Publications & Research
Research Publications
Where to start?
First of all, for any link problem, please check the French side of the website. All my work is in French except "Max-out" that has been translated in English. Please follow the link on Zenodo.
I don't publish on separate topics. I work within a single architecture with one guiding thread: how meaning and engagement are constructed, captured, evolved, and ultimately turned against us.
Orientation, work, identity, emotion, expertise: these are levels of the same problem, each text illuminating a different stratum — from the fabrication of the social subject to the production of a receivable lived experience. Engagement at work, to become legitimate, is built through inner narrative.
Publications 1 to 7 together build the full architectural logic of contemporary capture — what keeps the unbearable in place.
Titles are clickable.
Recommended reading order
Entry point. The most accessible overview of the framework. How engagement, recognition and fulfilment become levers of capture at work — explained without jargon.
For: General audiences, professionals, managers, HR, journalists. See also: press kit and infographic.
2. Max-out
The founding text. How meaning, engagement and fulfilment at work become levers of capture. First formalisation of the concept.
For: Readers seeking the foundational theoretical framework.
3. Unassigned Professional Orientation
Going back before work. How choices, trajectories and assignments prepare, upstream, the ground on which the system connects. Orientation as an ethical and political act. Questioning the antechamber of one's self-programming toward conformity, and one's own entry into capture through fully conscious and inhabited choices and a healthy relationship to engagement.
For: Practitioners, theoretical readers, students, parents, researchers.
4. Max-out: Archaeology of Contemporary Self-Alienation
The full deployment of the framework. The school–orientation–workplace continuum that produces a conforming, available subject, maintained at the edge of collapse — and that explains the exits into Burn-out, Bore-out, Brown-out, Workaholism.
For: Researchers, theoretical readers, psychologists, clinicians.
The central operator of the model. Compensatory narration — how the brain produces a micro-narrative between a signal and an emotion, and how this mechanism anchors engagement and endurance under impossible conditions.
For: Researchers, theoretical readers, psychologists, clinicians.
The intimate core of the model. How emotion is socially formatted into a form shaped by receivability — and how access to help, care and rights is conditioned on producing a legible format.
For: Researchers, theoretical readers, professionals in care and the reception of suffering.
A transversal text. How forms of expertise, their regimes of legitimacy, and the mechanisms of disqualification structure the public space — and capture the very conditions of critical thought.
For: Researchers, theoretical readers, experts of all kinds.
A forensic instruction dossier. Fifty years of primary sources on Burn-out: from the shaky fabrication of the concept to the documented failure of prevention. What their excavation reveals — and what the field's own authors have admitted.
For: Researchers, prevention professionals, occupational physicians, journalists.
9. Critique of the Supportive Stance as Moral Norm
How benevolence and non-directiveness have become moral norms that protect the practitioner rather than the person being supported — and the economic conditions that make this paradigm compatible with mass diffusion.
For: Coaches, trainers, psychologists, support professionals.
Two entry points into the model
For the general architecture — Max-out: the synthesis → Max-out → Unassigned Orientation → Archaeology
For the theoretical operators — Archaeology → From Nothing to Suffering → Conforming Emotion
The theoretical operators draw on a multidisciplinary framework: work psychology, sociology, philosophy, ergonomics. They require a slower and more demanding reading.
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Free Resources
Practical guides, tools and documents — designed for direct use without theoretical prerequisites. Free download.
On Max-out
Analysis grids, practical exercises and micro-actions to identify signs of Max-out. Not aimed at clinical diagnosis — aimed at contextualised awareness.
A toolkit for journalists, HR professionals and decision-makers. Five-step presentation, illustrative cases, key quotes, comparative table Burn-out / Max-out.
On orientation and support
Supporting orientation choices without imposing
A practical guide for parents, educators and professionals. Concrete principles, example dialogues, simple tools to support adolescents' autonomy.
ANALYSIS GRID FOR SUPPORT STANCES IN ORIENTATION
A reflective awareness tool for parents, teachers and professionals. Three stances (paternalistic, maternalistic, balanced), typical indicators, recalibrations.
Skills module (original module from the Autonomie orientation programme)
An orientation module for young people from age 13. Distinction between transferable and contextual skills, assessment across four dimensions. Designed for end-of-year choices in secondary school.
Charter for balanced and emancipatory support
A working document formalising the requirements of a defensible intervention: making influence explicit, bounding the intervention, enabling evaluation through observable effects.
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In Progress
These texts are being written or revised. They are made public as they develop, following the Write In Public principle: transparency of process, invitation to critical feedback.
Works in progress — "Write in public"
(currently: The HPI Child Against School)
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Earlier works
Orientation today, or the art of not getting it wrong
A critique of different orientation methods.
2015 — Self-published.
Earlier works — unavailable
These texts are part of the past. They are no longer available for sale or download, but they document a continuous body of work on orientation and influence since 2004.
Overcoming influence and changing — The career change programme for employees
2020 — Self-published. Out of print.
The orientation programme: Find Your Career in 5 Days
2019 — Self-published. Out of print.
