Analyser les interactions de travail. Le cas de la surveillance par bracelet électronique

The development of electronic tagging as a substitute sentence has led to the creation of monitoring centres, where agents systematically handle alarms by telephoning the offenders. After placing these alarms in the broader context of this surveillance "assemblage", we analyse the opening sequences of these calls (recorded within the framework of the study), from the perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. In particular, we show the different ways in which the surveillance professionals formulate the reason for the call (in this accusatory setting), their implications and their consequences for the trajectory of the calls. We also show how those who receive the calls can exploit the specific resources of the conversation to try to pre-empt the supervisors' formulations of the reason for the call, and thus minimize the power effects of an accusation. This analytical approach makes visible a particular interactional competence that is little recognized by the institution. It aims to account for the experience of supervisory work, from inside the very organization of the activity, by studying interactional events that are often too fleeting for more classical ethnographic approaches to be relevant. More generally, this approach opens up a perspective for restoring greater prominence to linguistic interactions in the sociologies of activity.