L'organisation de son propre travail : une étude du cours d'action de cadres de l'industrie - Organizing one's own work : A study of industrial managers' course of action

This study analyses how managers organize their own work, within the framework of both situated cognition and course-of-action theory. The activity of two managers in a metallurgical plant was studied during a period of two consecutive working days. Two kinds of data were collected just before and after these two days : - Review of the traces of the managers' activities and of the tools they resorted to (diary entries, ordering of papers on the desk, etc.); - verbalizations of the managers regarding traces, tools and an activity journal (during the two days, managers scheduled each moment in tables). Courses-of-action were reconstituted and analyzed by identifying macro-sequences, macro-series, and sequential or serial episodes which constituted them. The results showed that the managers' activity was divided in short episodes, connected by five different types of bifurcation. The managers located the major part of their activity within several tens of macro-sequences, many of them extending far before and after the analyzed activity. These gave diachronic coherence to the short episodes. The managers' activity was partially anticipated. In their diary, items differed according to the different types of anticipated action (appointment or deadline vs temporally undetermined action). Synchronous communications were present in the most of activity sequences. These involved search for synchronization in the manager's activity by coping emergencies and exploiting opportunities perceived during the course of action. Finally, autonomy in the managers' work appears as constructing signification extended on a large temporal span, these signification organizing activity in an adaptable way.