In the “activity square”: International perspectives on labor, work and activity

This article describes the particular “space” where research focuses on work as it actually takes place, and aims to characterize the way various ethnographic approaches to labor are evolving at the international level. That workspace is a “square” delineated by four major points of view: Distributed Cognition, Activity Theory, Ethnomethodology and its related approaches, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). After exposing their underlying principles, the four perspectives and their points of tension and differences are highlighted with regard to several factors that are critical when analyzing work-related situations: the kind of data collecting during fieldwork, the roles of persons and artefacts and their position in the dialectics of continuity and change. The development of information and communications technologies (ICT) provides a starting point for (re)interrogating the four perspectives and suggests overlapping areas and possible reconfigurations.