La messagerie électronique, principal métronome des activités de cadre

Abstract

The paper seeks to determine how e-mail helps to restructure supervisory activities. In France, socio-professional categories such as professionals, managers and executives are all classified as supervisors. Based on Elias’ conception of time, the study analyses how e-mail creates time units that structure and transform supervisory activities. A case study involving a local authority is then mobilized to ask questions about how email use has transformed dedicated supervisory roles. Findings reveal that e-mail tends to structure professional practices along temporal lines. Work starts to revolve around the continuous management and prioritization of information received as a continuous flow. Thus, information temporization and synchronization become the new temporal frameworks within which activities are realized. Indeed, the particularity of working via e-mail is the way that it forces supervisors to integrate contradictory data within a single time unit. The tool facilitates the real-time integration of information derived from multiple activity levels - but paradoxically, it also creates a new form of time dependency. In turn, this raises questions about the kind of autonomy that has traditionally been delegated to supervisors.

Keywords

• e-mail
• synchronization
• temporization
• supervisors
• activity transformations
• working under time pressure