Fonde sur l'etude d'un centre d'appels traitant majoritairement les contacts commerciaux par e-mails, cet article montre comment les operateurs developpent des competences interactionnelles fondees sur la precision et la concision. Leur charge cognitive est allegee par le recours a des lettres types dont l'elaboration, l'archivage et l'acces fondent une forme de solidarite professionnelle du groupe. Dans le meme moment, les competences d'embauche s'inscrivent encore autour des metiers du telephone. Dans le recrutement, seuls des profils singuliers s'inserent dans l'espace cree entre les grilles generales de qualification et de salaire et la classification locale des pratiques et des competences. Cette singularite des profils conduit a un soupcon de transgression et denote une division entre pratiques ecrites et pratiques orales, profondement ancree dans la culture.
This study of a call center that mainly handles sales through E-mail shows how operators develop interactional skills based on the precision and concision needed to conduct a successful exchange of electronic messages. The cognitive workload is lightened by using form letters; the writing, archiving and accessing of these letters form the basis for a sort of occupational solidarity grounded in a social and technical distribution of activities. However the skills required at the time of hiring are those related to jobs using the telephone. During the recruitment process, only ''singular'' candidates can take advantage of the room left by the lack of adjustment between the local classification of tasks and more general grids of qualifications and wages. The way this ''singularity'' can be suspected to be a transgression denotes the naturalization of a division, deeply rooted in our culture, between written and oral practices, a division which can be put to use thanks to the emergence of electronic transactions.