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Companies’ top management and trade union organisations are thinking about what actions should be developed to limit hyper-connection. Awareness-raising and best practice charters or, more radically, cutting off servers at the end of the day are frequent responses without always being convincing. The article is based on an exploratory study focused on the research and development activities of an automotive group. Engineers, and sometimes technicians, deal with projects on a global scale and are connected to contacts spread over several time zones. The article shows that the issue of disconnection cannot be addressed without bearing in mind the high standards of work intensity that are prevalent in these activities and internalised by employees. It also underlines their needs, in such circumstances, to be free to choose how to use their ICT equipment. In this way, they are able to ease the constraints on their professional life and maintain a balance with their personal life. Hence, solutions must be sought in terms of work organisation or equipment ergonomics.

The article discusses the contributions made to this issue on activity simulation. Focusing on the simulation of activity within organizations, it argues that the methods in question potentially affect power relations in change management processes. In these processes, participatory approaches do not always manage to take work activity into account. Simulation methods seek to take the constraints of the activity seriously and to consider the resources that would be useful.

Activity simulation may be described as a varied set of methods deemed to be useful in the design of new socio-technical environments, either in organizations or in other areas of everyday life. Based on a seminar held on this very theme, this special issue seeks to provide various examples of these approaches and attempts to prove the possibility and utility of taking activity into account within the design processes.

In addition to an approach that seeks to diversify the objects and fields of study covered in the sociology of work, in the 1990s service relationships were first and foremost considered a paradigmatic challenge where researchers were asked to conceptualise work-related problems otherwise than as typical work-related or social examples of rationalisation and resistance to rationalization. What people usually feared is that this might limit analysis to the micro-analytical level. The article argues that before returning to a relationship-oriented approach, there is a need to further explore relational approaches’ ultimately more open-ended potentialities.

In a conversation with the Nouvelle Revue du Travail, Pascal Ughetto and Philippe Zarifian address the controversy about service-related analytical grids, by focusing on the preconditions underlying each grid’s particular orientation. The debate follows their contributions to the Controverses special section found in a special issue called “Analysing service relationships and service-based social relationships”

Lean production has made a comeback in businesses since the mid-2000s, triggering much debate about its impact on working practices. This paper seeks to highlight the manner in which “lean” conceives work. However, neither Ohno, who devised the method and its tools, nor Womack, Jones or Roos, its theoreticians, actually provide us with very much explicit theory. The key idea is to combat waste in the day-to-day operation of workshops. This may lead either to a reassessment of employees’ working conditions or to an obsession with reducing “unproductive” work time by forcing human beings to constantly adapt. This relative uncertainty is all the more important insofar as its implementation outside the automotive sector means that it may be applied in very different productive contexts.

At first glimpse, when curators set up an exhibition on the Old masters, they give to their audience an occasion to go back in time. Mediators are supposed to put the curators’ knowledge and understanding of the artists and their time within reach of the public. However, these actors rely on a plurality of representations and practices that fit together only because they are not completely explicit nor closely negotiated. This paper starts from an exhibition on Fouquet, a painter and illuminator from the XVth century in order to consider an exhibition, and time itself, as « boundary objects », around which curators, mediators and audience gather. The exhibition illustrates a specific conception and a professional practice of the history of art, that are both all about piecing together a past we don’t know anymore. Curators are preoccupied with rebuilding the temporalities of the works of art ; but that’s not necessarily what the audience is concerned with, nor what the mediator should be working on. Indeed, they might concentrate on bringing back to life a story that revolves « around » the work, for example the history of lifestyles.

If we wish to report on the relationship between economic sociology and the economy, it must be done from a historical perspective within which the confrontation of the economics and sociological knowledge are evolutionary. In this context, a convergence between the two types of analysis can be operated by setting a discussion between the dominant theory and its representation of the economy.