Stemming from an issue concerning the creation of the observatory of the working conditions within the French National Employment Agency (ANPE) that we participated in as beneficiary of an industrial research grant (CIFRE), the thesis retraces the conceptual genealogies that led to the current views on the concept of " working conditions ", which was institutionalized in France around 1970 but remain undefined. Initially structured according to a factorial understanding based on the division of labour, then extended using sequential design derived from taylorism, its meaning is progressively built during the nineteenth century through dialectics between rights-freedom and authority-domination which refers to a political understanding of the working conditions, subsumed from the early twentieth century's rationalization movement by an organizational design of fully standardized or standardizable conditions. These conditions then tend to be exploited within institutional negotiations, being disconnected from continuously renewed dialectics between normative and normed in activity. This gap between the concept and real life is an epistemological usurpation which we propose to surpass using an ergological way of modeling the concept that brings visibility to multiple groups of debates regarding standards, and therefore values, from micro to macro in the social space. This renewed way of addressing the concept which benefits to those who work, could promote the emergence of alternatives left in the semi-darkness of the activity, potential sources of performance for productive groups.
