I. The Context and the Scientific Issues

The analysis of interaction and coordinated work situations have enjoyed considerable development in the last twenty years in social sciences, cognitive sciences and information and communication sciences. Research focusing on these phe-nomena has cast a new light on the link between knowledge and action and renewed the theories of organised action. On one hand, the ecological aspect of action in environments that knit together artefacts and technical mediations has been taken into account, and, on the other hand, linguistic competences, symbolic techniques and the repertories for evaluation and justification brought to bear by the actors have been investigated.

1. The developments in this field have been due largely to Anglo-Saxon researchers, working along several lines of research :

  - ETHNOMETHODOLOGY and SITUATED ACTION and COGNITION, focusing on the indexi-cality of action and on the emerging character of social phenomena.

  - DISTRIBUTED COGNITION, striving to account for the conduct and management of reliable complex tasks supported by environments composed both by humans and artefacts.

  - A third approach, that of ACTIVITY THEORIES, drawing on the Russian school and attempts, within a global model of activity, to relate socialisation, training and internalisation, thus integrating into a dynamic perspective contextual changes and individual development.

2. This research has not been without resonance in France :

  - Ergonomical analyses of courses of action and activity clinic in occupational psychology, situated at the crossroads of cognitive psychology and the francophone school of ergonomics, use specific interviewing, recording and simple or intertwined auto-confrontational methods, which have become instrumental for the transformation of work situations.

  - The research carried out in the "Work and Language" ("Langage&Travail") network, gathering researchers in linguistics, sociology, management sciences and occupational psychology, puts emphasis on the various forms of communication in organised actions (both oral and written) seen as language devices with social and pragmatic functions.

  - French pragmatic and moral sociology focuses on the analysis of actions under-stood as a trial, an opportunity for the actors to requalify the opposing forces in an arena of justifications that fall within different regimes of coherence.

  - The sociology of sciences and techniques stemming from the tradition of science studies and its analyses of laboratory practices.

3. Theses different approaches do not share identical views of action, do not give an identical status to knowledge in action nor to symbolic and technical mediations; they are at odds over the transformations to be achieved; they do not give identical scope to the actors' point of view and do not necessarily consider the question of the subject of the action. Some are more external and descriptive, trying to under-stand "how it works", others have more comprehensive insight, others are deliber-ately developmental.

Some research has transformational aims : some through improving technologies and their use, or by improving the performance of organisations, while others aim at the development of persons and of collective practices.

The theoretical splits only partly coincide with the differences between disciplines. Be it sociology or psychology, cognitive sciences or information sciences, language or management sciences, the approaches looking at action, organisation, objects and design, work and language dialogue and contacts are plentiful between them all, though the involved problematics are rarely fleshed out
.

4. Information and communication technologies play a central role in all these different approaches. They can also be used to support and refine these ecological theories of action, and for several reasons :

   - They constitute mediations and resources to be used for interaction, coordination, exchange and transaction. They are increasingly mobilized as external tools to assist in the construction of fragmented collectives.

   - Their use leaves traces, and such traces become essential sources for analysis purposes.

   - They allow to free the analysing processes from too great a reliance on the rep-resentations given of co-present interactions on the basis of either mutual or joint attention (towards a third object).

The detailed investigation of the transformations entailed by communication technologies in interaction, coordination and cooperation provides a useful analytical tool for all the research currents that look at collective action.


II. Description of the International Symposium

• Scientific Objectives

1. Assess the state of the art in the field by setting up an intellectual debate around the themes put forward below by confronting French, European and American specialists of the different disciplines and research trends interested in action, situation and activity .

2. Organise a dialogue around a set of structured questions reflecting upon the divergence and convergence among them, so as to possibly lay common new foundations and help direct future research

3. Introduce the corpus of work composing the different traditions, with the assis-tance of English/French, French/English translations.

4. Create international and interdisciplinary links and a collaborative network of more lasting character in this field.

• The Proposed Themes

1. The data used; the purpose of the research
These approaches entail different methodological implications extending to the choice of data as well as the temporal and spatial frames used to delimit the research object.

  - A more external, more ethological approach, drawing extensively upon traces and recordings of in situ activities (behaviour, language, IT traces). The very nature of such traces has been itself deeply transformed by the development of in-formation and communication technologies: from the patina of tools to more or less durable inscriptions, such activity archives can be accessed by researchers and thus transformed into data.

  - A more comprehensive approach, in connection with activity theory, considers the point of view of the actors themselves, as well as their capacity to modify their practices through their own reflection on analysed situations. This alters the respective positions of both the researchers and the subjects under study pertaining to the very definition of the situations under study, the analysis of the data and the relationships with the other parties participating in the research. The contribution of the individuals taking part in the study is needed to investi-gate the situations in which they find themselves (auto-confrontations, analysis groups, definition of the data to be considered). Such contributions should be in-tegrated as research data per se for studies striving for the development of indi-viduals and organisations.

2. The Structuring of Activity and Object/Subject Relations
Different theories confer divergent statuses to the orientation of collective action through intentions, goals, purposes, objects. Furthermore, they also differ on how subjects relate to these collective orientations which ever form they take :

  - Within Activity Theory, an activity is shaped by the subject's orientation towards its object. Activities are distinguished by their varying objects, by the instruments involved, by the rules determining collective action within and beyond the division of labour, also contributing to the system's history.

  - DISTRIBUTED COGNITION postulates an overall system that stretches beyond indi-vidual consciousnesses and is not directly interested in the acting subjects. The mediating influence of aims, plans, objects, affects and mental representations shapes the representation a subject has of a situation, unlike ethnomethodological analyses, which emphasise the contingent and improvised character of action.

3. Defining Situations
The nature of the situations under consideration (man-machine interactions in a given place and time, exclusive confrontations, interactions that are strongly mediatised by artefacts, activities spread over time and place in fragmented and/or networking collectives) and the way they are defined vary within the different approaches: How do researchers hailing from the current of situated action define situations and their limits? What is the role of human intentionality in the structur-ing of activity as concerns the theory of activity?
How are the "objects" of activity subjectively defined?

4. Technologies, Instruments and Artefacts
The respective roles of material and symbolic entities as coordination instruments are the focus of a number of divergences.

  - SITUATED ACTION depicts men and things as qualitatively different. However, without this being deliberate, its proponents sometimes present actors as reacting agents, rather than as fully knowing human actors with self-generated agendas. DISTRIBUTED COGNITION sees things and persons as conceptually equivalent (somewhat similar to the man-machine dyad of traditional cognitive science), ex-cept that the scope of the system is extended to include a collaborating set of persons and artefacts. From the point of view of ACTIVITY THEORY, artefacts are viewed as mediators of human thought and instruments in the service of activity, making things and persons asymmetrical.

  - Analysing the material and symbolic instruments of action is essential to move beyond the situation's limited spatial and temporal frames: be they seen, as by SITUATED COGNITION, as the fulcrum of routines, thus allowing a mutual dialogue between situations; be they seen, as by DISTRIBUTED COGNITION, as helping to stabilise complex coordinations; or be they seen, as by ACTIVITY THEORY, as put-ting into relation not only persons and objects, but also persons with other persons.

• Format

The contributors will be invited.
The talks aim at confronting a variety of approaches around the key questions described above that set at odds current action and activity theories and their implication on methodologies and on the objects under study.
The speakers will be allowed time to give their talks, followed by debates.
The speakers will be allowed to use their native tongue thanks to simultaneous translation.
Round tables will be organised to promote discussion.

• Intended Constituency

The Symposium is intended for French and European researchers and post-graduate students in a variety of disciplines (sociology, ergonomics, psychology, language sciences, cognitive sciences, management sciences, information and communication sciences) that are interested in the proposed themes (capacity: 120 persons).
The Symposium will be circulated in the relevant European networks (EGOS, ISCAR, etc.).