Continuing professional development as a system of psycho-power[La formation professionnelle continue comme dispositif d’exercice du pouvoir organisationnel]

Over the last thirty years, continuing professional development has had an increasing impact on the career paths of employees via the inculcation of social skills. In an unstable and changing organizational context, it acts as a normative system revealing the implicit representations of good organizational behaviors. This paper tackles the situation of continuing professional development as such by looking at it as a system of psycho-power. The goal of this system seems to be the "production of support," which is the sign of new forms of social control and regulation. By plunging into the small theater of training, with its actors and masks, the study shows how, beyond its contents and its explicit functions, continuing professional development fulfills a function of managerial acculturation, sometimes at the cost of the subjective precarization of the employee.