Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to regulations that take place within work (allowing satisfaction related to
a 'job well done'), the development of skills (allowing recognition), collec-
tive regulations (useful to cooperation), etc. It also relies on opportunities
for debate (questioning, mutual assistance, attentive listening, etc.) and
for thinking (keeping up a capacity for judgement, ensuring that action
is consistent with one's own values) that are crucial to any activity. Being
able to act, debate and think (Daniellou, 1998) are the conditions that are
indispensable to the worker to face real-world situations. The psychosocial
dimension structures them together by giving them a subjective consis-
tency. However, this dimension is not a 'given'; it is constructed within
and through activity itself.
The development of the psychosocial dimension:
A driving force of activity
The psychosocial dimension of ordinary work is not set in stone. As are all
of its other dimensions, it is in constant development. Indeed, it is through a
confrontation with real-world events, which are always unpredictable and
always complex, that this psychosocial dimension is called upon. It is also
through this confrontation that workers find ways of 'working things out
in spite of everything' - by inventing new ways of doing things, new ways
of dealing with work situations, new ways of acting when faced with real-
world constraints, new ways of cooperating, and by giving them meaning.
This renewed novelty is a part of the development of workers' activ-
ity. This is not just in the area of efficiency, which is characterized by an
operational search for an answer to the requirements of production work
within a theory of action, but also in the area of subjective engagement,
corresponding to the involvement of oneself in work activity and in inter-
actions with other people.
Therefore, any activity situation, whenever it implies a new mobili-
zation of the subject, should be viewed as a situation of activity that is
'under development'. Similarly, any event - even it is to be considered a
constraint - is an opportunity for workers to overcome, thus providing
them with opportunities for operative and subjective development.
Every event processed in this way, whenever it is set within the
workers' possibilities for acting, speaking out and thinking, is given new
meaning. This new meaning is usually stronger than the involvement that
was required to overcome the event. At a time where work shifted from
'a social definition where it was viewed as the rapid execution of gestures
or elementary operations … to an approach where work can be considered
as an intelligence and as a relevant conduct of events' (Zarifian, 1995, p. 7,
our translation), one can easily understand the importance that the mean-
ing ascribed to the events of work and how they are managed can have to
