Le traitement des courriers électroniques dans les centres d'appels

This study of a call center that mainly handles sales through E-mail shows how operators develop interactional skills based on the precision and concision needed to conduct a successful exchange of electronic messages. The cognitive workload is lightened by using form letters; the writing, archiving and accessing of these letters form the basis for a sort of occupational solidarity grounded in a social and technical distribution of activities. However the skills required at the time of hiring are those related to jobs using the telephone. During the recruitment process, only "singular" candidates can take advantage of the room left by the lack of adjustment between the local classification of tasks and more general grids of qualifications and wages. The way this "singularity" can be suspected to be a transgression denotes the naturalization of a division, deeply rooted in our culture, between written and oral practices, a division which can be put to use thanks to the emergence of electronic transactions.