New Ethics of French Employment Advisers and Their Clients Coping with the Unemployment Trap

This research work focuses on the transformation of the French Public Employment Service through a sociological pragmatic study of discourse and practices of professional employment counselors. We consider the reconfiguration of this profession is an indicator of changes in the welfare state to an active welfare state, which is expressed in particular by an institutional incentive project to the adaptability to employment standards and market principles. Based on a long ethnographic investigation in seven agencies with 87 counselors, and 200 observations of appointments between advisers and unemployed, the paper analyzes the effects of these two potentially conflicting targets: the subjectivation (individualized assistance in job search by the Monitoring Monthly Custom, introduced in 2006) on the one hand, and the management streamlining (profiling, strengthening sanctions) on the other.

By changing the standards, organization, this industrial rationalization of a new type reconstructs the structural professional divisions between socio-clinical and socio-technical standards. It brings out a new professional model, marked by an actuarial management of risks, but also supported by a moral dimension based on the individualization of treatment. However, earlier divisions persist and give rise to ethical dilemmas and polarizations (between ethic of work placement and ethic of empowerment coaching), and strategies of avoidance or neutralization of the most coercive professional acts.

The paper examines also the notion of subjectivity in social policies and the prescriptive strength of standards and tools that accompany the activation. The streamlining and tightening of supervision of unemployed on the ground give rise to the use of social technologies of adaptability, but the observations of professional practices also reveals some areas of negotiation. They are characterized by a use of the processual dimension in assessing the unemployed recruitability, by the establishment of trusted devices or else by the taking account of a "situated rationality" of the unemployed.