Une écriture entre ordre et désordre : le relevé de maintenance comme description normative

This article explores the role of the production and circulation of maintenance records as a written aspect of the collective re-ordering process. Based on an ethnography of maintenance activities in a department of France's RATP rail company, it shows that the practice of recording constitutes a process that is part improvisation, part knowledge of standards. Each record produces a normative description of the world: an accurate representation of the problem situation which, at the same time, steers and frames the successive stages of the operation it initiates. It therefore plays a role in both the sequential organization of maintenance operations and reducing gaps between the world as it is and the world as it should be. This process not only systematically aligns the order desired with the disorder observed: the differences in the production of records set contrasting relations to the norm and specifically articulate each worker's position in the organization of operations.