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Risk-prone organisations issue regulations to ensure the stability and safety of the socio-technical system. However, the tendency to over-regulate has its limitations. To mitigate these limitations, a railway company introduced a specific participative approach that uses formal debate to construct a compromise. This debate is based on a realistic view of the situation, involving in the writing of the new regulation all the organisational components to which it applies. It was found that the approach had indeed enabled the company to adapt its organisation to tackle some of the difficulties it was facing. However, it also brought forward new, more general limitations and highlighted some of the problems involved in introducing a new regulation.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how collective and distributed skills are considered in a professional competence management system by associating sociological and ergonomic work approaches. Collective work in companies is currently paradoxical: on the one hand, its value is increased through various forms of cooperation, and on the other hand, it is restricted in its makeup and sustainability by new kinds of employment. However, the results of our study, carried out in a large industrial and retailing company in a high-risk sector, highlight that a “single” and individual professional competence management system is a partial system. Work contexts should take into account technical specialties, changes in populations, changes in technology, etc. An efficient skills management system therefore ought to combine both individual and collective approaches in order to anticipate organizations that promote the development of collective and/or distributed skills, and training situations that promote their construction and transmission.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how collective and distributed skills are considered in a professional competence management system by associating sociological and ergonomic work approaches. Collective work in companies is currently paradoxical: on the one hand, its value is increased through various forms of cooperation, and on the other hand, it is restricted in its makeup and sustainability by new kinds of employment. However, the results of our study, carried out in a large industrial and retailing company in a high-risk sector, highlight that a “single” and individual professional competence management system is a partial system. Work contexts should take into account technical specialties, changes in populations, changes in technology, etc. An efficient skills management system therefore ought to combine both individual and collective approaches in order to anticipate organizations that promote the development of collective and/or distributed skills, and training situations that promote their construction and transmission.