ABSTRACT
The recent social and political emergence of ‘psychosocial hazards’ (PSHs) in France (Salher et al., 2007), Europe (Leka et al., 2011) and several industrialized countries (Kortum et al., 2011; Lippel and Quinlan, 2011) such as Canada (Shain, 2009), Australia (Johnstone et al., 2011) or Japan (NDCVK, 1990; Herbig and Palumbo, 1994) has questioned ergonomics to an unusual degree. Although ergonomics is, quite rightly, called upon to respond to this challenge – undoubtedly, PSHs have an impact on human work – it cannot do so without first reinstating, in its model of human activity, the psychical and social dimensions of work, which had so far been largely absent from the literature, and in so doing, reinstating in this model a theory of the acting subject.
