Version française

Activités’ objective is to provide a space in which to gather, disseminate and discuss both the conceptualizations that make it possible to understand purposeful human activities and related methods and practices for analysis, intervention and design. To this end, Activités pursues the specific ambition of deepening the links between the production of knowledge on the one hand and the objectives of transformation in relation to “fields” or “situations” on the other. This may involve areas of research such as well-being and health at work, the efficiency, safety or reliability of production systems, the professionalization of actors, the design of artifacts and tools for everyday situations, or the design of work systems, including their organizational aspects, etc.

The journal encourages the examination, from a range of perspectives, of different theoretical and methodological frameworks that address purposeful human activities: an historical-cultural approach to the activity, situated approaches of cognition and action, approaches based on the analysis of practices. It also hopes to be a support for discussions on intervention approaches and design processes that contribute towards the transformation of activities, situations and work systems, and on theoretical and methodological progress in the analysis of work and purposeful human activities.

The journal accepts research based on the study of purposeful human activities in real situations, conducted within different disciplines: ergonomics and work psychology, professional didactics, linguistics, educational sciences, philosophy, engineering, design, sociology, management, etc.

The journal is thus open to articles that focus on:

• The concept of activity, in its ontological (what is activity?) and epistemological (how to develop knowledge about activity?) dimensions.

• On the articulations between knowledge and action, whether they appear in communities of practice, or in the activity of the analyst, or of the people whose activity is being analyzed.

• On the methods (how to observe and analyze the activity, how to conduct processes of transformation processes, etc.) and on the conditions of their implementation.

• On the knowledge obtained from activity and work analysis (the state of the working and living conditions, situation categories, etc.) or from the processes that contribute towards the transformation of the activities and work situations (development at work, project management, etc.).

• On states of the art, whether methodological or theoretical, summarizing a range of works on a given issue.