This research aims at analyzing members’ interactional procedures interrelated with technology in professional distant work meetings. Webconference is a kind of audioconference system enhanced by web features allowing the users to manage the gathering, to chat, and to share screen, presentation, documents or applications. Based on video recordings of naturally occurring webconferences in work setting, the thesis analyzes how members take into account the specificities of the sociotechnical environment and mobilize verbal, nonverbal, and artefactual resources in order to accomplish situated actions. The study analyzes the complex transitional accomplishment of entering the meeting when opening the session. I examine how specific sequences reconfigure the way a meeting is opened and how the frame participation emerges in this specific distant setting. Opening and sustaining social relations in webconferences (and audioconferences as well) are not produced anymore within the model of a dyadic telephone call, where the ring produces a summons which makes relevant the standardized relational pair caller/called and organizes the call. Webconference is based on the model of the entrance. I analyze the repertoire of practices used by members to achieve the entrance into the meeting. I examine how a new standardized relational pair participant/moderator is made relevant to achieve and organize talk. At last I study systematic and multimodal procedures to delay the start of the meeting (pre-meeting) and to achieve a transition toward its beginning.
