The Dispositif

6Digital Participation and Work

Participation is first and foremost a societal issue that concerns the implementation of the democratic ideal and the principle of citizen equality since the 1960s. In the 1960s-1970s, participation was defined as a collective action linked to urban fights and the appearance of autonomous social movements. It takes on the meaning of mobilization when the co-production of projects between decision makers, professionals and citizens emerges with, most often, an impulse from the former (Bresson, 2014). Since the advent of Web 2.0, participation is facilitated by tools such as social media, which extends the collectives that can act collaboratively. Virtual dispositives are spaces that give life to participative digital society. In information and communication science, these issues cross, in particular, with collective productions and learning spaces. This implies active humans who collaborate by means of tools, referred to by some authors as dispositive. In this context, the dispositive is reduced to an instrument that makes it possible to access a service or functionalities. Intranets or Document Electronic Management (DEM), for example, can be considered as tools facilitating the performance of some tasks, in particular sharing documents within an organization. Therefore, the difficulty in this chapter will be to differentiate the common use of the dispositive from its conceptual value. For the concept of the dispositive to be truly mobilized, ...