Développement de l’activité et travail d’articulation : le cas d’un centre d’appels médico-social

Abstract

This article studies the organizational change of an inbound health call center. Seeking to improve the quality of its service, the company redesigned the activity of call operators by creating a new sub-team. Our study uses the concept of articulation work in order to grasp the relations between work collective and organization. We build upon activity theory in order to understand the call operators’ activity at different levels, that of the activity and that of the actors situated practices. Our research is based on a two-year ethnographic fieldwork which employed various data collection techniques such as ‘’shadowing’’ professionals. Our results highlight the existence of two professional perspectives. One is focusing on information exchange, while the other is based on support and advice to the users. Taking into account those two work perspectives is of crucial importance for the development of the activity and the health of employees.

Keywords

• activity theories
• development
• organizational change
• work collective
• call center