Framed Emancipation

The missions locales pour l’emploi are public employment centers for unemployed people aged 16-25 and out of school or university. They provide employment counseling, training, job placement services and an educational action. As such, the missions locales pour l’emploi aim at both employability and social integration for young unemployed people by frame constrainting them. But the discipline process also provides them with means for emancipation. Drawing on ethnographical fieldwork carried out in 2011 and 2012 in a mission locale pour l’emploi of Paris suburbs, this article addresses the pedagogical practices of the advisors of the mission locale to question the dialectical relationship between submission to authority (namely through constraint) and emancipation that takes place into social institutions. Thus, it analyzes the way in which authority is implemented, the postures it produces among the youth and the modes of subjectification it provides them with in a context of redefined budgetary conditions and normative framework.