L'autocontrôlé est devenu aujourd'hui un outil au service des stratégies de la Qualité Totale. En s'appuyant sur le cas précis d'ateliers de montage d'une usine d'automobile française, l'auteur souligne les difficultés d'application d'un tel principe. L'autocontrôlé allie en effet deux modalités potentiellement contradictoires : la traçabilité (enregistrement de toutes les défaillances signalées par les opérateurs) et la responsabilité. Si elle permet de mieux remédier aux défaillances humaines et techniques, la traçabilité n'en devient pas moins problématique dès lors qu'il s'agit d'imputer des responsabilités. Aussi, en cas d'incident, et pour éviter des accusations qu'ils jugent infondées ou trop stigmatisantes, les opérateurs savent-ils contourner les canaux formels pour assurer malgré tout la qualité de la production.
As is known, large numbers of writings circulate within every kind of professional environment. As a result, there is extensive research on the formats, uses and roles of writings in work. However, the approach taken here is not to describe what is done with writings in work. The central hypothesis rests on a performative vision of writings, one that gives them the power to act, agency. It can be summed up as follows: what do writings "do" to work? Studying work through its writings is a way to connect two dimensions that are too often kept separate: situated activities on the one hand, organizational functions on the other. Indeed, writings are material and robust-though not always lasting-traces of concrete activities, and they provide a handhold for the rigorous analysis of work as close as possible to its conditions of realization. However, writings travel and circulate. They form links between workers, groups, workshops, services, firms, without which production could not take place. They stretch work beyond its source. To track them is therefore to shift the field of enquiry to moments other than the present of the observed situation, and also to other nearby, surrounding workspaces. This brings out the procedural and interactive dimensions of organizations, their integrating capacity. Exploring what writings do to work is therefore not only to place oneself at an intermediate level between situated action and organized action. For the sociologist, it is a way of connecting these two perspectives "on paper", by embedding the analysis of the actual work in spatially and temporally broader collective actions, and by documenting organizational analysis on the basis of observed work situations. It is a way of contributing to a more extensive ecology of activity, more clearly anchored within its organizational envelope.
représentant la production et le travail ne sont pas, comme on pourrait le supposer, la voix monocorde de la direction. Le traitement des thèmes varie selon les époques, les enjeux, les réalisateurs et les destinataires. Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info-Institut d'Etudes Politiques de
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.