Contenu du sommaire : Les télé-services : Les nouveaux services de communication

Ambulatory medicine and information superhighways in health sector The health-care sector is undergoing a major transformation. The changes have occurred from the development of so-called «ambulatory » medicine. More specifically, it concerns slowing down the development of hospitals and spiralling healthcare expenditures by reorganising the way in which health employees work. Various information and communication techniques favour theses changes, bringing new

Telemedicine and social progress : a doubtful duet . Telemedicine musn't be limited to a «catalog of experiences », each of them being associated with extreme situations (urgency, loneliness...) and where technological prowess will always confirms validate the progress in medicine over the last fifty years. We want, here, to try to understand this phenomenon in its deeper dimensions, placing it at the cross-roads of the modernising discourses hold by the information highways (to which telemedicine provides an ideal tribune) ; the critical debate, which has been going on for several years, concerned with the technological, political, industrial and social convergence, and the present evolution of a system of treatment and acre aiming to become more liberal. Our hypothesis is that telemedicine goes along with the setting up of a care network and is preparing society for a medicalised regulation of health costs. In this case the question of individual and social risks must be posed.

Educational teleservices : a problematic linkage between convergence and the industrialisation of education and training. This article aims at understanding how the actors in an experimentation see the content/ container link and the development of the commodification of educational services. The methodological approach reveals different possibilities in terms of forms of educational technologies development. Thus, convergence takes two forms. One is supposed to provoke integration through norms according to telecommunication logic which makes an opening possible in terms of development of services. The other form offers a content/container integrated system which allows the developers to keep the structure of the offer under control. The options which are envisaged offer antagonistic answers to the question of who will master resources, accessibility rules and tariff standards. The reference to convergence and the knowledge industry allows the actors concerned to try either to keep or to transform the industrial logic.

The researcher and the participant faced with the industrialisation of education The authors, involved in the modes in the present mutations concerning education (and pledged in a theoretical reflection on the industrialisation of education), defend the position that the researcher's point of view is essential to the participant if he is to make sense of his role of innovator and be prepared to influence developments. Firstly, we define the objectives of the actors involved, which is to arrive at a methodology for the study of the innovatory socio-technical projects in order to evaluate their viability in multi-level and multidimensional terms. We then show how the industrialisation hypothesis enables us to make a distinction between projects arising from the industrialisation process within education (new equipment or aids which are introduced to facilitate educational communication) and those which arise from the process of the industrialisation of education (at the heart of the apparatus of education, procedures are rationalised, resources are apportioned and the division of labour in introduced).

Virtual campus, real market. This paper argues that a same dynamic process underlies all the virtual campuses pilot-projects that the authors have surveyed : one that tries to apply to the educational sector the rules of the market and the industrial production which characterise information and communication goods and services. The analysis points to evidence of this in different processes : division of labour and organisational rationalisation, substitution and capitalisation, commodification and privatisation, servuction and technological mediation, didactic reengineering. But the conclusion remains cautious. If the progress of industrialisation cannot be denied, the training field is still far from being totally industrialised and commodified.

Electronic business and services. When the mode of distribution becomes electronic, exchanges between the producer, the client and the intermediate firms change in nature and proceedings. When communication becomes interactive, a lot of informations is exchanged between the producer and the client, even if they are located far from each other. The paper points out the service dimension of electronic business. It proposes two differentiation criteria between web sites according to service interaction analysis.