Talent contests, prizes and rankings are spreading through the social and medico-social field, presented as a valorization of the people being supported. Drawing on social psychology and on cultural rights, I argue here that any competition between creations produces the opposite of what social work aims for, including for those who win. I propose another benchmark for thinking about the end of a project, the place without a rank, along with concrete ways of putting it into practice, the most radical of which consists in telling the story of the process rather than showing a result, as well as ways of subverting the schemes one cannot refuse.
Contests wherever people are being supported
Medico-social institutions enter groups of children or adults with disabilities in departmental talent contests, modelled on television shows, where a panel of professionals decides between them. Video workshops for children end with award ceremonies. Inter-institutional challenges rank the productions of elderly people, of young people in the child protection system, of psychiatric patients. These schemes are multiplying, they attract funding and press coverage, and those who organize them sincerely present them as moments of valorization, pride and inclusion.
I want to examine here what these schemes actually do to people, behind what they claim. I defend the following thesis: putting creations in competition stands in direct contradiction with the goals social work sets itself, and it methodically produces their opposite. It hurts those who lose, it weakens those who win, and it imports into places of care and support the very social logic whose damage those places are supposed to repair. The violence depends neither on the dosage nor on the way the contest is organized; it lies in the very structure of ranking, and that is why it remains invisible to people who are otherwise caring and competent.
Inclusion written into law, ranking in practice
French social work has, rarely for a profession, a legal definition of its goals. The decree of 6 May 2017, which introduced this definition into the Code de l’action sociale et des familles, states that social work aims to give people access to the full range of fundamental rights, to facilitate their social inclusion and the exercise of full citizenship, and that it rests on respect for people’s dignity and on the development of their power to act. The law of 2 January 2002 reforming social action had already placed respect for dignity and people’s participation at the centre of the sector. The Quebec psychosociologist Yann Le Bossé, in Sortir de l’impuissance (2012), gave this notion of the power to act, empowerment, its most precise content: supporting people’s concrete capacity to influence what matters to them, according to their own criteria, and not the criteria of those who support them.
A contest runs directly counter to every one of these terms. It does not include, it separates, since its function is to produce winners and losers. It does not develop the power to act, it submits people to a verdict handed down by others, according to criteria they did not choose. And it touches on dignity, since it sets up a hierarchy among people whom society has already ranked, and ranks them on the only thing they are still granted, their capacity to move an audience. A jury judging disabled people on their talent: the sentence is enough to state the problem. It remains to be understood why this problem so often escapes those who organize these schemes in good faith, and this is where research provides answers.
The threat of grades
Social psychology has long studied what comparison does to people. Leon Festinger, in a 1954 article on social comparison processes, established that we evaluate our abilities by comparing ourselves with others whenever objective criteria are lacking. This comparison is spontaneous, but devices can organize it, intensify it, make it public and final. A contest is precisely that, a machine for organizing comparison, and for settling it in front of witnesses.
The effects of this organization have been measured. Fabrizio Butera, Céline Buchs and Céline Darnon edited a collective volume with an explicit title, L’évaluation, une menace ? (2011), which gathers the work of French-speaking researchers on the effects of normative evaluation, the kind that situates each person in relation to the others. Their finding runs through every chapter: this type of evaluation diverts people’s attention from the task itself towards comparison with others, threatens self-esteem, degrades learning, and induces antisocial behaviour. Claudia Toma shows there that competition drives people to withhold information rather than share it, Caroline Pulfrey that self-promotion encourages cheating, and Jean-Claude Croizet, in a chapter entitled “Le racisme de l’intelligence”, that evaluation has historically served to naturalize social hierarchies, by passing off as differences in merit what is in fact a pre-existing social ranking. This last point directly concerns the medico-social field: ranking people whom society has already relegated means doubling the relegation while giving it the appearance of an objective verdict on their worth.
An older experiment sheds light on a finer mechanism. In 1988, the Israeli psychologist Ruth Butler compared, with schoolchildren, three forms of feedback on a piece of work: a personalized comment without a grade, a grade without a comment, and a grade accompanied by a comment. Only the pupils who received a comment without a grade made progress and kept their interest in the task. The mere presence of a grade cancelled out the benefit of the comment, because the grade captures all the attention and shifts it from the task to the rank. Transposed to our practices, this result says something precise: in an end-of-workshop presentation, anything that resembles a ranking, even accompanied by the most attentive words, erases those words. The prize list swallows the rest.
Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan finally established, in a 1999 meta-analysis covering more than a hundred experimental studies, that expected, tangible rewards diminish intrinsic motivation, that is, the taste for the activity for its own sake. The promised prize turns the activity into a means of obtaining the prize. What mediation seeks to bring to life, the pleasure of creating, curiosity, appropriation, is precisely what the promise of a prize erodes.
First prize is lost the following year
The most common objection consists in saying that the contest at least does good to those who win. It does not hold, and this is perhaps the most counter-intuitive point in this whole matter.
In the article Building, Not Valorizing I developed the idea that valorizing a person means placing them at a certain height, and therefore making them liable to fall from it. First prize is the purest form of that elevated position. It does not belong to the person, it is lent to them by a jury, and it can be taken back at the next edition, by another jury, for the benefit of another group. The confidence it seems to give is a conditional confidence, suspended on the next verdict. Alfie Kohn, in No Contest: The Case Against Competition (1986), a compendium of the research on competition, states this consequence with precision: victory does not build self-esteem, it makes self-esteem dependent on the next victory, and it teaches people to measure their worth by the defeat of others. Kohn also shows, against common assumption, that competition is not a given of human nature but a structure, which can be installed or not, and that cooperative situations produce better results, better learning and better relationships in the vast majority of comparative studies.
There is a second wound on the winners’ side, a more discreet one. The American social psychologist Morton Deutsch described as early as 1949 the structural difference between cooperation and competition: in a cooperative situation, each person’s success serves the others’, whereas in a competitive situation, my success requires the failure of others. Now, the groups we work with in mediation are peer groups, often fragile, whose cohesion is itself a goal of the support they receive. Making one child win against the children of his own institution, or one institution against the neighbouring institutions, means installing, between people who share the same condition, a structure in which their interests diverge. The winners lose something that does not show on the photo of the award ceremony, the solidarity of the group they belonged to.
The refusal that singles out
A second objection is made in good faith: people are not obliged to take part, they have a choice. One must of course fight for that choice to be real, for the information to be given from the start and not midway through the year as a fait accompli. But individual choice protects from nothing as long as the scheme stands.
In a system where the contest exists, where institutions go, where the other groups enter, not taking part is not a neutral position. Whoever abstains marks themselves out as the one who has no talent, the one who was not ready, the one who did not dare. The refusal takes its place within the very hierarchy it claims to refuse, and it occupies the bottom rung. This is the usual mechanism of competitive schemes: they do not need to coerce, it is enough for them to exist, and once they are there, abstention itself becomes a result. That is why the answer to the problem cannot be individual. You do not escape a ranking by refusing to appear in it; you only escape it by undoing the ranking itself.
The touching image that reassures the institution
If the contest does not benefit the people, we must ask who it does benefit, for it would not be spreading without beneficiaries.
It produces institutional visibility. Photographs, videos, posts on social media, a departmental event, directors meeting one another, communication that shows dynamic institutions, open to culture, committed to inclusion. The raw material of this communication is the body of the people in their care, their emotion and their effort. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Christophe Dejours, founder of the psychodynamics of work, showed in L’évaluation du travail à l’épreuve du réel (2003) how the individualized evaluation of performance, imported from management into every sector, destroys collectives and cooperation while producing indicators that reassure organizations. The talent contest is the festive version of this generalized evaluation: it provides the institution with quantifiable, photographable proof of its dynamism, at the cost of putting the people it hosts in competition with one another.
There is an expression for this in the disability field, and it comes up of its own accord in discussions among professionals: people become objects. Objects of an institutional policy, objects of a communication strategy, objects of a scheme of competition between institutions which is played out over their heads and in which they serve as material. And the image produced is all the more effective for being touching: it stages the institution’s benevolence and stifles any question about what happens the rest of the year.
The society taken as a model
The most troubling thing about the spread of these schemes is where they take root. Social work exists, to a large extent, because a society organized as a competition produces losers: people disqualified by the labour market, by school, by norms of physical and cognitive performance. Social and medico-social institutions take in precisely the people whom the general social ranking has relegated. Importing a contest into them means bringing the problem into the very place that was meant to repair its effects, and asking people to replay, within the very space of their support, the scene of their relegation, this time with the hope of coming out winners.
This choice of model is in no way compulsory. In the article Robustness, antifragility, resilience, drawing on the work of the biologist Olivier Hamant, I described the opposition between logics of performance, which optimize, measure and rank, and logics of robustness, which characterize the living systems that last, made of heterogeneity, redundancy and complementarity. A human group can be organized according to either of these logics, and the comparative studies gathered by Alfie Kohn, whom I quoted above, show that cooperation is not a moral luxury but a more effective structure, even by the standards of performance itself. Taking the society of competition as the reference, in a mediation project, is therefore a choice, almost always implicit, almost never discussed, and it is this lack of discussion that allows schemes contrary to the sector’s goals to spread through it in all good conscience.
Dignity escapes comparison
There is a philosophical and legal foundation for this critique, and it arms those who want to carry it into their institutions.
The philosophical foundation is old. Immanuel Kant, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), distinguishes what has a price, and can therefore be replaced by an equivalent, from what has a dignity, and admits of no equivalent. Comparing presupposes a common measure. What has dignity is precisely what escapes any common measure, hence any comparison, hence any ranking. Ranking people, on whatever criterion, amounts to assigning them a price, that is, to treating as a commodity what by definition is not one. A jury deliberating on the respective talent of two groups of deaf children performs exactly this operation, however delicately it conducts it.
The legal foundation is recent and little known. The French NOTRe law of 2015, in its article 103, states that responsibility for culture is exercised jointly by local authorities and the State with due respect for cultural rights, and the LCAP law of 2016 repeats this reference. The text that formulates these rights most precisely is the Fribourg Declaration of 2007, drawn up by the working group coordinated by the philosopher Patrice Meyer-Bisch, and I proposed a method for examining a project against the eight rights it identifies in the article Analyze your project using the Fribourg Declaration. Three of these rights are directly put at stake by a contest in a social or medico-social institution. The right to choose and to have respected one’s cultural identity, since the scheme assigns people to the identity of the one who has talent or does not. The right to take part in cultural life, which presupposes a chosen participation and not a staging decided by others. And the right to adequate information, which is not respected when people discover midway through the year that they are going to compete.
These texts do not make it possible to challenge a contest in court, and I do not want to suggest a legal weapon they are not. They give something else, which counts for more in the life of institutions: a recognized political foundation. A professional who opposes these schemes is not pitting her personal sensibility against a management decision, she is invoking a principle written into French law for the past ten years. The debate then changes in nature.
The place without a rank
It remains to picture what we are after instead. For the critique of the contest always runs up against the same practical question: how, then, do you end a project? People have created, they want to show, families want to see, the institution wants an event, and this desire for a strong moment is legitimate. The contest thrives because it offers a ready-made form for that desire. Another form is therefore needed, and to design it, I propose a benchmark I will call the place without a rank.
The idea starts from something I have observed for years in my workshops: every moment of presentation distributes places. When the images are screened, when the first names are spoken, when the group looks together at what each person has made, each person occupies a place in a shared symbolic space. It is this distribution of places that makes a presentation precious, and it has no need whatsoever to be a distribution of ranks. A place says: you are here, you have made something that bears your name, and the others have seen it. A rank says: you are worth more than this one and less than that one. A place founds, a rank compares, and the whole design of a project’s ending can be summed up in this question of method: give every person a place, and give no one a rank.
The philosopher Axel Honneth, in The Struggle for Recognition (1992), gives this distinction its theoretical grounding. Among the forms of recognition he identifies, social esteem is the one at stake in the sharing of singular contributions to something held in common. Now a singular contribution, precisely because it is singular, is not comparable with the others: it brings to the common something that no other brings, and it is this contribution that recognition salutes. The contest destroys this structure by replacing the question “what do you bring that no one else brings?” with the question “are you worth more or less than the others?”. The first question makes people complementary, the second makes them competitors. The place without a rank is the name I give to a device that stubbornly asks the first question and refuses to ask the second.
This benchmark has a practical virtue: it provides a test applicable to any end-of-project device, existing or being designed. Does every person have a named, visible place in it, connected to what they actually did? Does anyone receive a rank, even implicit, even disguised as a special mention, a jury’s favourite, an applause meter? The second question is trickier than the first, for rank knows how to hide. An “audience award” is a rank. A running order presented as a crescendo is a rank. An edit that gives more time to the “best” images is a rank. The test of the place without a rank forces us to flush out these shamefaced rankings, which do the violence of ranking without owning its name.
Project endings that bring people together
Concretely, designing the end of a project according to this benchmark of the place without a rank, that is, by giving each person a place and no one a rank, involves simple gestures, which I practise and which I pass on.
The shared screening, first. Everything that was made is shown, without selection, in an order that is not a prize list, for instance the chronological order of making, or an order drawn by lot, or an order built collectively for the pleasure of composition. Each author’s first name is spoken or displayed, because anonymity dissolves the place as surely as ranking hierarchizes it. The participants’ words accompany the works, each being able to say what he or she was looking for, without that word being a defence before a jury. The audience is invited to say what the images do to them, never to say which are the best, and this instruction is given explicitly, for without it the reflex of ranking returns. The celebration, finally, marks the passage and the work accomplished, for everyone and without a verdict, like the festivals that mark the seasons and not like the ceremonies that hand out prizes. And the trace, photographs, publication, later screenings, inscribes the event in a shared memory where all the names appear.
None of these gestures is spectacular, and that is their strength. They produce exactly what the contest promises without delivering, a strong moment, pride, visibility, but they produce it for every person, and without producing losers at the same time.
“Is my film better than the others’?”
This question is sometimes asked by the participants themselves. It does not come only from institutions or juries, it comes from children, teenagers, adults who have grown up in a society where the value of a thing is measured by its rank, and who apply that reflex to what they have just created. You do not answer this question by refusing it, still less by answering it. You answer it by changing what is shown.
In the article The process, not the result I developed a practice that brings about this change: presenting the journey rather than the productions alone. Telling what stages were passed through, what the surprises and the forks in the road were, how the planned project was transformed by the encounter, and showing the productions at the end of this narrative, as one element among others in a larger process. This shift does more than remove the rank from a presentation, it takes away the very object of judgement. You can rank films, you cannot rank journeys. A journey is neither better nor worse than another, it belongs to someone, it tells of a transformation comparable to no other. The narrative of the process therefore achieves the place without a rank by construction: every person necessarily has a place in it, that of their own path, and the very idea of winning no longer makes sense, since there are no longer two objects of the same kind to decide between. The question “is my film better?” turns, in this framework, into another question, which the participants end up asking themselves: “what did I go through in making it?”.
This paradigm has a material condition, which I recall in the same article: a process that is not documented is not remembered, and therefore cannot be told. Yet this constraint is a methodological blessing, for the documentation can be entrusted to the participants. I implemented this principle on a large scale in the travelling digital workshops I designed for Cultures du cœur, whose traces are gathered on the site ateliersnumeriques-culturesducœur.org, and I drew from them lessons presented in the talk Digital technology, a tool for mediation and cultural democracy. Digital tools there serve as link and as trace: people photograph, record, film the project while it is happening, as journalists of their own adventure, and this material then constitutes the shared narrative. The effect goes beyond the presentation. A person who has built the trace of her own journey herself, and who can tell it, becomes legitimate in her own eyes. She no longer needs a jury to declare her worthy, she holds the proof, made by herself, that she has travelled a path. This self-legitimation, by oneself and for oneself, is exactly what the law calls the development of the power to act, the goal that the 2017 decree quoted at the beginning of this article assigns to social work, and which the contest confiscates by handing it over to a jury.
Subverting the contest you cannot refuse
Sometimes you do not get to choose the setup. A practitioner recently told me about a situation of this kind, which is at the origin of this article. An educator and dancer, she was asked to run a dance workshop with a group of six children aged nine to twelve in a medico-social institution, children with an intellectual disability, several hard of hearing, one profoundly deaf. The project is beautiful, building group dynamics, opening a space of expression through the body. And it comes with an institutional expectation presented as non-negotiable: the group will take part in a departmental talent contest, whose name echoes that of a very well-known television show, in which medico-social institutions each present an act before a deliberating jury. This contest has existed for several years, a considerable number of institutions take part in it, and neither she nor I had ever heard of it before she found herself confronted with it.
In a situation of this kind, outright refusal is often impossible. You are alone, you are new, the decision comes from above, the contest has already been announced to the families. And refusal has a cost, it places the person who refuses in a position of permanent conflict and weakens her for everything else. What I have long practised in comparable situations is subversion. You do not oppose the device, you enter it, and you undermine its foundations from within, until it loses its meaning. I offer a few ways of doing so, as leads and not as recipes, since everything depends on context:
- Present something that does not lend itself to judgement. An act with no assessable form, a proposal about which one cannot say whether it is successful, a piece that seeks no effect. The jury finds itself before an object it does not know how to grade, and its embarrassment is in itself a demonstration.
- Turn the gaze around. Make the contest itself the subject of the act presented. Film the jury, act out the deliberation, stage the wait for the results. The people in care then become the ones watching the institution, and not the other way round.
- Bring everyone on stage. If the professionals, the management, the families present the act together with the people in care, the very category of the contest blurs, since no one knows any longer who is being judged.
- Strip the verdict of its importance. Decide collectively, beforehand, that the ranking will not be passed on to the group, or that you will not go to the award ceremony, or that you will celebrate the passage without waiting for the results. A ranking that nobody awaits ceases to organize anything at all.
None of these manœuvres is comfortable, and none solves the underlying problem, which is that these contests should not exist. They make it possible to get through without submitting, to protect the group during the crossing, and sometimes, in the long run, to make the scheme untenable.
Healing the institution before the people
This work of discussion, resistance and subversion does not belong to mediation itself, it belongs to an action on the institution that hosts it, and this shift must be owned and named. A professional who fights so that children are not put in competition is not doing side work that would take her away from her mission. She is caring for the milieu in which her mediation will take place, and without that care, the mediation will reproduce what the milieu contains. This is the principle François Tosquelles laid down on arriving at Saint-Alban in 1940, taking up the German psychiatrist Hermann Simon: you must heal the hospital before healing the people.
Concretely, this means that the time spent in meetings discussing a contest is not time stolen from the workshop, it is part of it, and it should be counted as such in the agreements governing interventions. An artist or a mediator commissioned for ten hours of workshop and zero hours of meetings does not have the means to do this work, and he or she will accept the contest for want of having had the time to challenge it. This question of preparation time with the teams, which looks administrative, is the one on which everything else depends. For ranking does not enter institutions by conviction, it enters them for want of discussion, and discussion, too, requires a place.
