Post – Le travail humain

English

This article provides a methodological contribution to understanding the issue of time in ergonomics. To this end, we will first present some existing methods for diachronic analysis of activity and work systems (for example, research on ageing, regulations related to health issues, the design of work systems that are part of the agro-ecological transition, and the work of the Change Laboratory) and we will specify their particularities in relation to their intended purpose. We will then present the subject that was the focus of this research and which required us to develop an original method of analysis: the entrepreneurial activity of building craftsmen. This activity, which is currently non-covered in ergonomics, plays out over the long history of the company and is confronted with contingencies, both strokes of fate and opportunities, in the face of events and transformations of various kinds (regulatory, economic, human, environmental, etc.). We drew on the conceptual and methodological contributions developed by Pueyo (2020, 2022) to understand long-term changes in order to develop this original method, which we call the historicity chronicle method. This method was used with six craftsmen. The aim was to retrace, in the form of a timeline, the major events in the company’s history at several levels, through the perception of its manager. The macro level of society and the sector of activity concerned the implications of socio-economic determinations in the history of the company. The meso level was that of the company’s operations, addressed using the concept of productive configuration. We asked the craftsman to present the significant events of the history of his company, explaining whether the event had arisen on his own initiative or whether it had been unforeseen and suffered. The manager’s micro-level consisted in establishing a link between the factual events in the company’s history (at meso or macro level) and the craftsman’s experience, his project, his work and working conditions, and his health. The results were processed in two stages: first, by presenting the finalized chronicles to an employee of the company in order to compare perspectives on the company’s history, and then by conducting separate and comparative analyses of the chronicles. The chronicle of historicity provides a first contribution to the analysis of entrepreneurial activity in ergonomics. It has proven its relevance in analyzing such activity, but we have also identified that this method should be combined with synchronic analyses in order to enrich our understanding of the artisan’s lived experience.