the major technological innovations and the approaches to support digital transformations in progress, each chapter – grouped into four main parts – enriches our understanding of the dynamics at work.
1) The first part provides an overview of the digital transformations and the various emerging technologies that are spreading throughout organizations.
Chapter 1 by Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon provides an overview of the various emerging technologies that are gradually being seen in companies, and discusses their paradoxical uses and impacts on work. Bobillier Chaumon also discusses how he believes the human and social sciences should accompany the design and deployment of these technical innovations so that they support business and promote the well-being of employees. Chapter 2 by Nadia Barville-Deromas and Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon focuses on the topic of collaborative technologies, and more specifically on the corporate digital social networks that are being massively spread throughout organizations in order to make communication fluid and to optimize synergies between professions and services. The authors question the psychosocio-organizational stakes that such cooperative platforms can represent on collective activity and mobilized skills. Chapter 3 by Camille Sagnier, Émilie Loup-Escande and Gérard Valléry proposes a critical analysis of immersive technologies based on virtual and augmented reality. The authors illustrate not only the contributions but also the constraints that these devices impose on the activity and the users, especially in the industrial sector. Chapter 4 by Sandrine Berger-Douce gives an account of the situation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as well as their strengths and weaknesses with regard to robotization. It also proposes the means of support for these organizations and their employees, who prove to be poorly prepared or not at all prepared. Chapter 5 by Lydia Martin, Julian Alvarez and Antoine Taly gives us feedback on the serious game technique for learning professional behaviors, and shows how debriefing and work group devices can promote learning transfers in work situations. Finally, Chapter 6 by Tamari Gamkrelidze, Moustafa Zouinar and Flore Barcellini defines the scope of action and the possible development of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors question the place and role of AI in professional activities and in the modalities/conditions of interaction between these innovative devices and humans.
2) The following thematic part focuses on the new ways of working caused or accelerated by digital transformations, providing analysis and feedback from various research studies.
Thus, Chapter 7 by Emilie Vayre reports on the psychosocial and socio-professional issues of telework deployment within work organizations, based on a summary of various research works and publications. The author also suggests steps that can be taken to mark out the process of deploying telework in work structures. Chapter 8 by Elodie Chambonnière and Jacqueline Vacherand-Revel is based on an ethnographic study in the building sector that deals with the reconfiguration of pre-existing management practices of various key players on the building site and occupational risk prevention activity, following the introduction of a business application. The authors demonstrate the advantage of an ethnographic approach that immerses itself in the heart of this activity in order to be able to understand the multiple determinants of the evolution of these newly digitized managerial practices. Chapter 9 by Anne-Cécile Lafeuillade, Flore Barcellini, Willy Buchmann and Tahar-Hakim Benchekroun focuses on collaborative robotics (cobotics) and the way it is considered and determined by the organizational projects of managers of SMEs. The authors demonstrate the importance of starting from the reality of the activity to shape the “desires” of transformation, a reflection similar to that of Irène Poidi, Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon and Jacqueline Vacherand-Revel in Chapter 10. These authors show how technological artifacts are mobilized at different stages and for different functions in the process of creating innovative companies by young entrepreneurs. These technical devices then take on a status and a particular trajectory of use depending on the situations and activities in which they are employed. Finally, Chapter 11 by Maria Ianeva, Raluca Ciobanu and Chiara Lai on the new physical territories of digital activity proposes to question the outlines and challenges of space as an object of research and action in digital transformations. Their contribution seeks to qualify the psychosocial and organizational implications of these complex socio-technical devices (flexible spaces, unassigned positions), based on research carried out within the IT subsidiary of a large French group.
3) The third thematic part discusses more specifically the psychosocial, socio-organizational and occupational impacts of technology diffusion in work activity.
Chapter 12 by Maxime Besenval and Alexandra Bidet looks at the beginnings of engagement in digital, creative and collective work. Based on an ethnographic study of the sociology of work and uses in the video game design sector, the authors ask how far we can invest in and develop the opportunities offered by digital transformations – in terms of permanent and collective reconfiguration of the product of work – without threatening the possibility of workers engaging in it. Chapter 13 by Florence Cros, Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon and Bruno Cuvillier raises the issue of the obsolescence of the skills of older workers in the face of the challenges of technological change. This chapter illustrates that older people have major experiential and collective resources that enable them to cope with these transformations, and, above all, to regulate technical failures or work situations not covered by the new systems. Chapter 14, the last chapter of Part 3, by Pauline Crouzat and Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon sets out, on the one hand, to specify how the collective activity of an aeronautical engineering department can be reconfigured under the impetus of technology and, on the other hand, to examine the manifestations, resources and limits of these collective practices mediated by technology.
4) The fourth and final thematic part covers the methods and approaches that can be used to understand, design and support digital transformation projects.
Thus, Chapter 15 by Jean-Marc Robert, Antoine Martin, Mitra Taraghi, Clément Colin, Masood Maldar, Flavie Bonneviot and Eric Brangier aims to explain the place and role of the prospective ergonomics (PE) approach in the development of future products, services, processes and systems. The authors present two illustrations of innovative projects that apply the approach and methods of this perspective. Chapter 16 by Laurent Van Belleghem describes the interest of the activity simulation method in order to fully explain the new work configurations that these transformations foreshadow and to help design them. Two intervention experiments illustrate these ways of anticipating and co-designing probable future work. Chapter 17 by Clotilde Coron and Patrick Gilbert deals with the specificities of change management in the context of digital transformations, because they can be an amplifier, or even a catalyst, of social and professional inequalities. The authors present a model of change management that takes into account the specificities of technological change. Chapter 18, the last chapter by Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon, returns to the concepts and models of technological acceptability, which are crucial in the process of adopting and deploying new technologies. The chapter also discusses their contributions and limitations. Based on the situated acceptance approach, he outlines the methods that, in his view, allow us to explore the acceptance of emerging technologies, based on the analysis of acceptable developments related to digitized activities.
Introduction written by Marc-Eric BOBILLIER CHAUMON.
