Mobbing and harassment, part 2: disappearing to meet up

Group or individual harassment takes the form of a dual joint movement: exposure (with a view to humiliating the victim) and making him/her invisible (with a view to destroying them).

The Orange case highlighted some of these actions, which continue to be documented. The profile of harassers is well known and has been the subject of my research for years, particularly through speech act analysis.

Yves Clot, Professor of Clinical Psychology of Activity at the CNAM, established the concept of ‘impeded activity’ (Le travail à cœur, 2010). He attributes the term “quality” to an opaque categorisation that focuses more on the task. Forced reorganisations ‘derealise real work’; the organisation does not say what the work consists of in order to ensure its quality, nor does it provide the resources to achieve it, which deprives workers of the means to work while threatening them with professional misconduct.

The injunction to comply with a reorganisation therefore opens the door to harassment, since the change will allow new ‘standards’ to be established, the nature and meaning of which cannot be open to discussion.

However, Clot reminds us that workers are greater than the organisation that constrains them. They are committed to pouring all their personal energy into their work, even when it is impeded. Their inhibitions conceal a hidden energy potential that demands to be released, which is why impeded activity is still activity. Activity translates into creative effort in the different spheres of existence, and this action in turn nourishes activity, in the same way that personal initiative influences the organisation. Thus, activity produces the “recreation of a world”.

For the harasser, the purpose of harassment is to protect a state of being that they know to be fragile and unhealthy. In reality, harassment cuts them off from the branch where they think they are sitting safely, sometimes to the point of bringing down the tree, that is, jeopardising the organisation on which they are frantically dependent.

Let us conclude with Clot, for whom workers are united by a secret shared consciousness and the joy of joint achievement, which nourishes their professional feelings. He quotes Zarifian, according to whom counter-movements (‘counter-effectuation’) signify a ‘process whereby an event, initially endured, is appropriated, given meaning and transformed, depending on the power and values that individuals deploy to deal with it’.