Introduction

The aim of this book is to analyze the forms of knowledge selection, hierarchization and mediation of bodies of knowledge in "communication" during professional training. A body of knowledge (BOK or BoK) refers to the comprehensive set of concepts, terms and activities that define a particular professional domain. It serves as a framework for guiding practitioners within that field, encapsulating the essential knowledge and practices necessary for effective performance. For this, we will investigate the link between two types of ideologies: the performative efficacy promised by training programs, and communication seen as a logistic to be managed and optimized to achieve mastery. The choice of professional training in communication is related to the hypothesis that training is a place where communication ideologies and standards crystallize. Starting with professional training will allow us to question the functions attributed to the BOK in communication within organizations, because professional training corresponds to an adaptation logic to the demands of such organizations. The question that will pervade this book is: How does the efficacy imperative affect the mediation of BOK in communication in ongoing professional training? The question is to determine to what extent the promise of efficacy is linked to behaviorist, logistical, instrumental and managerial conceptions of communication, as well as scientistic expectations1 (Jurdant 2009, p. 5) towards said bodies of knowledge. This problem makes it possible to understand contemporary forms of communication engineering, "the way in which various social actors take over all of these processes to produce power and value" (Jeanneret 2014, p. 32).

This book aims to bring to light the construction of communication conceptions in the field of professional communication training. It will therefore be marked by a reflection on this discipline, its challenges, its modes of social visibility and its relations with the socio-economic world. Working on the elaboration of professional BOK in communication leads to questions on the relations between academic knowledge and knowledge deemed relevant and efficient for professional practice. The concept of knowledge (savoir) can designate bodies of knowledge with highly varying statuses. Depending on the approaches, some will produce certain categorizations: theoretical, procedural, experiential, informal bodies of knowledge, etc. The goal is not to discuss these forms of categorization, nor to produce any new ones, but to see what, within professional training, constitutes action-related bodies of knowledge (Barbier 1996, p. 16). As Foucault has pointed out, "knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice, and which is specified by that fact" (Foucault 1969, p. 182). This means that "there are bodies of knowledge that are independent of the sciences (which are neither their historical prototypes, nor their practical by-products), but there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice; and any discursive practice may be defined by the knowledge that it forms" (Foucault 1969, p. 183).

What types of knowledge are considered "useful", "practical", "operational" in professional communication training? These questions are related to the modes of instrumentalization of BOK in professional training and, more generally, to the quest for certainty (Dewey 1929) in the knowledge transmitted. On the other hand, short professional training programs - and not only those devoted to communication - place particular emphasis on the development and sharing of "best practices" drawn from the concrete experience of facilitators or trainees. This helps us understand casuistry (Passeron and Revel 2005) as a knowledge mediation communication process derived from concrete experience and compiled as exemplary cases. While professional training is not the only framework in which the development of cases actively participates in the circulation of communication standards, it is a privileged field of practice for investigating this question.

This book is at the crossroads of research on organizational communication, knowledge mediation and the industrialization of training. However, as Bonnet (2015) has emphasized, the mediation field of organizational knowledge is still a relatively underexplored area of research.

Knowledge mediation is a process which is not naturally associated with the objects of research inherent in the field of organizational communication. Closer to (or even interdisciplinary with) Educational Sciences, it is nonetheless at the heart of the info-communicational challenges of collective entrepreneurial, associative or administrative action (Bonnet and Galibert 2016, p. 5).

For Bonnet and Galibert, this perspective should "go beyond a functionalist vision of information management, knowledge management or organizational learning" (Bonnet and Galibert 2016, p. 5), as done by management sciences to understand the forms and challenges of the processes underlying organizational knowledge mediation. This project aims to contribute to structuring this area of research and highlighting the interest of this type of approach applied to the field of organizations. For Jeanneret, "this approach to communication based on the claims it substantiates proves particularly crucial for those seeking to conduct a constructed reading of the way in which the procedures, skills and occupations that make communication a professional reality, are established and transformed" (Jeanneret 2014, p. 249).

As shown in Lépine and David (2014)2, the relations between professional practices and communication training show to what extent it is complex to desire to establish a foundation of common skills for communication occupations, which are highly diverse and ever-evolving

Far from being superimposed on epistemology, the communicational approach becomes the center of the interrogation on the production, recognition, and publicization of bodies of knowledge and, conversely, their repression. It is not surprising that in such theoretical frameworks, the reflection focuses more on the sciences than on science: it now opens a new investigation into what can be called an anthropology of the bodies of knowledge, raising the question of the legitimization of knowledge with a broader scope than the sole category of scientificity (Jeanneret 2004, p. 21).

Research begins with a first choice: to focus on training organizations, and this is for several reasons. The first is that in France, as in most countries in Europe and North America, professional training is mainly provided by organizations offering training internships. It is relevant to question the ways in which these organizations position themselves, establish their expertise, divide communication into "products", promote their offer and claim mastery over communication processes. The second is that training organizations themselves have been the subject of little research, despite being key actors in lifelong professional training. According to Delamotte, "if we agree to recognize an industrial type of mutation in the social representations underpinning the practice and development of the field of training, it is also appropriate to construct an observation around the main actor in industrialization, namely the training organization" (Delamotte 1993).

When studying the training programs proposed in France, these share similar content with other training organizations in various countries. To begin with, part of the training organizations studied deploy their offer at an international scale. We were able to show that the contents of these training programs are quite similar from one organization to another, and based on the same models (such as SWOT or the Deming wheel), designed in the United States and promoted by numerous agencies or communications consulting firms around the world.

Professional training in communication involves diverse structures (general organizations, specialized organizations, grandes écoles, associations, independent units) and the offer is quite heterogeneous. From this observation arises a bias in research: not delimiting the field of research a priori (based on a certain definition of "communication"), but taking into account what training organizations designate as "communication" training programs. By analyzing the segmentation and construction of short professional educational offers in communication, we will see that communication has close relations to marketing, management and personal development. However, this question of the permeability of boundaries seems particularly interesting to understand the conceptions of communication at work and the standards referring to them.

This work is the result of a triple methodological approach: an analysis of corpora of catalogs from training organizations and their teaching aids, an interview survey and an ethnographic survey3. In order to analyze the rhetoric of training organizations, their educational offers in communication, their segmentation and positioning, I studied a corpus of 2017-2018 catalogs from eight educational structures and updated the analysis by establishing a comparison with 2023-2024 offers. The analysis of these catalogs accounts for the plurality of arguments for legitimizing educational structures and the...