This thesis explores the social processes through which technological change and technologies themselves are negotiated in everyday life. I look to interpersonal communication as a site of such negotiation and focus on the networked practices that extend from mobile telephones, personal computers, and online social platforms. The management of everyday life and interpersonal relationships are shaped by practices of communication management that work through the use of these technologies. I extend and inflect the phenomenological approach to co-presence in interpersonal communication, also reassessing notions of time, for the context of constant networked connection. Drawing from divergent theoretical approaches for understanding technology, an entry point for this thesis was formulated through social interaction. A grounded qualitative approach was used to engage with individuals’ experience of interpersonal communication across everyday domains and contexts of activity. A selection of 35 participants was asked to complete two in-depth interviews, thinking-aloud tasks, and a communication diary. The empirical findings are explored from three perspectives. First, individuals’ relationships to communication tools as objects in an everyday environment are understood for the perceived temporal pressures and a need for networked connection. Second, individuals’ management of those pressures is explored through their imposition of individually controlled barriers to interaction, through which domains of activity are managed by communication practices as relational domains, developing a form of networked awareness between individuals. Third, I examine the forms of negotiation taking place through the interdependency of individual practices, captured by notions of authenticity and perceptions of technologies, as well as a discourse about technology that is enacted through practice rather than communicated through content, what I call meta-communication. I conclude that the negotiated use and role of technologies in interpersonal relationships has implications for the negotiation of wider social changes to the role of technology and to everyday life itself.

Cette recherche se donne pour but de rendre compte des conditions d’émergence et de production du sens dans le système d’organisation, d’information et de communication de l’entreprise culturelle. Placée sous les lumières complémentaires de la sémiotique, de la sociologie et des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication, cette étude vise à interroger la vie et le désir culturel d’une entreprise particulière, pour mieux rejoindre l’horizon problématique de son milieu d’immersion : le milieu de la « culture » en France. Effectuée dans le cadre d’une Convention industrielle de formation par la recherche en entreprise (CIFRE), cette recherche se base sur une enquête de terrain et sur une observation menée pendant plus de quatre ans à la Fondation La Borie-en-Limousin. La vie de l’entreprise est donc considérée en tant que corpus d’étude, en tant qu’objet hétérogène et complexe mais néanmoins délimitable, et capable de fournir un appui solide à l’analyse d’enjeux nationaux : ce désir absolu de « rendre la culture accessible », le parcours et le dispositif d’une action culturelle, l’idéal d’un « développement » de la culture, la difficile négociation de ses identités culturelles, l’imprévisibilité du système d’information et de communication, etc. Ainsi, le travail de modélisation construit peu à peu le concept d’ « espace culturel », monde abstrait visant à stabiliser les caractéristiques de tous milieux en charge de la question culturelle et ouvrir de possibles voies à la transposabilité de ce modèle, à l’attention de celles et ceux qui font l’art et la culture en France. / This research aims to show how meaning can emerge and be produced within the organisation, information and communication systems of a cultural company. Conducted within the complementary frameworks of semiotics, sociology and Information and Communication Sciences, this study scrutinizes the cultural life and desire of a particular company, in order to better grasp the general questions that arise, in this field, to its receiving environment—the French “culture” sector. This research was undertaken as part of a Ministry of Higher Education scheme for education through industrial research (Convention industrielle de formation par la recherche en entreprise, CIFRE). It is based on a field survey and on observations carried out over four years at the La Borie-en-Limousin Foundation. Life within the foundation is considered as the corpus under study, a complex and multifaceted one, but also one that can be circumscribed, and used as a basis for an analysis of national issues such as: how to account for the absolute desire to make “culture” accessible, how to set up and implement a cultural event, how to approach the ideal “development” of culture, how to negotiate between different cultural identities, how to deal with an unpredictable information and communication system etc. The modelling work thus gradually builds up a concept of “cultural space”—an abstract world used to stabilize the features of all environments which deal with culture, and open up possible ways to transfer this model for all those involved in arts and culture in France.

How do non-vocal practices function within sequences? This thesis addresses silence and gesture in the context of social interaction involving human participants through the framework of conversation analysis (CA) to answer this question. Although it is certainly possible, and indeed common, for gestures and other non-vocal practices to occur during talk, this thesis focuses on those that occur without accompanying talk. In order to understand the role of non-vocal practices in this environment, we must first understand the role of silence (or the absence of talk) in participants’ interactions. How does silence function within the sequential environment? How does context affect how silence and nonvocal practices are treated by participants? If one organisation (or aspect of an organisation) is affected, are all organisations (or aspects of that organisation) affected? I draw on psychological, sociological, and linguistic literature to show why silence and gesture are related in interactional research and how this affects conversation analytic methodology. The work that forms this thesis brings together cross-cultural perspectives and technical advances with respect to silence and non-vocal practices both individually and when they occur together (i.e. non-vocal practices without accompanying talk). I begin with a broad overview of research and theories of gesture and silence before discussing CA as a method and its relationship to silence and non-vocal practices. The empirical studies begin with silence in relation to culture and context and issues in analysing and transcribing silence. I then examine how one sequential environment, in which psychotherapy clients are obligated to respond by orienting to the therapeutic agenda, has a preference structure that is very different from ordinary conversation. In this sequential environment, silence and elaboration are marks of preferred responses rather than dispreferred. The preference structure is made particularly visible through accountability that becomes relevant when a client’s response is produced promptly following the therapist’s overtly therapeutic action. Silence in this environment contributes Inaction and Silent Action in Interaction 3 to clients’ performance of sincerity and participation in the psychotherapeutic process, and non-vocal practices during longer silences can show that the client remains engaged with the sequence. Many authors have accounted for silences that are not treated by participants as problematic by applying constructs such as ‘continuing states of incipient talk’. This construct, however, is variably used and has not been developed through empirical examination. It does not adequately explain interactions that involve silence or gesture, as I show through a content analysis and systematic review. After recommending that researchers engage with participant orientations in environments that differ from canonical conversations, I describe an environment that is commonly thought of as constituting a ‘continuing state of incipient talk’ – television-watching. I show that contrary to some claims about ‘incipient talk’ environments, although response relevance is relaxed, both sequence organisation and turn-taking are strongly oriented to by participants. Compared to ordinary conversation, television-watching also involves more gestures and other nonvocal practices without accompanying talk. I examine how non-vocal practices without accompanying talk are used in interaction. As responsive actions, gestures can be used without accompanying talk as a resource for doing sensitive interactional work, particularly in places where giving offence might be a concern. Non-vocal practices can also be used in other situations to accomplish sequential actions that could otherwise be spoken. These uses of non-vocal practices create methodological questions for conversation analysis, which has traditionally focused on the talk of participants. By clearly distinguishing between actions and turns (two classic CA concepts) and examining the timing of non-vocal practices, I show that non-vocal practices can have a clearly defined role in sequence organisation. CA can thus be a useful method for examining the entire situation of social interaction, including non-vocal practices.

This thesis addresses a range of research questions regarding literacy in early modern Scotland. Using the early modern manuscripts and printed editions of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s late sixteenth-century 'Cronicles of Scotland' as a case study on literacy history, this thesis poses the complementary questions of how and why early modern Scottish reading communities were encountering Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', and how features of the material page can be interpreted as indicators of contemporary literacy practices. The answers to these questions then provide the basis for the thesis to ask broader socio-cultural and theoretical questions regarding the overall literacy environment in Scotland between 1575 and 1814, and how theorists conceptualise the history of literacy. Positioned within the theoretical groundings of historical pragmatics and ‘new philology’ – and the related approach of pragmaphilology – this thesis returns to the earlier philological practice of close textual analysis, and engages with the theoretical concept of mouvance, in order to analyse how the changing ‘form’ of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', as it was reproduced in manuscript and print throughout the early modern period, indicates its changing ‘function’. More specifically, it suggests that the punctuation practices and paratextual features of individual witnesses of the text function to aid the highly-nuanced reading practices and purposes of the discrete reading communities for which they were produced. This thesis includes extensive descriptive material which presents previously unrecorded data regarding twenty manuscripts and printed witnesses of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', contributing to a gap in Scotland’s literary/historiographical canon. It then analyses this material using a transferable methodological framework which combines the quantitative analysis of micro-data with qualitative analysis of this data within its socio-cultural context, in order to conduct diachronic comparative analysis of copy-specific information. The principal findings of this thesis suggest that Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles' were being read for a combination of devotional and didactic purposes, and that multiple reading communities, employing highly nuanced reading practices, were encountering the text near-contemporaneously. This thesis further suggests that early modern literacy practices, and the specific reading communities which employ them, should be described as existing within a spectrum of available practices (i.e. more or less oral/aural or silent, and intensive or extensive in practice) rather than as dichotomous entities. As such, this thesis argues for the rejection of evolutionary theories of the history of literacy, suggesting that rather than being described antithetically, historical reading practices and purposes must be recognised as complex, coexisting socio-cultural practices, and the multiplicity of reading communities within a single society must be acknowledged and analysed as such, as opposed to being interpreted as universal entities.

Music and language are both deeply rooted in our biology, but scientists have given far more attention to the neurological, biological and evolutionary roots of language than those of music. Because of this, and probably partially due to this, the purpose of music, in evolutionary terms, remains a mystery. Our brain, physiology and psychology make us capable of producing and listening to music since early infancy; therefore, our biology and behaviour are carrying some of the clues that need to be revealed to understand what music is “for”. Furthermore, music and language have a deep relationship, particularly in terms of cognitive processing, that can provide clues about the origins of music. Non-verbal behaviours, including voice characteristics during speech, are an important form of communication that enables individual recognition and assessment of the speaker’s physical characteristics (including sex, femininity/masculinity, body size, physical strength, and attractiveness). Vocal parameters, however, can be intentionally varied, for example altering the intensity (loudness), rhythm and pitch during speech. This is classically demonstrated in infant directed speech (IDS), in which adults alter vocal characteristics such as pitch, cadence and intonation contours when speaking to infants. In this thesis, I analyse vocal modulation and its perception in human social interaction, in different social contexts such as courtship and authority ranking relationships. Results show that specific vocal modulations, akin to those of IDS, and perhaps music, play a role in communicating courtship intent. Based on these results, as well the body of current knowledge, I then propose a model for the evolution of musicality, the human capacity to process musical information, in relation to human vocal communication. I suggest that musicality may not be limited to specifically musical contexts, and can have a role in other domains such as language, which would provide further support for a common origin of language and music. This model supports the hypothesis of a stage in human evolution in which individuals communicated using a music-like protolanguage, a hypothesis first suggested by Darwin.

Le domaine extrêmement sensible de la production de services aux personnes est fortement dynamisé par de puissantes associations qui administrent des établissements et services professionnels avec une efficacité reconnue. Pour autant, la puissance publique qui finance très largement ces établissements a engagé par la voie réglementaire une dynamique de modernisation organisationnelle qui implique une évolution extrêmement sensible des pratiques, des conceptions, des logiques d’action collective, des métiers et professions, et des formes organisationnelles. Cette évolution, inscrite dans l’ordonnance du 24 avril 1996 pour le secteur sanitaire et la loi du 2 janvier 2002 pour le secteur médico-social, suppose que ce secteur professionnel soit capable d’imaginer des solutions innovantes, notamment pour l’évaluation des processus professionnels et l’amélioration continue de la qualité des services. Dans un contexte de crise générale des modalités de management des ressources, les innovations organisationnelles sont imaginées dans des logiques d’autonomie au travail et de traçabilité. Les problèmes de communication et de recompositions organisationnelles, d’écriture et de langages professionnels, et autres particularités micro-culturelles sont analysées dans le cadre d’une observation-participante afin de comprendre les mutations professionnelles. à l’oeuvre depuis la loi du 2 janvier 2002 et l’ordonnance du 24 avril 1996 / The highly sensitive domain of services delivery to persons is mostly under the command of powerful NGO’s managing institutions and professional services with high efficiency. Meanwhile, the state which is the main financial source of these institutions has initiated through regulations a movement of organizational modernization which leads to extremely controversial changes in interventions, in representations, in strategies of collective actions, among trades and professions as well as in organizational structures. This development, present in the regulation of April 24, 1996, for the health domain, and the law of January 2nd, 2002, for the medico-social domain, implies that the professional domain be able to formulate innovative solutions, especially with regard to the evaluation of professional actions, and to the on-going improvement of the quality of services. In a context of a global crisis concerning the ways of managing resources, organizational innovations are conceived according to an approach centering on work autonomy and follow-up. Problems of communication and organization overhaul, of professional discourses and stylistics, and other mini-cultural issues are analyzed through a method of participant-observation in order to understand professional mutations taking place since the law of January 2nd, 2002, and of the regulation of April 24th, 1996

Hannah Arendt définit la solitude selon trois modes différents, le premier se nomme « solitude » et recouvre les situations où nous sommes avec nous-mêmes.En philosophie, cette dichotomie ontologique permet à l’homme de prendre conscience de lui-même, et de dialoguer avec lui-même. La solitude permet la formation de la pensée. Le second mode définit par Arendt se nomme l’esseulement. Ce mode s’illustre par le fait que l’on peut se sentir très seul au milieu d’une foule.Enfin, le dernier mode exposé par la philosophe correspond à ce qu’elle spécifie d’isolement. Ce mode apparaît quand la personne est concernée par les choses du monde. Ce mode revêt un aspect politique. La personne se retrouve isolée quand les autres (avec qui elle partage le même souci du monde)se détournent d’elle. A partir de l’analyse donnée par Arendt nous allons mettre en parallèle cette distinction des formes de solitudes avec notre surexposition numérique et notre profusion de relations numériques dans nos sociétés de communications.Internet est devenu, dans notre vie, en très peu de temps une part de nous-mêmes.Quotidiennement nous nous rendons dans le monde virtuel pour différentes raisons. Nous souhaitons partager avec nos amis réels nos émotions,nos expériences, nos souvenirs sur des réseaux sociaux comme Facebook ou Twitter. Nous cherchons des « bonnes affaires », nous faisons nos courses, nous nous rendons sur des forums virtuels pour « discuter », nous utilisons des messageries en ligne pour continuer des conversations interrompues plus tôt ou encore pour entretenir un lien avec une personne chère qui se trouve éloignée.Certains utilisent Internet pour rencontrer des personnes, pour se faire des amis,vivre une vie normale et réelle dans le monde virtuel. La question de la solitude n’a jamais été aussi présente qu’aujourd’hui, la faute à notre société individualiste qui défait les liens entre les personnes. C’est dans ce contexte qu’Internet apparaît un peu comme un sauveur. Internet offrirait la possibilité de rapprocher les gens,de faire naître de nouvelles relations sociales, de créer des amitiés, de donner la possibilité aux personnes se sentant seules de sortir de la solitude. Mais Internet apporte-t-il réellement une solution au problème de la solitude ? Change-t-il fondamentalement le rapport que les individus vont avoir entre eux à l’avenir ? Quel impact sur les relations sociales réelles et/ou virtuelles qu’ont les individus ? / Hannah Arendt defines solitude according to three different modes, thefirst is called "Solitude" and covers the situations in which we are with ourselves.In philosophy, this ontological dichotomy allows man to become self-conscious,and to dialogue with himself. Solitude allows the formation of thought. Thesecond mode defined by aren't is called the horror. This mode is illustrated by thefact that one can feel very alone in the midst of a crowd. Finally, the last modeexposed by the philosopher corresponds to what it specifies isolated. This modeappears when the person is concerned with the things of the world. This mode hasa political aspect. The person finds himself isolated when the others (with whomshe shares the same concern of the world) turn away from her. From the analysisgiven by Arendt we will put in parallel this distinction of forms of solitudes withour digital overexposure and our profusion of digital relations in our society.The Internet has become, in our life, in a very short time a part ofourselves. Every day we go to the virtual world for different reasons. We want toshare with our real friends our emotions, our experiences, our memories on socialnetworks like Facebook or Twitter. We search for "bargains", shop, go to virtualforums to "chat", use online messaging to continue interrupted conversationsearlier, or maintain a connection with a loved one find distant. Some people usethe Internet to meet people, to make friends, to live a normal and real life in thevirtual world. The question of loneliness has never been more present than it istoday, the fault of our individualistic society that undoes the bonds betweenpeople. It is in this context that the Internet appears a little like a savior. TheInternet offers the opportunity to bring people together, to create new socialrelationships, to create friendships, to give people who feel lonely out of solitude.But does the Internet really solve the problem of loneliness? Does itfundamentally change the relationship that individuals will have with each otherin the future? What impact on the real and / or virtual social relationships thatindividuals have?

Savons-nous ce qu’est le rire ? Sous la pratique ordinaire de portée infinitésimale, quels mécanismes et quels usages, quels affects et quels plaisirs, justifient l’éclairage des outils des sciences sociales ? Pour répondre à ces questions, ce projet de thèse prend appui sur une sociologie de la réception culturelle des arts comiques : il entreprend de comprendre le rire à la croisée du comique et du rieur. Deux types de matériaux sont utilisés et interprétés : le premier provient d’une enquête quantitative menée auprès de 210 enquêtés ; le second convoque 36 rieurs singuliers pour des entretiens approfondis. Dans les deux cas, les enquêtés appartiennent à toutes les classes sociales et cette diversité sociologique fait apparaître l’impossibilité d’attribuer au rire une signification sociale ou politique univoque. L’éclat du rire trouve alors son explication dans le temps long d’une biographie sociologique finement reconstituée. Adossé à ces deux terrains, ce travail met en regard des schèmes narratifs comiques, extraits des oeuvres culturelles dépouillées de leurs caractérisations littéraires ; et des types d’expériences sociales fondamentales vécues par les rieurs.Le rire fonctionne comme un signe qui vaut pour autre chose que lui-même : il manifeste la reconnaissance à pic d’expériences passées qui sont souvent liées aux grandes étapes initiatiques de l’existence sociale et qui ont pu demeurer dans le rieur sous la forme de dispositions à rire : l’apprentissage de la marche et de la bipédie ; l’intériorisation des grands savoir-faire civilisationnels ; l’affectation par les pouvoirs, qu’ils soient petits ou grands ; la formation politique des relations avec les autres ; etc. Par ailleurs, si le rire est bien un signe, il est inclus dans une communication de groupe : c’est un acte de catégorisation qui se greffe sur les fractures les plus fines du corps social et qui, en retour, contribue à les figer ou au contraire à les déstabiliser. Cette dimension pragmatique du rire invite à réévaluer la fonction de socialisation des oeuvres et le rôle majeur de la stéréotypie comique dans la compréhension du social par le rieur. Enfin, le rire n’est pas un affect unanimitaire, mécaniquement extorqué chez tous par le développement sans précédent des industries du divertissement : il faut également y voir une stratégie de positionnement culturel qui s’agence jusque dans le grain le plus fin de l’existence sociale et son caractère d’événementialité. / Do we know what laugh is ? Under the ordinary practice of infinitesimal range, what mechanisms and what uses, what affects and what pleasures, justify the lighting of the tools of social sciences ? To answer these questions, this PhD research takes support on a sociology of the cultural reception of comic arts : it undertakes to include the laugh at the crossroads of the comic arts and of the laughing person. Two types of materials are used and interpreted : the first one comes from a quantitative inquiry led to 210 respondents ; the second one calls 36 singular persons for deepened discussions. In both cases, the investigating belong to all social classes and this sociological diversity shows the impossibility of allocating in the laughter an univocal social or political signification. Then the burst of laughter finds its explanation in the long time of a painstaking sociology of socialization. Based on these two fields, this work compares the comic narrative schemas, shed from his literary features ; and the types of fundamental social experiments lived by the persons who laugh. The laughter is a sign which is worth for something else than itself : he demonstrates recognition sheer of past experiences which are often linked to big initiatory stages of social existence and that could reside in the laughing person in the form of dispositions to laugh : the learning of the walk ; the internalization of big civilisationnels know-how ; affectation by powers, small or big ; the development of political relations with others ; etc. Moreover, if the laughter is well a sign, he is included in a communication of group : it is an act of categorisation that comes along on top of the finest fractures of the society and that, in return, contributes to congeal them or on the contrary to destabilise them. This pragmatic dimension of the laughter invites to revalue the function of socialisation of writings and the major role of the comic stereotypy in the understanding of the social by the laughing person. Finally, the laughter is not an affect unanimous, mechanically extorted to all by the unsurpassed development of the industries of entertainment : it is also necessary to see for it a strategy of cultural distinction.

Trust and speech are both essential aspects of human interaction. On the one hand, trust is necessary for vocal communication to be meaningful. On the other hand, humans have developed a way to infer someone’s trustworthiness from their voice, as well as to signal their own. Yet, research on trustworthiness attributions to speakers is scarce and contradictory, and very often uses explicit data, which do not predict actual trusting behaviour. However, measuring behaviour is very important to have an actual representation of trust. This thesis contains 5 experiments aimed at examining the influence of various voice characteristics — including accent, prosody, emotional expression and naturalness — on trusting behaviours towards virtual players and robots. The experiments have the "investment game"—a method derived from game theory, which allows to measure implicit trustworthiness attributions over time — as their main methodology. Results show that standard accents, high pitch, slow articulation rate and smiling voice generally increase trusting behaviours towards a virtual agent, and a synthetic voice generally elicits higher trustworthiness judgments towards a robot. The findings also suggest that different voice characteristics influence trusting behaviours with different temporal dynamics. Furthermore, the actual behaviour of the various speaking agents was modified to be more or less trustworthy, and results show that people’s trusting behaviours develop over time accordingly. Also, people reinforce their trust towards speakers that they deem particularly trustworthy when these speakers are indeed trustworthy, but punish them when they are not. This suggests that people’s trusting behaviours might also be influenced by the congruency of their first impressions with the actual experience of the speaker’s trustworthiness — a "congruency effect". This has important implications in the context of Human–Machine Interaction, for example for assessing users’ reactions to speaking machines which might not always function properly. Taken together, the results suggest that voice influences trusting behaviour, and that first impressions of a speaker’s trustworthiness based on vocal cues might not be indicative of future trusting behaviours, and that trust should be measured dynamically.

Cette thèse vise à analyser les contextes et interactions qui président à la construction de processus identitaires d’élèves de cours moyen dans une école rurale. Elle repose sur une observation participante, dans une démarche réflexive : que se passe-t-il dans l’école qui favorise l’émergence d’une identité ? Quelles modalités communicationnelles y participent ?Après avoir souligné l’importance de facteurs fortement contraignants tels que les institutions et les caractéristiques de l’interaction, l’auteur dégage quelques conduites qui ne cadrent pas avec ces facteurs. Ces conduites engendrent des jeux de rôle, de scène et de représentation des individus.Les individus endossent des rôles qui leur permettent d’interagir avec autrui. Ils revêtent des atours pour mieux accréditer leur rôle. Ils peuvent alors se trouver catégorisés, étiquetés, voire stigmatisés.Mais il ne suffit pas que les individus portent un masque pour paraître ; il faut que leur “présentation de soi” évolue en représentation, sur scène, face à un public. Les individus, devenus acteurs, livrent alors une véritable prestation dans les parenthèses spatio-temporelles et actantielles de la situation ou au cours d’une “carrière”.Les processus qui s’élaborent sont nombreux, car l’enjeu est de s’insérer dans le groupe, de trouver une place, sa place.L’expérience de chaque acteur se trouve ainsi dépendante des choix individuels comme des relations et représentations collectives.Pour conclure, l’auteur souligne la prégnance des structures comme la force des individus qui échappent à celles-ci. Et c’est précisément parce que les individus sont capables de mettre en oeuvre de telles stratégies qu’ils créent des processus identitaires à leur mesure et à celle du groupe qui les voit naître. / This thesis aims at analysing the contexts and interactions leading the construction of identity process of CM children in a rural school. The thesis rests on a participative observation in a reflexive approach : what happens in school that can favor the emergence of an identity ? Which communicationnal modalities are involved ?After having accentued the importance of very restrictive factors such as the institution and the characteristics of interaction, the author emits some behaviors that do not frame with.These behaviors generate games of role, of scene and of representation of persons. People assume roles which allow them to interact with others.They choose ways to accredit their role. Thenthey can be categorized, labelled or even stigmatized. However a mask isn’t enough to appear : the self representation must evolve in representation on scene, face to a public. The persons, becoming actors, deliver then a show in the spatiotemporal and acting frames of the situation or in a career.There are many process because the stake is to fit in the group, to find a place, its place.The experience of each actor becomes in fact dependent on individual choices and on collective relationships and representations.In conclusion, the author points the importance of structures and the strength of persons that escape them. It’s because people are able to enforce such strategies that they can create identity process.