2.1.2.1. The feminine, an added value

The question of women, their investment and added value in the dynamics of work, supervision and implementation of public policies, has not been explored much to date. However, for the sake of a world to be renewed, the rise of the feminine as an outsider and the injunction to “do better than her fathers”⁵ demonstrate offensive and reflexive qualities (combativeness, audacity, mètis) and original performances (volte-face, reversal of stigmas, clandestinity-advertising). Their irruption into fields (professional, political, civic) largely and historically dominated by men leads women to build a specific performance space, a robust capacity to act and a poetic speech that undoes certain modes of relationship to truth (Irigaray 1991), an embodiment to change them from within. They are building a normativity independent of community and media ambiences that have long been accustomed to going beyond their word.

It now turns out that collective intelligence is not correlated with the individual intelligences of the group’s stakeholders, but is more specifically due to three factors: the level of social sensitivity of each group member, the balanced distribution of speakers and the proportion of women – the more women there are in the group, the better the group performs (Woolley et al. 2010).

The capacity of the feminine to integrate in complex sets the constraints emanating from inter-individual links (Gilligan 1982)⁶ produces a rationality qualified as care, ethical gesture, thought in action, situated cognition. Care is anchored in the contextual and relational constraints of situations and preserves the quality of links in a world of interdependence. It is the way in which problems are constructed that is indicative of this alternative voice, the antipodes of a hegemonic position of expertise or princely overhang. It can lead to a distancing from the effects of authority and power, when they are not in line with what women know to be true by experience and which they are capable of objectifying (Bouissou 2015):

“The heroes of fairy tales are called upon to face challenges from which they emerge as winners, if and only if they place themselves outside the system of power relations, they enter into another order of relationships.” (Muraro 2004, p. 134)

This is the challenge for women today, when they are able to engage socially and professionally, when they have a sufficient level of education to analyze and distance themselves from power relations and assert their position in the social field. Many women are developing a strong taste for accompanying the work of others, aware of their role in mediating and confronting the various receptions of the world; the watchword: to make viable new ways of collective existence and work. The function of sorority, reciprocal mothering, affidamento (relationship of trust, mutual aid, cocooning) in women’s groups is essential:

“It is mediation and distancing that women still need.” (Irigaray 1992, p. 17)

The challenge is therefore an effort to change the cultural atmosphere, to shift the questions, to transform oneself from within into knowledge and social skills, to pay attention to qualitative differences, to strengthen subjectivity, to recognize the importance of the symbolic, to emancipate oneself from logocracies (Prokhoris 2002; Steiner 2003).

Inheriting knowledge structured via the masculine form does not prevent us from using it by putting a new wisdom at the service of the common good, observing social organizations, studying their genesis, taking a singular critical look at them, and committing ourselves to them by redefining the normative frameworks (Woolley et al. 2010, 2015; Citizen Today 2013). Women also inherit a thought that has been formed through centuries of silence, meditation and mediation, thoughts dependent on life, confrontation with bodies, with others, with the bodies of others (Woolf 2012). They also inherit a few elders who have been able to speak out politically and civically, based on their own personal experiences. Welcoming otherness and making something of it for oneself and for the other is specific to psychic bisexuality and female genius, identified by Kristeva (2003) – and not only for women.

The feminine can interfere in everything: when it does, new ecologies are formed, irrigating the intimate and the political, asserting a civil responsibility as close as possible to the situations, problems and conditions of their expertise. Follett’s (1924) intuitions are inspiring sources: as a pioneer of “gardened” management⁷, she worked as a consultant and social worker to renew the organization of living together, making conflict an integrating factor rather than antagonisms and divisions, thinking power with rather than against.

The capacity of the feminine to take oneself in hand (alone or with others) leads to the formation of rationality tinged with moral imagination, inspired by the return to the primordial childhood of beings and things, as a return to meaning: the interior is exteriorized, the pre-individual is individuated, the reserve of potential is solicited for/by a new individuation. For this, tools are needed; design is one of them.

Bonhet (2016) provides interesting analyses of behavioral design as a tool for intervention in organizations, to transform them from the inside by focusing on the observation of current situations: simple gestures, which do not disturb the fundamentals of organizations, but nevertheless redirect flows by a better adjustment to values (e.g. that of equality between women and men). According to the economist, there is a third way (behavioral economics), between major programs and individual voluntarism.

2.1.3.1. Modernizing and managing

In accordance with the French Law on the Freedoms and Responsibilities of Universities, the preparation of universities for the exercise of the responsibilities and competences devolved by the State involves modernizing the support functions (finance, human resources, information systems) in order to be able to take full responsibility for the management of its budget, a large part of which relates to the payroll. The conclusion of the reports of the Inspection générale de l’administration de l’Éducation nationale et de la recherche (IGAENR) that accompanied the institutions in their transformations (between 2007 and 2011) emphasized that the challenge for the coming years, once the transition to RCE⁸ had been completed, would concern the dissemination and appropriation of a culture of steering at the level of training and research activities and their support functions.

During a term as vice-chair of the Board of Directors⁹, the author integrated a collective dynamic (one directorate and one executive) focused on the modernization of the RCE. The aim was also to ensure the transition and continuity of the public service and to integrate the new challenges – in particular the construction of the PRES then the COMUE¹⁰ bringing together two universities and various institutional partnerships, around scientific and organizational projects (pooling of tools and organizational methods, consolidation of the steering culture).

The strategic line of the new university grouping aimed at its modernization while wishing to develop its core business (research, training, internationalization, outreach) and its territorial registration. Particular attention was paid to the issues of innovation, professionalization of studies and autonomy of actors. The national and institutional context strongly encouraged this. The political and social concern for training, preparation and support for working life is a constant that has become even more evident in recent years, together with an ethical and civic questioning of the relationship between the State and civil society, clearly expressed in the requests of the supervisory authority for the improvement of training activities. The reform of accreditation¹¹ goes in this direction: it is a matter of affirming the principle of subsidiarity by entrusting institutions with the responsibility for quality and sustainability – financial, human, real estate, logistical, etc. – in order to ensure that they are able to meet the needs of their clients – their strategy and training offerings. The conclusion of the IGAENR¹² audit, preparatory to the devolution by the State of increased competences and responsibilities to the university, stipulated that the challenge of the coming years would concern the diffusion of steering at the level of the intermediate components (35 research teams, 4 doctoral schools, 17 training units: heterogeneous entities accommodating between 300 and 4,000 students, between 30 and 200 staff, and offering a total of about 100 degrees).

It should also be stressed that the new regulations give a central place to the university boards of governors, which are the bodies that deliberate on institutional strategy in the light of the constraints and projects that are now more directly assumed. Composed of about 30 members, half of whom are professors, the board of directors approves the establishment contract. Political commitment is crucial to guarantee a dynamic of change both through the slow mutation of symbolic frameworks (representations, values) and through the construction of working methods and tools for all the institution’s support functions and functions.

Conducting such a project implies acting in the short, medium and long term to:

• – organize action at various levels;
• – be able to adjust projects continuously and according to the hazards that arise along the way;
• – use tools and build on them if needed;
• – identify material from which to act and resources to be associated with the overall movement.

The support of teaching colleagues and external partners was sought on certain strategic points: days of reflection were organized according to the expectations of the territory with regard to the university, the enhancement and recognition of student commitment and forms of innovation in training practices.

Other subjects have been the subject of teacher-led studies and reports, such as the mapping of training and research fields in the light of territorial partnerships and foreshadowing the structuring of training and/or research fields, in line with the State-led accreditation reform.

The university in which we practiced, with a strong experimental tradition in the human and social sciences and the arts, focuses on issues of the contemporary world. It is committed to and recognized in the construction of new areas of knowledge, particularly the digital humanities.

It is on this potential, objectified and analyzed, that the modernization movement should be based. In terms of governance, the aim was not only to share the project within the political sphere and to drive the administrative side of the project, but also to establish and consolidate the achievements sufficiently to ensure continuity and duration. The entire project was also to be part of the general policy of the grouping of establishments (COMUE): by becoming part of it, the establishment was taking its part in the emergence and dynamics of the whole. Needs in terms of new skills and new missions (lifelong learning, digital, language training, schooling, qualityevaluation) have emerged, as well as the need to lead teams of collaborators, administrative managers and teacher-researchers.

The period of preparation for contractualization with the State is a key period, and begins with the institution’s self-evaluation – in particular on issues of success, professionalization, innovation, dissemination – and the formalization of strategic axes for the coming period. We have set up and supported a series of workshops bringing together some 40 volunteer faculty members and a few administrative or technical staff on selected themes (networks and territories, democratization and student success, digital deployment, jobs and working conditions). At the same time, the shuttles with the guardianship and AERES¹³ directed the institution’s vigilance on the points of fragility (success, social integration), inviting them to conceive a clear strategic line, structuring all the activities perceived as too heterogeneous and dispersed.

Strengthened by our research and monitoring activities on the issues of mobilization of actors in education, we observe that the stagnation of reflection on the recurrent failure of students and the overall inefficiency of aid mechanisms encourages us to address the issue more strategically¹⁴: act at the meta-transversal level of the institution, in project dynamics, so that the strength of scientific activity (production of knowledge), a force for innovation, leads not only to academic and scientific recognition, but also to increased professionalism among all the protagonists (teachers, partners, students); put at their service the expertise of the research teams in social innovation and the institution’s capacity to cooperate with a young and resilient socio-economical territory, and with actors in the professional world who are sensitive to innovations.

While these synergies are already at work within the institution’s transformative programs, new efforts are focusing on training activity in its broadest sense, to upgrade and restructure the sector and to spread the culture of subsidiarity in the spirit of the accreditation reform. At the managerial level and through an HR perspective, it is also a matter of reconnecting and rebalancing two functions that are too often distant (research and training), encouraging a more fluid circulation between the two spheres and a more direct anchoring in social reality through an understanding of the changes and challenges of today’s world. This evolution has led to a diversity of actions:

• – reorganization of services (schooling, steering), monitoring of training provision, development of a culture of lifelong learning (FTLV) and bringing the initial and continuing training sectors closer together; formalization (organization charts, mission statements) and simplification of procedures and making schooling channels more fluid; choice of gradual restructuring through support work in consultation with the technical committee;
• – budgetary and pedagogical dialogues: analysis of practices with regard to the objectives of the contract and the institution’s strategic projects; monitoring of territorial cooperation and the emergence of business sectors; economies of scale and room for maneuver: transformation of employment support (experimentation of assignments for two years);
• – demonstration of the appropriateness of choices and reconfigurations before elected councils (board of directors, academic council, technical committee, board of faculty directors); construction and dissemination of tools (shared sustainability and self-assessment indicators);
• – installation of intermediate management layers: proposal to create a position of program manager and design of a support plan for the new teaching responsibilities, overhaul of the policy around teaching work, implementation of transversal management platforms, pooling of budgetary, HR and engineering resources.

2.1.3.2. Outcome and introduction

This modernization drive was partially successful because there was a lot of resistance. The failures or simple difficulties kept the team on alert, to enable them to understand and move forward. The idea is to preserve a dynamic, to seek to share it, to maintain it in the long term, while thinking about the subsequent challenges facing the institution and the academic world. The challenge is also to find ways of ensuring continuity despite changes in teams, staff mobility and the renewal of elected board members’ terms of office.

Supervision and support for socio-institutional change require other forms of rationality (particularly in relation to time and space) than that which is usually useful to teacher-researchers: a rationality conducive to action and decision-making in the short and long terms, integrating, in order to master them, the constraints and risks inherent in any choice, an ability to work according to a project-based approach and in cooperation with colleagues or partners with diverse know-how. It allows the action and the management function to be anchored in a solid ground and offers as many opportunities to develop the practice of the profession.

It raises awareness of the mediation work needed on the part of those who accompany, coach and stimulate: mediation skills such as the ability to anchor oneself in tangible realities are essential. They are generally not improvised, but are worked out and acquired through a reflective effort focusing on the issues at stake in the situation and relationship, the stakeholders, the communication contract, ethics and the mediator’s room for maneuver.

Knowledge about psychological development within an educational or training relationship can support reflection. In the field of educational or formative accompaniment, mediation is defined as the capacity to produce a symbolization for oneself, for others and for collectives. It is also a power over the other (the psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier evoked in 1975 the “violence of interpretation”).

It is as much a risk as it is an opportunity for alteration and transformation. Its vitality presupposes its renewal and elasticity: the capacity to “remake” itself, to cultivate a form of resilience, to imagine and bring about other forms and other representations, other types of mediation and sharing of meanings (Bouissou 2017b). It is therefore an active role assumed by a mediator, who is an interpreter who handles language and representations in a potentially creative way, capable of marking the spirit of the other and accompanying him or her in a universe, or even in a “multiverse” of meaning (Kristeva 2013):

“The absence of living mediation has the effect of considerably impoverishing the representation of reality, because it ends up denying it the richness of being able to be perceived in a thousand ways. The real separated from the possible is a stone: what is a real without the burning core of its inexhaustible possibility of being? Living mediation is the work of those who know that reality is not entirely given over to the logic of power and domination. To know it, one must be it, that is to say, one must be oneself of this world which is not entirely given over to the logic of power. Living mediation brings together in the same gaze what is and what can be, and brings one into another order of relationships.” (Muraro 2004, p. 137)

2.1.3.3. Development and mediation

This question of mediation and protection, allowing the subject (child or adult) to “grow up” by progressively integrating the tools necessary for his or her life in the world, is therefore essential. The goal is to ensure that the subject (or group) is comfortable enough, but not so comfortable that they are not frustrated by the reality of the situation, as Donald Woods Winnicott says about the “good enough” parent. In the relationship of care with the child or in the social relationship between adults, mediation has the same capacity to contain, symbolize, protect and guide. Bion (1962) sees it as a mechanism by which the adult “lends their psyche” and takes charge of the transformation of the anguishing perceptive elements into constructed, formalized, distanced, less anxiety-provoking and ultimately integrable and nourishing psychic contents for the child. Anzieu (1974) evokes the “skin-self”, a psychological membrane built in the relation which is then gradually integrated by the subject, protecting the psyche, filtering the external or internal aggressions, while at the same time guaranteeing a good grip on external reality and a fluid relation to intimacy. Balint (1961), who is interested in the group psyche, helps professionals develop emotional intelligence and protect themselves (individually and collectively) from defensive projections and anxiety.

In the managerial and organizational field, mediation is the art of contributing to collective life and conflict resolution by seeking the best outcomes for all stakeholders. The challenge is to go beyond wars or the clash of positions, to focus on content (a common good, not a monopoly) and on processes (what circulates and connects), to move from frontal and binary opposition to the search for a third element that shifts the stakes and reconciles positions. According to Follett (1924), the integration of conflict allows for a socio-cognitive and relational well-being that benefits all parties, as opposed to compromise and power relations, and characterizes constructive leadership.

Participating in the undertaking of mediation therefore means bringing together the conditions for a creative work of elaboration that is both distanced and anchored, which guarantees sufficient space for the life of the spirit and makes room for the encounter with otherness; this arrangement must also be contained by an explicit rationality, preserving it from arbitrariness and violence. From this point of view, mediation concerns at the same time the educational relationship, the reading of traditions (inheritance and transmission), the interpretation of human and psychic facts and the life of groups. In this way, we wish to consider from the same angle situations which, although always singular, call for a reflection on symbolic, social and psychic dynamics and the way in which they intertwine.

These reflections show the interest of understanding the psychic functioning and its genesis in the relationship (from the parent–child relationship to the adult–adult, individual–group relationship), in order to grasp in an open, flexible, inventive way, the question of accompanying adults in training and change. The aim is to help relational (inter-psychic) practices to bring about psychological vitality and to instill orientation, acquisition and modification at an individual (intrapsychic) level.

2.3.3.1. Switching to RCE

The LRU’s message to universities, as we have deciphered it, is this: “Organize yourselves so that you can stand up and be accountable; survive, grow, shine, find reasons to exist. Look for the means and decide the ends. Define your new center of gravity”.

Autonomy implies defining one’s standards, not doing without them; it implies the acceptance of a mastery that one chooses to impose on oneself. It is not something that can be achieved in a few years; it depends on a change, not only in structures but also in minds, in the way in which we situate ourselves in terms of responsibility, and therefore in terms of ethics.

Dealing with the internal organization of a university and articulating its administrative and political dimensions requires organized, stable decision-making spaces, installed at various levels: in the services, directorates and central councils and at the so-called intermediate levels, within the components and teams. Work has two sides:

• 1) the way/voice of rationality, with the help of procedures, pieces of writing and the constitution of traces, which hold the framework together and make the institution concrete and tangible;
• 2) the animation of the instituted space, the interest in human issues and the incessant translation of actions and constraints.

Reading Derrida’s text Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction relevante? (2005) advances the question of transmission (not only intergenerational in educational terms, but also intersectoral or networked in organizational terms). What is communicating, informing, giving access? What is our responsibility in this chain?

Indeed, the challenge of animating the functioning and evolution of the university concerns the translation of actions – for oneself and for others – in order to preserve and share the memory of the reasons behind decisions. Not translating (or giving media coverage) would be condemning oneself to bureaucracy, applicationism and non-thinking. On the contrary, translating (mediatizing) helps to promote understanding, to take in oneself, to appropriate, to alter as well. This effort of translation and mediation is something we all have to do, whatever perimeter we operate in; it enables us to combat the natural tarnishing of everyday tasks, the banality of routine gestures, the absurdity of decisions whose motives are no longer known. To translate is to raise, to enhance, to give back the inaugural meaning of government choices when it is lost – and it is constantly being lost:

“Translation leads us to penetrate the thoughts of others. It asks us to understand them before judging them. More than many other exercises, it demands that we know how to forget our preferences, how to make ourselves receptive to a foreign thought and to render it as its author had conceived it: to respect the other, to give him our attention, to fight against ourselves to present his arguments as forcefully as possible. It is not by chance that humanism, which attaches so much value to translation, has often found itself engaged in struggles for freedom and in the fight against fanaticism.” (Berger 1959, section 20-56-1)

This is an opportunity to confront actors from other sectors (private, public) and to become aware of the problems of social innovation, monitoring, evaluation and dissemination, which seem essential to the vitality of the environment and the professions.

2.3.3.2. Resonances and transfers

It is the clash of cultures and the richness of contrasts that often drive progress. Beyond the different social reasons, the culture of piloting is based on a certain mode of rationality and the actors gain from exchanging their vision and the problems; this is the interest of the moments of training and meeting. On a daily basis, working with a management controller, a human resources or financial director, or an information system project manager, sharing common orientations or knowing how to identify them at the heart of technicalities is a stimulating exercise. It is an opportunity to concretely test the possibility of skills transfer and translation, and the more general hypothesis that a solid culture and frame of reference in the human and social sciences are a good basis for dealing with complex and novel professional situations; they are also inexhaustible resources for the problematization of situations and problems. Transferring and translating means recognizing similarities without getting lost in them.

In this respect, the proximity between the experimental approach as learned during doctoral studies in the social sciences (problematic, general-operational hypotheses, field testing, data collection, analysis, conclusion) and the project-based approach as commonly practiced in steering activities (construction and deployment of an IT system and digital or heritage master plan, employment campaign, self-evaluation campaign) can be emphasized. The latter proceeds in stages: diagnosis, stakes, objectives, identification and coordination of stakeholders, production of deliverables, and retro-planning; it presupposes the constitution of a socialized and shared space–time, but in which a form of depersonalization is necessary (the interest is more in the processes than in the individual positions of the actors).

It is a question, in line with Ost, of making space–times synchronous.

The hypothesis of the commitment of the feminine functions as a strong motive in the experience we relate, as an experience of beginning, in the sense that Arendt (1983) gives to this term: understood as an essential characteristic of action in its political sense, of commitment to the city. The beginning, the capacity to inaugurate, is at the very principle of action (Collin 1999).

An elective mandate is not a status or a profession, but a function for a defined period of time; it is possible to invent one’s own way of doing things, within a framework – which it is a question of knowing well – by putting one’s achievements at stake. This is quite different from inheriting a habitus already formed by others. It is a matter of working, exploring and learning in unusual rational and normative contexts, offering their virtues, risks and tools, their supraordinate and unifying dimension which it is incumbent upon us to understand, support, identify and guarantee for the whole.

Our experience, immersed in an environment and a dynamic at work, had to keep a spirit and a stake of individuation, in personal and collective terms, historically situated.

When the feminine becomes professional, it becomes involved in everything and renounces nothing, especially not learning: inspired, enlightened, trained, disciplined by historical-cultural psychology, psycho-sociology, socio-institutional analysis, it allows us to see human productions as work: an overall configuration with the capacity to say something about a human and therefore collective trajectory. It is up to us to decode and both train and inform ourselves.

In doing so, thought catapults itself to other problems and issues, provokes them too, makes one sensitive and vigilant to what is the object of inadequate normativity – what is overgeneralized, over-interpreted or left on the margins – to work to make it adequate.

This is the foundation for governing oneself, for occupying positions and functions, for mobilizing oneself. It is the university that can guarantee the emancipatory promise of the university for those who work there, students and professionals:

“It is a form of training, and a leap, a change of level that is as much a beginning, a risk taken which is also a bet, something, again, like an ethical commitment.” (Ost 1997, p. 39)

The sciences of education, the sciences of action and reflexivity may lend themselves to this game: work is at the service of a vital problematization, of setting something in motion – including oneself – in order to make it work, to undo it, to redo it and to act. We find here Arendt’s labour-work-action triptych (1983), described as the condition of the vita activa of the modern human. Beyond the intense social exercise of an elective mandate, internal deliberation proves to be an essential skill, listening to minority voices (perpetually diminished by the daily noise of labor) who ask: if “administering”, was right, just and good, what would it be? If “a professional learning environment” were positively possible, what would it be?

2.3.3.3. Reshuffles, in more ways than one

The search for a feminine empowerment supposes that we think of development in terms of stages and tests (intellectual, professional, ethical). Seeking support for empowerment (as opposed to avoiding conflict, freezing one’s thoughts, and a sclerosis of human work, which is very insistent or even compulsive in the course of ordinary work) means wanting to understand for oneself, to verify at the heart of situations the validity of hypotheses, to train oneself, to cooperate, to go towards new skills and new technical and symbolic support.

They are also opportunities to confront and reinforce wills, normativities and rationalities other than one’s own. A source of inspiration for a woman wishing to individuate herself through her work lies in the example of women who have thought about their action from the very beginning, conscious of learning by doing, of learning by starting, integrating from the beginning the idea of difficulties, failures, and recognizing their own position as outsiders as a significant element of their development problems. As such, the documentary film À la recherche des femmes chefs¹⁹ is exciting. Anne-Sophie Pic tells how, as the daughter of a chef and heiress, she began to learn from her team again, while at the same time performing her chef duties:

“I come up against everything one can imagine, I am subjected to inappropriate, disrespectful remarks: I am a woman, self-taught, the daughter of the boss who is no longer there… I am both boss (my brother left in 1998) and apprentice. I need others to train me technically, but I’m starting to question what I see that I don’t like. You can imagine how pleasant the situation was… But it doesn’t kill me, it strengthens me. I don’t have the technical tools, but I have developed a taste, a sense of smell, and I have in mind the example of Michel Bras, self-taught and triple starred [chef]. I start with the idea of combining flavors, in sauces, in cooking. I revisit the crayfish gratin using my grandfather’s recipe. Being self-taught is also a freedom. I had no taboos, I wasn’t formatted, I was curious. And I am still, eternally under construction, questioning myself, blossoming in creativity. I’m never more relevant than when I’m being pushed to my limits. […] And, being self-taught, I want to pass on what I have learned, to make people want to start cooking again. I am my father’s daughter, I have a duty to remember, I draw my energy from this development challenge. I want the name Pic to shine a little brighter. I want to do what my father didn’t have time to do.” (Pic 2017)

The feminine learner is getting ready to know a range of things – from temporalities, relationships to spaces and cultures – to question acquired knowledge, to commit herself to action as well as question her inner self profoundly, which is the ultimate end point:

“Our professional life was a blank page on which we could write as we pleased.”

“We did not have any pre-established schema of the woman at work, we had to invent it on the spot, to trace the path as we walked, following Machado’s masterful message [wishing to see the human treasure of vigilant consciousness grow in the world].” (Carmena 2016, p. 117)

Our experience has also led us to rethink our commitment to research; the work will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, but we again reaffirm the synchronicity of this evolution with the exercise of responsibilities in university leadership and administration. Listening to a radio report in 2006²⁰ (which will constitute a body of research in its own right) acted as a challenge, even a summons to look more deeply into certain questions relating to development, emancipation and their frames of reference, as well as triggered an awareness of the need to report, to seek to integrate, to affiliate and to transform.

Starting from a situation of girls dominated from the outside by constraints and norms (material, social, familial), we have highlighted their relationship, flexible and open to these constraints and the fact that despite or thanks to this – it is undecidable – “they” do, act, move in the spaces, deterritorialize themselves, whilst the boys, better tolerated in the spaces of the city, do not leave, identify themselves prematurely – without deliberation – and perhaps all the more so in what they want to assert of an identity, or even a destiny:

“They” think about destinations, demonstrating a formidable vitality, which leads us to seek to objectify what makes it possible in their living environments – those encompassing the adolescent, family or school environment, as well as the media or scientific systems that speak about them or make them speak. The work therefore consists of elucidating and valuing that which in singular voices – even if they are produced in chorus – insists, perseveres, performs, as a vital movement of individuation, and in elucidating the conditions that favor these voices, make them possible and make them heard. More precisely, it is a matter of addressing the associated environments in which they resonate, environments that are generated and individuated by the same movement, as Simondon – through the idea of transduction – and Canguilhem – through the idea of milieu – help us to understand (and more recently Coccia on the subject of “the life of plants”), both internal and external to the subject and their ability to be immersed, in total solidarity, in the same plane of immanence as the air they breathe, without renouncing the desire for transcendence or mobility.

The situations of synchrony and diachrony are all the more crucial as the feminine is identified as being desynchronous with respect to a single referent camped by the neutral (Fraisse 2017).

The feminine becomes a starting idea, which authorizes or obliges another approach to questions, becomes a search for a position of otherness that goes from one to two. It is not precisely a question of comparing categories (differences, inequalities), but of thinking together about different environments, living spaces and times, and difference in general. The emergence, persistence and perseverance of an axiology of the feminine bring to the forefront the duty of creativity, alteration and primordiality (in girls, in women, in oneself). It is a question of making concrete and beginning to boost and promote the feminine.

2.3.3.4. Brief summary

We have experienced the multicolored, synchronous, deeply soliciting and unifying effervescence of bringing together and bringing into dialogue fragments of life and experience. The present clarifies the past, bringing it together, organizing it and enabling it to provide all its strength, all its support, to propel it into the future. Individualization of knowledge, of individuals, of collectives: everything can now be thought of, without any a priori hierarchy but without amalgamation; research and reflection are at the service of the transformation of the university and the progress of its actors. This is the time of possible crossings; divides, prohibitions and borders, although tangible, come into the background and allow for the reworking of the landscape and associated environments. We underline the cathartic and maieutic force of fiction writing and consequently its heuristic force of discovery (see section 3.1.2.2), as Ost (2008) reminds us about his book Antigone Veiled.

And this is what we have tried to study extensively over the last 10 years, through continuous work, trying not to depart from an ordinary and usual (even domestic) position, from a confrontation with works, performances, interviews, which gradually constitute a corpus, while continuing the work of problematization, from our position as women who are informed.

From the heritage of feminist thought, we seek to formulate adequate questions in terms of emancipation, empowerment and individuation, and to pose working hypotheses that will function as authorizations to advance and work. In this sense, it is our view that:

• – girls (women, the feminine) benefit from a centuries-old legacy of male domination and an outsider’s relationship with this phenomenon;
• – this heritage is transmitted, reinforced, reiterated, incorporated through customs and provisions constructed early on during their initial socialization (one is always the second sex);
• – the location of women and girls promotes a greater appetite for knowledge and care of otherness;
• – girls’ ability to inherit would benefit from being better recognized in its complexity: but considering that the inheritance lacks evidence, it will be necessary to work, to discern, to deliberate, to modify the balance of power: a task of transformation will then be announced.

In other words, it is about hearing and trying to connect with:

• – specific locations (uses of the self, one’s examination of the world, knowledge, way of being in relation to otherness), and thus draw an initial explanatory line;
• – authentically situated and pragmatic cognition;
• – an integration of the death drive, an understanding of the natural entropy of any system and organization;
• – a propensity for action and commitment.

It is a question of conducting research in acts and verbs, finding opportunities and resources to make a qualitative leap in problematization, making it more complex and unifying:

• – to understand individual or collective trajectories with a particular interest in mobility and becoming;
• – to capture socialization experiences (familial, juvenile) and the reservations they constitute for adult life;
• – to hear this potential as a reserve of pre-individuals at three levels:
  • - for a relationship with the other (sex), to make it happen;
  • - for a relationship with oneself, deferring one’s future outside of assignments and from one specular relationship to the other (sex);
  • - towards a problematization and individuation of knowledge.

Finally, and because the feminine and gender recomposition concerns empowerment “in general”, we also wish:

• – to identify possible transfers between areas of life and to generate a more global reflection on the question of knowledge and its translation into action, creation and work;
• – to keep open a reflection and a sensitivity in human and social sciences towards transits, exiles, traces, transfers and the potential they constitute for future lives.

The axis of knowledge, the axis of power and the axis of ethics are thus brought together in a kind of vertical solidarity.

2.4.1.1. Hic et nunc

A landscape of work is taking shape in which new rationalities and techniques require careful consideration: issues, social needs, anthropological and epistemological mutations and changes of scale²² force us to think differently. How do we frame and support its entirety? The answer does not only concern the macroscopic level, but also gives a full place to local management, in an effort to make work more intelligent²³, without isolating this gesture from a broader confrontation that is shaking our society (Gomez 2016). Neither the financialization nor the geopolitical crisis of meaning that results from it can conceal the subjective and collective dimensions of work, the need to animate and defragment spaces with meaning and breath. The psychodynamics of work points out that the reference to subjectivity is not detrimental to the formation of collective will and rational action; on the contrary, they act systemically.

The observation of ecosystems of human activity reveals that there is a lack of continuity and strength between the different places of production (especially and all the more so with regard to immaterial productions, indirectly visible but nevertheless real). Concern for real work, the hic et nunc of the activity, its objectification, demonstration and sharing often lack both scope and rigor, and it is through proximity management, support and innovation in social intervention that these shortcomings can be filled.

If Gomez is primarily interested in corporate governance, it is a good opportunity to draw inspiration from it to think about the work as a whole, including public services (Bouvier 2007), to shake up the usual frames of reference and to think more effectively about public action: building a new intelligence of services and their governance, in motion. The economist invites us to reconnect fundamental values: dignity, integrity, gift, mobility, vulnerability and ecology (Gomez 2012). It highlights subsidiarity²⁴ seen as an adequate principle of organization, which is neither power sharing nor substitution nor delegation, but responsibility for a public action (or a problem) allocated to the smallest entity capable of assuming it: “at our level, in our place, what can we do by ourselves?”. This question organizes the whole starting from the entities that constitute it: the human being (his collectives) is free to act according to his own autonomy (capacity, intelligence) and can produce authentic work, that is to say, “liberating, always assuring him of intelligence and self-awareness” (Gomez 2013, p. 165).

The authenticity of the work requires the greatest consistency between what is claimed and what is actually done, so that it is a measurable value. The gap between the two must not be too great, otherwise it is the credibility of the discourse that is at stake: this gap between the promise and its fulfillment can be a source of cognitive dissonance, which is extremely harmful to the performance of the organization and the comfort of the actors. It is in the congruence or the gap between the expressed project and the concrete achievements, that work for the organization becomes a strategic lever, or remains an adjustment variable.

To be attentive to work (one’s own, that of others) is to go to its sources, its motives, its details; it is to develop a sensitivity to the genesis of things, links and human operations. It also means being able to take a step up to see things as a whole. It means playing with scales, thinking about both the segment of activity and its participation in the whole system (what will be the access, the diffusion, the reception by a large number of users and contributors?). It is still paying attention to the signs, because it makes sense (what is important for a leader and his troops?).

Being attentive to work implies reviving values of educability, potential, efficiency, and the power to act at all levels, which are at the basis of the Enlightenment, public action in general and social experimentation. We can imagine a new strategic age of work and social intervention: that of the democratization of their governance, of a wider access to the culture of management and of the continuous reinvention of their creative forms.

2.4.2.1. Illustration of a project

In 2015–2016, the management of the COMUE Paris Lumières²⁹ therefore wished to respond to the call for the I-site project³⁰. Working on this type of program has consisted of a number of preparatory operations:

• – asking what is at stake, what is the added value of the program and on what findings the call text is based;
• – designing the ecosystem on which it is based and/or which it wants to organize (stakeholders, knowledge economy, governance, relations with the socio-economic world, training-research links, quality);
• – identifying the place of innovation in this ecosystem (how it is conceived in this text, the knock-on effect of one thing on another, how it could be conceived in our establishment, and the fundamental know-how that should be both translated and federated);
• – positioning governance issues and engineering and self-assessment aspects, as constituent operating modes of the project, from its conception;
• – declining a whole series of questions posed by the text and relying on intuition, on the association of ideas and on the resources available or to be sought (knowledge, skills, disciplinary crossings, innovation mechanisms) to begin to answer them.

In other words, it was a question of conducting a reading of the call for projects in terms of resources, potential, stakes, by focusing on the text – in a way, forcing it to speak to us – and by keeping in mind Foucault’s methodological reflections, which proposed some questions that, in our opinion, were very heuristic:

“How did we constitute ourselves as subjects of our knowledge; how did we constitute ourselves as subjects who exercise or undergo power relations; how did we constitute ourselves as moral subjects of our actions.” (Foucault 2001, p. 1395)

Here, the “we” can be as much French higher education as any of its sectors or actors. In other words, we are talking about transduction, subjectivation, individuation and verification, at the individual and organizational levels. It is a question of refocusing the institution and making the broadest possible inventory of its interests, needs and standards.

It is about the appropriation of a freedom and a responsibility as a public service operator. The same type of questioning can be applied to all the grey literature emanating from French and European higher education. – and public policies as a whole – that can be formulated, from the place of a state operator (as a university is), as follows: if I had to implement this program, this convention, this general framework, what would I do? If we contributed to this, as a strong, solid, assertive project, what would we do? What would it mean to be part of, or even the driving force behind, the operation?

It is a task (to be carried out, before oneself), a fact (it is already there), an obligation (that one gives oneself), a trial (installed over time, by nature invisible). This relationship to texts is based on a hermeneutic and optimizing reading, which aims to enter as much as possible into the views of a text to make it operative and efficient, through a cooperative anticipation – we have something to do together – about the useful and rational meaning of the text; it is the intentio operis that should be grasped and, through a reading that postulates its fullness, we contribute to making it possible, to individuate it (Ost 2004).

The work entrusted to a project team had to be a continuation of the work carried out for the initial version of the project (in 2014). It had to make the scientific and intellectual ambition more readable and more targeted, to put forward concrete and well thought-out proposals in terms of governance, to show our ability to project ourselves into the next 10 years, to present an evolution in terms of HR policy, to be anchored in what already exists – in particular in the Labex and IDEFI supported by the two universities³¹, which are intended to be integrated into the I-site and will be the driving force behind future reconfigurations.

Two points quickly emerged in terms of scientific content:

• 1) the question of standards in its broadest sense federates all projects and teams and should be maintained;
• 2) the fields of art and creation have their full place, the question being to find an overall synergy.

The emergence of a new field, which would come to be structured around norm studies, was a consensus in the project team and allowed for a project that integrates the proven capacity of the Labexes to take ownership of social and critical issues and to put forward innovative proposals, both conceptual and operational (organization, structuring).

Once this ambition had been stabilized, and in line with the framework of the call for projects, we were able to focus on making it operational. Strategic axes have been defined, taking up the elements of the previous version and giving them a more concrete look: 1) a transversal axis on pedagogy, open, collaborative, in resonance with the work in close and structured partnership (which meets the specifications in terms of structuring the territory); and 2) noting that the digital is by nature transversal, we value it as such, without making it a priori a specific axis of work (but it could become one). In addition, an axis of development of interdisciplinarity in research, training, partnerships and international cooperation is deployed in four strategic areas: “Memory, patrimony, society” (integration and evolution of the Labex “Past in the present”), “Differences, inequalities, injustices”, “Risks, behaviors, vulnerabilities” (axes already identified in the first version) and “Arts, creation, society” (integration and evolution of the Labex “Arts and human mediations”) with a strong coloring of digital humanism facilitating interconnections.

Strategic fields are operationalized through platforms. The structuring and structured aspect of the project must be particularly visible and convincing in terms of the project’s capacity to structure itself and to propose new forms of organization, compatible with the existing structures of the parent institutions, and likely to bring about their transformation (the term platform was chosen in view of its potential translation into English and its international readability).

The platforms give rise to a clear and understandable but above all open organization: no pre-identified teams (the specifications having identified as a risk of internal rejection of the project, the fact that part of the community is excluded), but a project-based operation, capable of integrating any researcher or team related to the theme and likely to make it evolve. The platforms are intended to be self-evaluated, transformed, recomposed and re-thematized over time (at least 10 years), according to the achievements made and the problems identified as bringing new advances to be made.

One aspect is particularly noteworthy: the effort made by the team – foreshadowing the effort that would have to be made in the bodies of the COMUE and in those of the universities – to connect the future governance of the project to the sustainable structures of the institutions. It was therefore necessary to provide the project with its own governance, clearly identifiable by an international jury and by any user of the system, without making it a separate entity, independent of the EUMC, which would be the bearer of the project.

The will to see the evolution of training, transmission and co-construction practices with partners now involved in the project’s organization and orientation, including internationally, are other subjects carried in the project. Governance has therefore been defined fairly precisely, inspired by other programs that have proved their worth and are aimed at addressing a twofold challenge: 1) to guarantee efficiency and responsiveness by setting up an executive with the means to act; 2) to provide spaces for hands-off approaches, elaboration and long-term monitoring.

In total, there are three levels that ensure the functioning of the whole process:

• – an eight-member board;
• – a strategic council composed of a large number of elected members of the EUMC councils and involving partners;
• – a Strategic Orientation Council (internationally qualified personalities), an advisory body for governance at the other two levels.

The governance of the platforms also includes an operational executive and deliberative bodies at a more transversal level.

Efforts have also been made on the operating rules making it necessary to circulate information between the PIA program and the teams, entities and bodies within the universities: training components, doctoral schools, international relations, development services, etc., without which the university – and hence the EUMC and the program – could not function. This crucial point had been clearly identified in the specifications.

2.4.2.2. The bottom line: excellence?

Although it was not selected by the jury – this will be taken up again later within the framework of other programs – the project has advanced the community’s understanding of the approach and the issues at stake, while consolidating the unifying intellectual ambition of the member or partner institutions of the EUMC, in the territorial ecosystems.

The project method, which enables us to situate ourselves in relation to the major programs, makes it possible to address the different aspects of university activities and professions. It also makes us understand the importance of learning to think in terms of economic, strategic, collective and organizational intelligence.

It revisits and brings to life the notion of a study (a project is a study), and can help to refine and define what is meant by excellence, in a sense that is neither discriminatory nor hierarchical, nor academic or standardizing: excellence appears as a balance (always unstable, precarious, requiring constant attention and management) between stakeholders and as a process of transindividualization, when an individualizing energy circulates between entities. Thus, excellence would be synonymous with the determination of a collective to transform itself, to reinvent itself, to find the best ways of accomplishing its missions by carrying out in-depth work on the projects and their specifications: determination of the leaders and project leaders, and of everyone, to bring the construction requirement to the level of intensity of a critical look at the choices made, of the knowledge of the risks and costs (economic, psychological, etc.) of the choices made. This presupposes a good mastery of analytical, deconstructive and restructuring tools of the human and public “thing”, particularly in terms of the ability to foresee action and intervention in various spaces and temporalities. This means accepting the autonomy and constraints of a state public service, subsidiarity, loyalty, rigor and accountability. This supposes a vision of research and training as a sort of attitude, monitoring, method and state of mind. This presupposes a will, a desire to export, to translate, to enhance, to become a stranger, to disorientate, to “travel”, as Kristeva (1988) would say. This implies foresight and strategy, including for oneself.

2.4.3.1. Proving yourself

Attentive to the social practices of experimentation, the Agence nouvelle des solidarités actives (ANSA, created in 2006) attests to the good dynamism of social experimentation in France and, in 2014, took stock of a decade. It underlines the richness of the network of actors: experimenters, public authorities, evaluators, and public or private structures constitute a real social laboratory. But how do you identify, disseminate, generalize what works? Impact assessment is still too rare in France. Worse, where it exists, its lessons have little influence on public decisions. Whether due to a lack of practical tools and/or lack of acculturation, little or no evaluation is made of the effects produced by an intervention or public device on the target persons. The report makes the following observation: while substantial public funding is needed to address social issues, and while, in the field, the players are sufficiently involved in the search to innovate and evaluate their achievements, initiatives remain local: they are not capitalized and do not inform the more macro levels where decisions are taken.

Public action is proving to be weak and too heavily based on weakened voluntarism, lacking in strength and rationality. This is a serious problem in terms of political legitimacy and the intelligence of work, at the societal level (dissemination, exchanges, changes) as well as at the intermediate level (analysis of human activity, capacity to formalize it, to stimulate it, to supervise it in a pertinent way).

The UK’s What Works centers are a source of inspiration for France³². Their mission is to collect data from a variety of experiments, to systematically analyze and summarize them; if necessary, they organize additional experiments to ensure the validity of the results. The challenge being to promote the experiments to professionals and public decision-makers, they develop an editorial activity (guides, advice, efficiency indicators) and training sessions³³.

Inspired by this example, ANSA wants to highlight the variety of forms of observation of French public action and the possibilities of enhancing the value of these actions (various forms are possible: perpetuation, capitalization, spin-off, extension), and above all to encourage a more dynamic mode of dissemination, more adapted to the stakes and expectations of each player. In order to do so, it would be advisable to propose spaces for pooling, dynamic and participatory dissemination, as well as flexible, progressive and less linear models of swarming than the one-shot generalization model. There is also a need for a twofold support: professional support through the creation of tools and strategic support to create structures and mechanisms for success stories and their dissemination.

The aim is not to disseminate a product, but rather to help understand the complexity of developing public intervention mechanisms in an evolving process, as evidenced by the conclusions and proposals of a series of workshops conducted over several months and reaching consensus within a multi-sectoral community:

• – to adopt an open definition of experimentation in France, identifying various forms, ambitions and scales;
• – to promote the inclusion of a feasibility study to anticipate brakes and provide for adjustment possibilities;
• – to involve all stakeholders in the setting up and governance of the partnership, and entrust coordination to a leading third-party actor, which guarantees the fluidity of exchanges;
• – to provide an overview of the effectiveness of the scheme through milestones and results;
• – to constitute an evaluation toolbox, allowing for a choice among methods;
• – to make the reference framework of the experimentation legible and homogeneous, by means of an ethical charter;
• – to encourage the sharing of results, inspiring practices and lessons for public policies, in particular by creating national (independent) bodies responsible for this capitalization;
• – to create spaces for exchange between stakeholders to foster ownership;
• – to promote the progressive spin-off of promising or effective devices;
• – to accompany any generalization in the long term by allowing for adjustments at the various stages.

2.4.3.2. Enhancement of the human and social sciences

The question of the enhancement of university activities is now very present in the strategic thinking of higher education and research³⁴. While it has long been treated through the prism of the experimental sciences, technology transfer and economic profitability, the question arises somewhat differently for the enhancement of human and social science activities. The PIA programs are making progress in this area, since the challenge is to disseminate the university’s activities in that they allow for social advances and innovations. The recent reflections carried out by the Athena agency underline the crucial importance of human and social sciences in a knowledge economy with very complex issues.

The understanding, visibility and enhancement of the social impact of the human and social sciences raises questions of professional integration of students, human resources in general and at the university in particular (evolution of the teaching and research profession, career support, forward-looking management of jobs and skills). The evolution of the activity and the teaching profession/teacher-researcher, and a more open and better instrumented vision of professional integration, go hand in hand.

The aim is to move away from the endogenous and defensive functioning of a research activity that is often experienced and tested in conflict with the issues of the professionalization of students; however, the development programs promote reciprocal training between different activities, such as research, training, digital and international activities and partnerships, and invite universities to demonstrate the effects. The question of enhancement, of the collective capacity to make people recognize (sometimes in their own eyes) and shape a value produced – which is not just a targeted promotion for itself but an effort of demonstration, objectification and conviction – has become a key issue.

The High Council for the Evaluation of Higher Education and Research and the human and social science sections of the French National Council of Universities (CNU) have integrated this enhancement into their prospective and methodological thinking. The issue of the enhancement of the social humanities deserves specific attention, because of its strong links to extremely diverse and numerous activities (academic, social and societal).

Support for the enhancement of activities consists of:

• – helping to understand the question of enhancement, in particular for the human and social sciences, as it is conceived in French higher education and in the major development programs, and promoting a shared reflection on this subject, by better defining the problem;
• – defining what is meant by “HSS enhancement strategy”, taking into account the variety of situations and profiles of institutions (territorial coordination, universities, schools, monodisciplinary, multidisciplinary, public, private), the different reasons for this enhancement, as well as the variety of experts recruited for the evaluation;
• – proposing tools and forms for project teams involved in the evaluation process and for institutions conducting self-evaluations – while maintaining the framework of the reference system, which remains the common tool for all evaluations.

The work consists of carrying out documentary monitoring (ministry site; Athena agency), identifying the issues, analyzing the semantics of the field and the associated sectors, and designing the problem as a whole. It is a question of collecting, documenting and investigating a narrative, for appropriation by higher education actors (institutions, Hcéres, European or international partners).

It should be noted that neither the National Research Strategy nor the various reports on specific issues (on the structuring of energy sciences, on the socio-economic use of research, on cooperation between research and public action) highlight the question of the human and social sciences as a specific field that requires special treatment. On the contrary, they are recognized as indispensable to scientific progress, because they help us to think about uses, cultures, behaviors, technical, human and social evolutions, at the heart of all problems. They only take off and find strength in their transformation, step by step, with other forms of rationality and operativity. It is undoubtedly under this condition that we could recognize a transindividualization of knowledge: a movement of transformation of the entities in presence and their environments.

From these analyses, observations and reflections, we can deduce that:

• – rationality at work in action cannot be reduced to a single mode, a single input, a single method; and academic inter- or multidisciplinarity is not enough to feed the complex problems relating to action, its supervision, its evaluation, its sustainability and its transformation;
• – the technical dimensions of situations cannot be ignored: although the human and social sciences know how to put into words, to translate – their added value is certain – they do not replace, but on the contrary integrate into, a richer whole that gives way to technicality. Any reflection on the future, the actors, the graduates of human and social sciences, should integrate this problematic basis: the unthinkable alliance;
• – supervising, directing and developing work (including one’s own) requires specific management, clear objectives and clarified functions. Training in the humanities cannot be sufficient if it does not introduce the use of technology.

Far from excluding itself from considerations of organization and control of the activity, experience in the concrete action of piloting and supervision leads to overcoming the usefulness of the tools, becoming familiar with their normativity and their dissemination, and to becoming professional through a diversity of dimensions that any profession (including the so-called intellectual professions) cannot ignore.

Once again, we insist on the fact that the absence of a framework, of tools and of anchoring, go hand in hand with anomic, unstructured and non-structuring environments, where arbitrary powers and the hegemony of a few ideological positions are exercised. There is injustice, impunity and denial of the realities of work, leaving those who do not occupy high positions without resources, support and strength. For all these reasons, it is necessary to support, supervise and equip, giving access to methods, processes and dashboards that strengthen and shape the human spirit.

These reflections go in the direction of a broader objectification of teaching and research activities (particularly on the “third sector” of the profession, which concerns the back office and all the support activities) and a consideration of this broadening of training and support for teaching and research professions.

We underline the importance of being prepared for a plurality of activities, which allows for better career development, which leads to a better quality of teamwork and which undoubtedly better prepares for the management of human resource diversity and collective intelligence. It should be remembered that variety is a factor of pleasure and renewal, and that professional mobility (the ability to retrain) and flexibility are an asset and will be even more so in the future.

The ability to support these two approaches and methods is proving to be an asset: because they bring complementary visions and inputs, resonate with a variety of sensitivities and relationships to the world; and because they broaden and enrich the vision that one can have of such and such a problem in a vast and very complex knowledge economy, and for future lives and occupations, which will no doubt have to do with increasingly heterogeneous knowledge, tools and tangible and intangible goods.

These observations initiate a reflection on the capacity of the actors to work in plural collectives, to demonstrate an ability to understand cultures that are very different from their own, to translate them or to translate themselves into a strength of proposal. At the same time, there is the question of the work and skills of the teacher-researcher, who is involved in complex research, design and dissemination operations. At the same time, there is the question of training, doctoral but not only, and the problem of skills transfer, whether at the individual level (student or professor) or at the organizational level. How can we think of this training in a different way other than in the framework of the companionship alone?

2.4.3.3. PhD training, empowerment

“I’m saying the future is desire, not fear.” (Patrice Chéreau)

The semantic universe attached to the development of work is rich in dynamic resonances; we can pick out the following keywords: knowledge economy, digital, networks, technology, problem-solving, criticism, creativity, communication, collaboration, initiative, curiosity, agility, engineering. Career support specialists (mobility, transfer and development) keep an active watch and pick up weak signals to feel the emergence of trends³⁵. They testify to the profound redefinition of relationships to time and space (and to the uses of the self) induced by professional changes and the reflexive effort they require (Albert 2017). They attest to a growing concern to accompany young graduates in the transition from higher education to professional integration (including doctors: the employment of doctors is at the heart of the objectives of the National Research Strategy).

It is a question of helping to ensure that the qualities and achievements built up over a long period of study, research and experience integrate sectors and activities for which they were not necessarily intended. Beyond a search for a training-employment match, the aim is to help the graduate to experience a change of scenery (leaving a world, its customs and codes) and transfer (what I know how to do here, transposed elsewhere, makes something or other possible): the first step towards empowerment, the ABC of entrepreneurship.

To convert one’s assets is first of all to know them³⁶. Three essential qualities are forged during the doctorate and make their mark: endurance, creativity, expertise. In addition, the graduate can rely on his or her rigor and a form of thinking conducive to problematization and experimentation, as well as on know-how in information gathering, data analysis and synthesis.

Converting one’s assets also means agreeing to go out of phase and seize opportunities and expectations (conduct careful monitoring to do so). It means anchoring oneself in the concrete and giving mistakes every chance (experimenting and ensuring that something remains of it); it also means consolidating, enhancing, disseminating and integrating information networks.

The operation O21 – S’orienter au XXIE siècle (O21 – Navigating the 21st Century)³⁷ initiates a support for career development: plural (young creative people, experienced professionals, playful digital actors, decoders of emerging trends in the world) and polycentric (Bordeaux, Villeurbanne, Lille, Paris). This new concept is based on an understanding of a world that is now very open, full of uncertainty, insecurity and great potential, in which older people, in all their diversity and expertise, have a role to play in creating envy and encouraging risk-taking by providing the reference points of which they are the guarantors.

It should be noted that the possibility of taking risks is a factor in quality of life: if there is no stake, if everything is already settled, what is the point of living? (Reverzy 2001). Questions of desire, of volition. There are procedural, cognitive dimensions at work, as well as effective and assertive strategies for activating tacit skills. Designing one’s experience, motives, achievements and projects allows one to form and make known the spiral movement consisting of advancing by integrating new assets (Buzan 1995; Duval 2016). The adventure fails without a good dose of curiosity for the fertility of the acquired knowledge and its unexpected effects; to succeed is to risk.

Mobility is proving to be a major skill for living in transformation. This conversion concerns both recent graduates and professionals in mobility. Moreover, because it is synchronous with the issues of responsibility and societal impacts, and the transfer of resources for a better inclusion of French research in civil and economic society³⁸, the conversion movement concerns both organizations and institutions. The individual situations of professional construction-evolution and the institutional changes in the higher education sector can be grasped according to the same frame of reference: for those who are building their career path and for the organization that is building their strategy, it is a question of integrating the issues of development and innovation, of moving the assets and potential out of the comfort zone and extending them into new situations, in order to meet new challenges.

Teacher-researchers are also concerned by this movement, when, in the context of their missions³⁹, they seek to diversify, enhance and share their achievements. They are helped when the work environment is sufficiently structured and guarantees spaces for reflection (evaluation of concrete achievements, definition of rational organization, leadership, foresight, tool building). The challenge is to promote professional expertise beyond academic disciplines: to deploy inventive, intervention (finding tools, building systems) and support qualities (understanding the interlocutor, their request, needs, involvement); to problematize questions, problems and crises; to model, test hypotheses; to share, encourage support and responsiveness.

The evolution of university skills and a more open and better instrumented view of work go hand in hand. The challenge is to support, recognize and share enriched, solid potential, organized by the diversity of experiences and by a practice of training-research, requiring cognitive agility, the use of knowledge that has been made accessible, and the continuous reapplication of acquired knowledge.

It seems that a new field of support and management is emerging, in which the time for problematizing questions (“not answering too quickly”) is equal in its intensity and investment to the construction of solutions (“not remaining abstract”): double polarity, permanent tension. The analysis of training-transmission situations and the analysis of work and its operational situations are part of the same gesture of understanding and vigilance: it is a matter of being attentive to the right clues, educating one’s gaze to perceive the articulations and interfaces throughout the value chain (and not in a fixed overhang). The parallel between teaching-transmission and work organization can also be followed, by showing that the teacher manages the class, manages knowledge, creates workspaces (being themself a stakeholder, like a manager), physical, digital, psychic, interlocutory spaces; that it is a question of investing in relationships to time, which are also varied. Running a class can be similar to a project-based approach (composed of a series of sequences, rationalities, timelines, deadlines, deliverables, etc.) that the theories of situated action and methods of self-confrontation help us to understand, objectify and shape.

Since these questions of support, from and for work, are crucial for the future, we have sought to deepen them, to collect material from professionals in the sector of enhancement, transfer and support⁴⁰. This is an in-depth study, following observations, intuitions and hypotheses that can be summarized as follows: the university does not draw all possible benefits from knowledge, for itself, its public, its partners, because it struggles to build adequate relationships to action and the power to act. What do the actors say at the social and societal level? What tools should we look for to tackle modern problems? What skills, qualities, cultures need to be built? Here is an overview and some potential courses of action:

• – open up to a thinking and an economy of knowledge, of the immaterial, of cognitive capacities, of the world of data, which constitute a third industrial revolution as defined by Rifkin (2011);
• – anticipate technological breakthroughs, as well as new societal issues and new, changing needs;
• – invest in understanding and inventing interfaces between producers and users of knowledge;
• – rethink interdisciplinary and mobility issues by integrating the ageing of the population and the appropriation of digital technology;
• – approach learning by risk and error, which leads to redoing, to re-thinking, to putting into play, by developing a culture and an ethos of innovation and transduction;
• – the societal and human dimension is essential to understand the human, its processes, organizations, uses, to understand the connections between designers and users;
• – perceive weak signals, analyzing speech, developing agility, especially in relation to prescribers and to oneself;
• – create its engineering, to develop a spirit of research and development, to aim for expectations and not perfection, to cultivate decision-action-correction;
• – promote a hybridization approach, team hybridization, a variety of profiles, and value solidity in both personal work and independence;
• – anticipate the rest of the career, question what is being built today for tomorrow (proactivity);
• – network, design your profile, your approach, your offer, capitalize, enhance, disseminate, etc.;
• – know how to identify the real effects of co-construction, and approach operations analytically.

There is a need to address the issues of supervision and training, for juniors, as well as for seniors and experts. In a vast knowledge-based economy, the borders are shrinking and the ultra-rapid transformations that are at work, affecting us all, are bringing to the fore the importance of the capacity for transfer, translation, agility in the handling of codes, various languages and collective intelligences:

“While it is true that collective intelligence is not the sum of individual talents, but rather the result of the quality of interactions between talents and personal projects, collaborative techniques for networking, capitalizing and sharing experiences (including failed projects) are a valuable resource.” (Portnoff and Dalloz 2010, p. 90)

Awareness of this culture needs to be raised and intermediaries and translation skills need to be found. Does this task – as well as this fact, this obligation, this trial, to use Foucauldian terminology – fall to the student, to the doctoral student? Perhaps also to their trainer, who is in turn in personal and professional evolution? How do we transform ourselves?

Observers identify some support: having conducted doctoral research gives a sense of concreteness, contrary to the idea that one usually has of it. While three qualities are forged during the doctorate and make the mark – expertise, creativity, endurance – project management is a form of training that graduates lack. It is necessary to change the image of the doctor, to develop opportunities to further anchor the work, to make it readable and to insert (translate) it into a collective framework. Of course, alternating theses are a step in this direction.

Once again, it should be stressed that translating consists of identifying, leading to the question of what we keep, what does not change in substance, what only changes in form, despite the transformation of tools, technologies, organization of the new stakeholders and the ways of managing the whole.

We find this attitude encouraged by the IGAENR’s assessments prior to the devolution of the payroll: an inescapable modernization is at work in universities, even if each one is characterized by specific problems, support, resources, history, which give it its own form and appearance – thanks to the necessary work of analysis, interpretation, and narrative construction that is incumbent on the “political” framework of the university. What is at stake is the translation of basic, disparate, anomic elements into an identifiable, appropriable, public (in the sense of the Aufklärung: turned towards the common interest) narrative.

A few advantages can be put forward in support of this kind of approach:

• – having a concern for extreme scales, or even contrasts or antipodes to be held together (macro vs. micro, short term vs. long term, material vs. immaterial, stability vs. impermanence), without inevitably seeing this as an undermining of the profession; on the contrary, orchestrating contrasts is perhaps nourishing them and making sure that they are refined, fine-tuned and individualized;
• – making an inventory of tools, supports, skills and methods, for example, knowing how to problematize, to suspend the emergency, to help work, to depersonalize, to design, to represent in various ways;
• – organizing the circumstances and atmosphere of the working meetings, encouraging dialogue and mediation, developing a culture of translation;
• – recognizing one’s own professional practice (and to have it recognized) which unfolds, in broad daylight, and for which “I” feel responsible, which “I” direct according to my will, my volition, my normativity; to be able to say: this is the value that “we” have produced;
• – deliberating, maintaining a power distance, translating it into power, becoming the subject (media) of this power, arming oneself, equipping oneself;
• – depersonalizing and thinking about common energy, making a new form of subjectivity happen by setting in motion (individuation, mobility, normativity) and problematizing.

2.4.3.4. Foresight

Modernization implies adopting a forward-looking attitude, thanks to a re-reading of the thinking of Gaston Berger (1896–1960), considered the father of foresight in France. Forward-looking thinking is therefore not new.

Born in Senegal, he was an industrialist, philosopher and administrator of higher education, founder of the Instituts nationaux des sciences appliquées (INSA) and the International University Centre and Foresight Centres, and Director of Philosophical Studies:

“For him [Gaston Berger], foresight is not a science of forecasting (because the calculation only comes afterwards; it translates into figures the strategies that the reflection elaborates for action); it is not even an anticipation of the future, because too often we limit ourselves to conceiving the future according to the precedent (which may not be repeated identically), according to analogy (which naively supposes that the never seen will offer resemblances with the already seen) and according to extrapolation (which is only an extension of the known series); it is the creative imagination of the desirable future (with the willingness to prepare for it now), an imagination which consists of examining the interplay between current trends to see their probable scope, but which consists even more in appreciating in advance the new quality of demand that will result from their eventual achievement: for it is this new quality of requirement which, once formed, will bring about types of desire and need, and therefore types of behavior, that will change the situation.

In short, foresight does not seek to anticipate the future along the lines of the present (with the help of simple corrections); it seeks to anticipate the styles of conduct that will be invented on the basis of some future pattern or other, if it comes to pass, and it is prepared to create the conditions that will favor them, if they contribute to the real advancement of mankind.” (Duméry 2018)

The titles of issue 12 of the journal Prospective (“La recherche scientifique”, “L’État et la société”, 1965) provides an overview of the major issues addressed: scientific research and the State; misunderstanding or decision sciences; research, a changing environment; and a policy for science.

Reflection on foresight leads us to question the significance of developments for the researcher, the research administrator, the statesman, the director and the citizen.

It is therefore a question of thinking about professions (or skills) and carrying out a reflection aimed at these professions based on concrete facts, both directed towards general ideas and centered on the individual:

“A prospective study is not only a presentation of changing situations but also a reflection on their scope and human consequences.” (Darcet 1965, p. 1)

From a certain point of view, it can be considered that foresight has become more democratic, since it does not only concern managers, but everyone when they seek to direct their lives, particularly their professional lives, and since, moreover, according to the principle of subsidiarity, which is related to the autonomy of operators and actors, everyone, in his or her position of responsibility, may find himself or herself concerned by foresight reflection.

Training in the attitude of foresight therefore proves to be a relevant programmatic approach, enabling the social actor or future actor to be given the ability to interpret the world’s progress, to situate himself in it, to govern himself.

What is interesting to note today, to preserve, to find again, or to reinvent, is the spirit that animates prospective thinking:

“For the International Centre for Foresight, as for many people, the conclusion of our unceasing research lies in the certainty of great changes in the near future for which humanity must prepare itself. Without negative pessimism or excessive optimism, but with the necessary objectivity, honesty and humility in the face of such a goal, we would like to contribute to a clearer view of the prospects for the coming decades.” (Gros 1959, pp. 5–6)

It is therefore an attitude to be communicated:

“…an active, invigorating and attentive attitude towards the future.” (p. 6)

We define the idea of modernity as an attitude, a disposition to take hold of the present and the future, simultaneously timeless, new, and as reserving within themselves a timeless current dynamic that also resonates with the past that is incorporated into them. These are tests of prediction, not prophecy:

“We have to think that we are going to see certain structures of our world change. Industrial and agricultural, social, economic and political structures will undergo the transformations required by the transition to other orders of magnitude, by the movement we already perceive of the ‘planetarization’ of problems.

Teaching and education will have to adapt to the demographics and new conditions of life as well as to profoundly different forms of relations between the West and the rest of the world.” (p. 6)

And we understand that globalization was already there, on the horizon:

“These seemingly inevitable transformations, which are particularly driven by the development of the great new techniques, will require above all, if they are to be progressive and not disastrous, that men adapt to new forms of thought and vision. And this adaptation is not written into the facts.

As far as humanly possible, it must be prepared and wanted. We have to think about the real aspirations and needs of people. It is necessary to think of the essential values of civilization in a world that is in constant acceleration of change.” (p. 6)

To know the future, to be interested in it, supposes in the prospective attitude the development of a willingness to know and a must be: because it will not be a question of allowing oneself to be flatly determined, not of refusing, but of acting, freely, with full knowledge of the facts, as the bearer of a past.

The development of the great new techniques must lead to an awareness that calls for prudence, humility and combativeness: progress does not escape the human being and the human does not dominate the world:

“The balance between freedoms and constraints, notions of time and space, average life expectancy, physical pain, the conduct of life which requires ongoing formation rather than relying solely on the formation received in adolescence, are all examples of reconsiderations which must be made, which must be made courageously – without haste but without wasting time.” (p. 7)

We therefore recognize the importance of training and self-care as a developing being, throughout life. Concretely, the programmatic and methodological objectives in the field of prospective thinking are:

• – posing the problems correctly;
• – bringing together specialists, led by their work and their reflections with a forward-looking attitude;
• – developing and supporting a specific attitude of openness to weak signals, in all those who aspire to it;
• – taking three central lines of study further: 1) human problems, 2) the West and other great civilizations, and 3) the general consequences of major new technologies:

“To be forward-looking is to make a persevering effort to create within oneself the reflex by which man constantly evolves from the observable facts of life to the general ideas symbolized by these three great subjects, and vice versa, from general ideas to everyday facts.” (p. 7)

One should add: to have a sense of kairos and mètis which gives the necessary appropriateness and flexibility to the pragmatic mind, the therapist, the forecaster, the strategist, the aesthete. This profile is dedicated to the exploratory dynamic, to the assumed distancing from praxis, or even to suspension and poetic detour, if one needs to regenerate oneself in order to better perceive, understand and feel. This approach, which admits and respects a form of humility – the human does not fully control their destiny, nor their environment – leads to the search for transcendence, verticality, a summit, to use the words of Char (1971), and aspires to wisdom.

Foresight is more on the side of doctor Canguilhem’s hope of one day – who knows that it won’t prevent the patient’s death and acts at every moment for life – than on the side of technical control of all the risks without any controlled end.

Foresight, this method, this discipline, this attitude, allow scientists and technicians, doctors, industrialists, farmers, civil servants, economists, sociologists, educators, priests, etc., to meet:

“...since man must be the constant object of all study and action for both of them.” (p. 5)

This is what we are trying to show at our level, when it is a question of (representing) questions of individuation, summoning different points of view, cultures and expertise (doctor, philosopher, psychiatrist, architect, lawyer, poet, writer, educator, consultant, chef, actress, political activist, etc.), and setting oneself in motion, thinking about the consequences and putting into practice a rationality of care. It is also a question of opening and operating the black boxes, with the sciences of decision-making and foresight, while not avoiding economic and investment issues:

“The emergence of decision sciences and the increasing involvement of the specialist or expert in their development affect the function of all those who have to make decisions, whatever their position in the public and private sectors.” (Piganiol 1965, pp. 61–62)

Cognitive, deliberative aspects are at the heart of who governs and decides. These are skills to be acquired, rationality to be honed, which do not necessarily come of themselves once one occupies a position or status. The analysis of the processes of collective intelligence, translation, plural and socio-cognitive management of information in these situations deserves attention:

“In any scientific society, the extension and complication of activities require that an increasing number of parameters be taken into account for each decision, that more and more information be stored and available for consultation, that raw information be used only after a careful translation phase.

This is why the memory and judgement of the isolated man are no longer sufficient to grasp all the elements that the person in charge must take into account. The development of operational research, statistical research facilities, and decision making using machines, greatly increases human memory and computing capacity and may change its nature.” (p. 62)

These half-century-old forecasting texts foresee the gradual automation of production and administration systems and a new conception of corporate management, inasmuch as managers will be provided with infinitely increased means of action which will generate the need for a much more solid scientific culture and economic training:

“Without a minimum [level] of knowledge in these subjects, there can be no real understanding between them and the study centers responsible for informing and enlightening them.” (p. 63)

The risk, in the event of a deficiency, is the transfer of responsibility, the concentration of power in the hands of experts alone:

“The leader creates a vacuum in which technocracy is installed in the confusion of roles.” (p. 63)

Things get even worse if the leader focuses on the day-to-day running of operations, setting interim objectives on a day-to-day basis, mainly based on opportunity:

“It is said that he has no policy and no problems are solved.” (p. 63)

What the analysts describe with regard to the leader, the person in charge, private or public, can be thought, in our opinion – and as Simondon recalls – on the scale of the ordinary subject who has to behave: in both cases, it is a question of a tension between the individualized part (of oneself, of a collective, etc.) and the pre-individualized part which exceeds and goes beyond.

In any case, it seems that everyone benefits from being inspired by reflections on human affairs and their future, and from becoming familiar with this meta-method which combines prospective attitude and action thought on a large scale with concentration on the present, global action and care for oneself.

From this point of view, what are the cardinal virtues of an education in an accelerated world? Berger sets out some principles that we believe are still relevant:

• – an inner attitude of calmness is the most precious weapon; the faster things go, the more you have to remain calm (keep a hold on yourself and be in control);
• – the imagination, which must be matched by enthusiasm:

“In a stable world, reason is the only master: we must deduce, specify, verify. In a world that is mobile and full of novelty, one must constantly invent, and first invent one’s own life. The university, where one trains in invention, then takes on particular importance. It ceases to be the crowning achievement of teaching, to become the introduction to existence. Completing your studies: what a false, silly expression! On the contrary, it all begins then and he who, on leaving the faculty, has no more curiosity in his mind and no more questions in his head than when he arrived there, is not far from having wasted his time.” (Berger 1959, section 20-56-1)

– team spirit and courage:

“We have no right to conceal from young people the perils that await them. They will enter a world where their place is not reserved and where their destiny will be constantly questioned. Invention requires as much courage as it does imagination. It is easy to repeat, less easy to undertake. […] No doubt there are techniques for calculating chances and guiding decisions: they will never, however, relieve us of the obligation to choose. The countries or environments that are not progressing well are not only those that lack resources or technicians, but also those that lack the entrepreneurial spirit.”

• – and finally, the sense of the human: it is not a simple orientation of the intelligence; it is rather a profound disposition that engages our entire being. Without it, courage could be brutal and team spirit would be reduced to a superficial adjustment of behavior. Developing this virtue is the role of culture.

Berger evokes poetry as a value of culture, because it introduces us in its own way to the secret life of beings, and without it the real human would risk escaping us. This culture, which has so much virtue, cannot, as is claimed or sometimes feared, be opposed to technology. Without technology, the past is dreamed of without being used; everything is endlessly redone and one will approach humankind empty-handed.