Digital Transformations in the Challenge of Activity and Work

14Are Work Collectives and Digital Exposure Compatible?

For almost half a century, the work sector has been digitalizing: technologies (computers, smartphones, software, etc.) are omnipresent in many companies. Engineering, a context of hard sciences and mathematics, is of course no exception to this phenomenon. However, technology is based on a binary and formalized language that does not take into account all the needs and capacities for expression and criticism that are specifically human. Here, we seek to recognize and characterize, more precisely, the role and consequences of the use of so-called collaborative digital tools on collective activity.

14.1. Collective activity: major developments

Collective activity needs to be preserved and developed at work because it is a source of organizational performance, quality of work, as well as health (Caroly 2010; Clot 2010): it carries the possibilities of co-construction and mutual interdependence of employees, as well as their power to act, in its individual and collective form (Clot 2008). Collective activity corresponds to the setting in motion of collective work and of the work collective(s) that carry it out (Caroly 2012).

Collective work (Caroly and Barcellini 2013) corresponds to explicit coordination activities and adjustments of tasks and missions according to the risks of the activity. It refers to the articulation of competences according to common operative frames of reference (de Terssac and Chabaud 1990; Leplat ...