Temporal strategies of operators dealing with numerous parallel processes: A field study

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Abstract
This paper presents a field study of the temporal strategies used by manual workers in a fiberglass factory. Their work consists of feeding ten machines working in parallel. These operators use two very different strategies in their work: one based on anticipation of the future evolution of the process, and another that does not use such an anticipatory strategy. We show that the temporal constraints imposed by the machines are at the base of whether or not the workers develop this strategy. We also discuss the impacts of these temporal strategies on different factors, such as performance, the number of errors committed, and the nature and topics of the operator's interactions with his colleagues. @ 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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