Formé-e pour servir! La part langagière de la formation professionnelle dans la nouvelle économie

This paper focuses on the new economy and more particularly on the service industry. It aims to highlight how, in these contexts, language and communication operate as central strategic tools both in terms of the regulation of service practices on the work floor and the regulation of the employees' behaviour. The emphasis of this paper will be on service training programs. I will first show how various institutions of the service industry organize and legitimize vocational training programs and I will highlight the particular place of communication training courses within the proposed curriculum. Secondly, a close examination of training sequences will allow to show how language operates as an organisational principle of training and highlight the underlying language ideologies. I will argue that the service industry clearly considers communication training and language practices as a way of controlling the activity of their workers, constructing them as service <i>agents</i> and denying them the capacity of acting.