APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN – PROPOSAL FOR A PhD contract

Thesis co-directors :

• Karine Gros, MCF HDR Humanities/Life Sciences
• Jean-Claude Sagot, Emeritus University Professor, ergonomist (Belfort-Montbéliard University of Technology)

Co-supervisor : Gérard Uzan (Research engineer, University of Paris 8 Saint Denis, Chart-THIM Laboratory)

PREVEN-TI@ is an exploratory qualitative research project on the prevention of the professional disinsertion of disabled workers in order to facilitate a sustainable maintenance in employment. It is a response to the IGAS report N°2017-025R “The prevention of the professional disinsertion of sick or disabled employees”, to the recommendations of the Gillot report “Disabled people: ”Securing career paths, cultivating skills” (Recommendation No. 5 “Increase early intervention for the benefit of sick or disabled employees”, and No. 38 “Develop collaborative and multidisciplinary applied research on disability”) and the recommendations of the CNCPH to “promote participation, innovation, research and experimentation” (Concertation on the provision of employment support services for people with disabilities 28/09/18).  

The aim of the project is to develop a global and systemic approach to methods of observation and longitudinal analysis of situations, to develop practical prevention tools, and to enable employers to anticipate situations of disinsertion and to remedy them as they arise (through so-called natural experimentation).

Indeed, the prevention of occupational disinsertion is done first through early actions taking into account the work activity and the conditions of this activity, and not only by acting on the job through reclassification actions or job adjustments.  

This thesis will analyze different devices and tools, including those being developed by different companies or start-ups such as Wesi Report. 

During the experimentation of the tools, several elements appeared to be developed :

1. In spite of the ergonomics of the applications, the handling of the tools remains complex on the concept of weak signals; in fact, the support staff need training and support from the expert teams of the tools in order to integrate the weak signals approach and ask the appropriate questions to identify these signals.
2. The question of the interest of detecting weak signals as an essential element of a global preventive approach remains and is spontaneously counter-intuitive: why seek to collect information which, as such, taken in isolation, do not seem significant, when we are daily assailed by “strong signals”? The most significant example of this misunderstanding is the desire of some caregivers to have the content of signals (responses) as informative elements. When in fact they are not at the moment.
3. Finally, the perception of the use of digital tools that deeply question organizational and cultural systems remains complex. Often perceived as useless because they are already used by the caregivers, the use and interest of such tools, whose vocation is not to “replace” but to favor the maintenance of a constant link, remain complex to demonstrate without a clear conceptual and scientific foundation.

• Monitoring of all the sciences that address the issue of weak signals and characterization of the concept of weak signals applied to the Human Sciences and to specific use cases in career paths.
• Identification of the “warning signs” spontaneously mobilized by the stakeholders.
• Linking the concept of weak signals to the notion of “warning signs” and “legitimizing” the application of the concept of weak signals in the use cases mentioned above.

• To understand and formalize the processes that are favorable and unfavorable to sustainable job retention and professional development,
• To identify the typologies of career paths, taking into account potential drifts and resiliencies,
• Identify micro-incidents as causes, alerts or symptoms likely to cause, in the short, medium or long term, exclusion from the workplace.
• To characterize the organizational and political logics of production of professional (de-) marginalization.

• To evaluate monitoring tools (vigilance approach, detection tools) and anticipation tools (proactive approach, early action tools) concerning the factors and processes of de-integration in the perspective of,
• Bringing these tools and the support practices of the integration providers into line with each other providers of integration,
• To support employers in the appropriation and implementation of these new tools.

• Master’s degree in work psychology,
• Master’s degree in sociology of work,
• Master’s degree in Health Research, project management and professional practices in ergotherapy,
• Master’s degree in ergonomics,
• Master in Technology and Disability,
• Master in Human Machine Interaction.

Regardless of the educational path, knowledge of technology and/or artificial intelligence and/or human-machine interaction is essential.

• PhD contract : 36 months from the beginning of the school year 2022
• Compensation : 1866 € / month

Application
CV + cover letter (word format) to Karine Gros karine.gros@u-pec.fr and Gérard Uzan gerard.uzan@univ-paris8.fr