Abstract
Our aim in conducting these works was to study the inclusion of the project in identity dynamics of people attending a career orientation counseling. The literature about the project is disparate, Boutinet (1990, 2002) offers a synthesis underlining the complexity of this construct, as being personal, social, pragmatic and existential at the same time. Sartre’s (1943, 1946) atheist existentialism invites us to consider human being as what describes itself first by its projects. The project therefore is not simply professional but engages at the same time existential questions. Far for passively integrating itself in identity dynamics, we postulate that the project organizes these dynamics in respect of the subject’s finalities. We wanted to reveal in our subjects how such a heterogeneous project, both existential and pragmatic, could organize identity representations in its way. A first exploratory research using the IMIS methodology of investigation derived from the ego-ecological theory of identity (Zavalloni & Louis-guérin, 1984 ; Zavalloni, 2007) gives rise to the complexity of transactions that combine to construct meaning and ways of thinking and acting inside identity dynamics. A series of interviews with five subjects leaded us to consider the complexity of identity dynamics under the angle of what organizes it, the existential project of self, of what concretizes it, socially situated action, and of what justifies it, socialization of the subject in his social and cultural environment. These works we are presenting enrich the theoretical model of the dynamics of the system of capability (Costalat-Founeau, 1997, 2008) by deepening in the links between the project, that includes an existential element and another pragmatic, the socialization which is both reconstruction of definitions of the social environment and quest for recognition by the subject, then at last the action which brings an experiential concretization and social validation to identity representations and subjective capabilities. Another study, with a quantitative and longitudinal approach, centers on the evolution of levels of subjective capability in regard to the professional project, before and after a career orientation counseling. This led to an attempt of creating and validating a new scale named “SSC-PP” for scale of subjective capability related to the professional project. Submitted to 50 participants of a career orientation counseling, it showed that all dimensions of capability related to the project don’t evolve together in the same proportions.