-patterned. And finally, there is the case of another trainee, an ex-trade-unionist, who came to the training session in a moment of big changes in his life. After divorcing his wife, he decided to leave the trade-union where he had been active for twenty years. Today he plans to become, through the professional training experience, a manager in the firm. For all these trainees, training experience is a "fire escape" where they seek asylum from a world too finely balanced in order to gather strength and stability. Statements switch over, significantly, from the individual to the collective. While the individual seeks to emphasize some fundamental brittleness that has to be cured by training, the collective (the group of trainees) takes over the model of the "broken life line" and makes it clear that the "restoration of identity" is the main goal of their professional re-deployment. Formulated along the way as the actors advance in their training, the collective narrative appears like the account of a "myth," as it is exemplary (it founds a new order) and general (specific features of individual histories are erased). Everyone

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in the group takes over the myth of the loss to be recouped, and he no longer sets a claim to account for his own individual experience. It does not matter whether the loss is real or imaginary. Thus, even those who did not lose their job and who will not lose it, at least during the training period, speak and act as if they were already laid off. If trainees say, and rightly so, that at CNAM the former stock jobber "mourns his previous occupation," they use the same expression (mourning) for those who have lost their job. For everyone, training becomes a place "to mourn their previous occupation," to speak about their "professional death" (Procoli 1999). This is the case of a woman who is a social worker coming to CNAM with the project of turning to another profession. But the further she advances in the training program, the more uneasy she feels in her job. Finally, she begins to speak as if she were unemployed. "I'm nowhere, I'm shedding my skin as a social worker.... I'm mourning my profession." This is also the case of another trainee, a social worker at the Paris police headquarters, where she deals with the professional and family problems of policemen. After a very mobile career (in her administration, executives have to change periodically their workplace), she feels very tired. Today she wants to leave public administration. Her discourse about her professional re-deployment becomes a discourse about her professional death and it takes a mythical form that evokes myths about the end of history. This profession [social workers in the police force] is one where we engineer our own disappearance. Once the problems are solved, we vanish because, in general terms, we are no longer needed. The same with cops: when they have reached their ultimate goal, when everyone is safe and order prevails, they are no longer needed. In the context of a mode of training whereby trainees are continually encouraged to overstep family and professional patterns, the notion of "mourning" stresses the breakdown with the past or with the world outside training. Family life outside must not interfere with training, especially with the new bonds set up in this context. The story of a trainee who, during his training experience, had his second son, is exemplary. He became the target of his mates' jokes as he had transgressed a fundamental rule at CNAM: never do anything likely to impinge on the life of the cycle. That is to say: "family life must not interfere with training life." But finally his transgression was forgiven when all his mates created a symbolic bond by proclaiming themselves "godfathers" to the baby. In another form of expression, I would describe as "spontaneous plays,"7 trainees express their feelingsfriendship, attraction or lovewhich arise with the passing of training weeks. These plays can appear, in the eyes of an observer looking from outside, as spectacular. In the so-called "love plays," they give emphasis to new sentimental bonds called upon to replace older ones. In the eyes of the trainees, the new couples are exemplary, even though, generally speaking, these bonds do not last beyond the training period. As a "genuine product" of training itself, these bonds emphasize that training is, in the group's imagery, a self-contained space in which a

new family emerges. Sometimes, bonds set up during the training period can deeply modify the course of a life. That is what happened in the context of the most spectacular event that took place in the life of this group. The protagonists of the event are a man who embodies, in the view of others, domestic stability and a successful career (he appears as an "achiever"), and who becomes the undisputed leader of the training group. As soon as he enters this training group, he takes under his protective wing a young woman, made frail, as the group sees her, by being under severe professional and emotional pressure. Between the two, a strong bond of friendship and solidarity builds up. By helping her to obtain a trainee job in his own firm, he gives her a chance to take a step away from her regular place of work, at least for a short time. One day, to the great surprise of all, he falls ill, loses his job and disappears from training, while she is hired by his ex-firm and replaces him in his position. No one in the group knows exactly what happened (why was he was fired while he was waiting for a promotion) and nobody dares to comment on this event in derogatory tones. The very fact of being destabilized, in other words to be "deprived of" (work, family, etc.) acquires a positive value in terms of the collective narrative. The strong one, the stable one, goes without his riches (career etc.) in order to make it possible for the unstable (the low performer) to be well trained and, consequently, to restore her identity and find a new stability. The hardships he bears have much in common with relinquishment of earthly possessions as a mystical sacrifice. He, who is a paragon of stability, to which everyone aspires, accepts his own destabilization. This self-denial will make it possible for him and the others (the unstable) successfully to "reshape." This story, more so than any other, points to the gap between the way trainees account for such matters and the managerial ideology they were supposed to absorb. It stands out, inasmuch as it denies the dichotomy "achiever/ nonachiever," which is at the root of the reputation the day trainee is seeking to acquire. The collective narrative is the exact opposite of managerial thinking, according to which the lowperformers, not the achievers, are the ones to be sacrificed. The sacrifice of the "performer" shows with great clarity that the meaning of the professional project (to become a manager) is completely subverted. There is then no cause for surprise if, at the end of his training session, the unemployed former stock jobber reformulates the responsibilities of a manager who, as he says, "has the power to make a profession sink or swim," and finally adds that his own purpose is to see that know-how survive. "My responsibility is to see to it that trades are handed down," he says, and that is the reason why he chose to become a manager. The latter attitude comes clearly into conflict with the main task of a manager, which is to measure the gap between the old abilities and the new ones, useful for the future of the firm, which are to be acquired. Paradoxically, the narrative repudiates what is meant by performance in the managerial language: it is not any longer a question of changing oneself to become a "flexible man," adaptable to any professional or personal context and, consequently, able to mold the Other.

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The resistance against the conventional Ideology is not limited to the condemnation of changee.g., through the desperate conservation of old know-how doomed to disappear. It emerges in many other instances, e.g., in a discourse on entrenchment,8 in the search for roots even though these roots are imaginarye.g., in the yearning for the home of one's ancestors, where one has really never lived.

educational system (1792). Arrested and imprisoned during the Terror he was sentenced to death. He took poison rather than go to the guillotine. 3. Whereas in 1970 the number of unemployed workers in France was ca 300,000, this number increased to one million in 1976. From this year on unemployment continuously increased, being now stabilized at 2.5 million (February 2000), which corresponds to circa 10.5% of the working population. The appearance of mass unemployment was felt to be a source of grave concern to all those involved in societal problems, so much so that the French translation of Jeremy Rifkin's book "The End of Work" was a bestseller, with a preface by a former Prime Minister. 4. Latin for "it teaches everybody." 5. In day courses including groups of forty-five or fifty students at a maximum, the coach monitors his trainees at close range while this is not possible in university type evening courses where the professor addresses ex cathedra an audience of one hundred to three hundred students which he seldom knows individually. 6. The state-owned electric power producer. 7. By "spontaneous plays" I mean those events which express in concrete terms the logical patterns of the collective discourse and which escape the control of the session leader, overstepping the training method or diverting it. 8. A testimony of the search of entrenchment is very frequently expressed by such metaphors as " to follow the training courses is like to put down one's luggage after a long journey."

Conclusion
Coming back to the question brought up at the beginning of this article (can a society survive in a stream of perpetual change?), it is clear that the collective narrative of the trainees provides no support whatsoever for an ideology separating achievers from non-achievers and the necessity of adaptability and mobility. Inasmuch as it denies that society should be divided along those lines, and insists on the value of professional stability and geographical entrenchment, the collective narrative appears as an implicit condemnation of the new model of work, which involves uprooting and the loss of benchmarks. It may seem paradoxical that managers-to-be, people trained to become efficient executives in the global economy, rebel against the new forms of work they are supposed to uphold and spread, producing an anti-management narrative. May this paradox be only apparent? The trainees' narrative is produced in a place founded, during the French Revolution, on the omnes docet principle, which aims at the enlightenment of the citizen throughout his life. Objectively, this principle is violated by the teaching policy of today's Conservatoire, which is undoubtedly elitist and firm-oriented. Skilled and flexible employees are trained, not good citizens. Despite the ideological "shift" of the institution, the trainees succeed in re-appropriating something of the omnes docet principle, when they reject the social division imposed at CNAM. Distorting the official meaning professional training has acquired in late capitalism, the trainees finally revive the foundation principles of their institution.
Notes 1. The imperative of continual change is imposed far beyond the professional field, especially in the domestic field, the family has become a changing pattern. 2. Philosopher, mathematician and politician (1743-1794). He wrote for Diderot's Encyclopedie articles of political economy. As a deputy to the Convention he proposed a project aiming at a reform of the

References
Applebaum, H. 1992. The Concept of Work. New York: State University of New York Press. Condorcet, 1989. Ecrits sur ^instruction publique, Paris: Edilig, t.ll Godelier, M.1986.The Mental and the Materia. London: Verso. Grignon, C. 1976. L'art et le metier. Ecole parallele et petite bourgeoisie. Actes de la recherche en Sciences sociales 4 : 21-46. Lash, S. and Urry, J. 1987. The End of Organized Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press. Procoli, A. 1999. De la violence symbolique a la reparation : le cas d'uneformation en ressources humaines au Conservatoire national des Arts et Metiers. In Franchise Heritier. De /a violence, t. II, Paris: Odile Jacob. Rifkin, J. 1995. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: P. Tarcher/G.P. Putnam's Sons. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character. London and New York: W.W.Norton & Company.

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