ABSTRACT
This part is composed of seven chapters focusing on age-linked changes in relation to work behaviour. While problems related to ageing show up clearly at the socio professional and health levels-as we have seen in the second part of this book-they are usually also symptoms of difficulties encountered at the work behaviour level. To identify and understand these difficulties one must have knowledge of (i) the functional capacities of the worker (which are dependent upon his or her age, state of health, experience, etc.), (ii) the work constraints to which he or she is subjected, and (iii) his or her work behaviour, defined here as the strategies the individual uses to cope with those constraints. In other words, we must pinpoint the physiological, cognitive and psychosocial phenomena underlying the ageing process, determine the factors that have marked the individual’s work history and may strongly influence the effects and means of action of those phenomena, and attempt to understand how work behaviour can evolve in the course of a career, depending on what job environments are experienced. To this end, it is necessary to relate the knowledge acquired through fundamental research, to that obtained in ergonomic field studies.
