The subject of organisational learning immediately brings to mind a certain number of empirical facts. Adam Smith's pin factory and his statement "to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman" (Smith, 1776, p. 112) which resulted from specialisation and continuous application of the same tasks. The learning curves based on Taylor's theories, drawn by engineers for workshop tasks, at the beginning of the century; or yet again "experience curves", established in the 1930's in the aeronautical industry, curves recording the reduction of direct work costs as a function of cumulated production growth.

In order to explain this type of regularity in a plausible and convincing way, the phenomenon of "learning" linked to direct experience gained in production is invoked. The worker in the pin factory, the employee timed in his tasks by the method officer or the group of workers, technicians and foremen at the aircraft factory accumulating know-how as they work. In each case, the practices used are improved. The complete set of these learning by doing processes results in an increase in productivity.

However, the examples above fall into two categories. In one case, the individuals are considered in isolation even if they are part of an organisational framework; on the other the organisation is considered per se (the aircraft factory for example), where the performance of the entire unit is considered. In the latter case, the learning process refers to the entire organisation. By applying the term learning to such very different situations, both the individual and the group effect seem to be considered indifferently.

However, in any organisation (such as the aircraft factory), not only are there obviously a number of individuals who pool their own experience, but also systems, arrangements or coordination procedures to enhance contacts between the workers involved and which define the organisation as such and as a specific, united and ordered reality.

Even if the result, namely an increase in productivity, seems the same (measured either individually and on a group basis), is it possible to group together under the same "learning" heading, two processes which would a priori imply differences? This question will be considered in this paper from an organisational learning point of view.

The current theoretical literature on the subject of learning is based on concepts of learning which are generally far more complex and extensive than the simple process of learning via direct experience within one's personal activity. Nevertheless, one sees the same tendency to conflate the processes affecting individuals (humans) and the processes which affect organisations -to a certain extent one sees this in the use made of the concept of learning as soon as the term is applied to an entire organisation.

For example, today the principle of "organisational learning" [START_REF] Levitt | Organizational learning[END_REF] includes certain behavioural or evolutionary approaches [START_REF] Nelson | An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change[END_REF][START_REF] Marengo | Coordination and organizational learning in the firm[END_REF][START_REF] Marengo | Structure, Competence and Learning in an Adaptive Model of the Firm[END_REF] This has raised the theoretical problem of how the systems, procedures, rules and routines which make up the organisation (and which provide fairly consistent links between the different individual members of the organisation), evolve during the learning process. The nature and logic of the evolution of these links are central questions for a theoretical approach to organisational learning. This paper will try to present the way in which certain theories of organisation have treated the problem of the organisational link, in order to highlight the difficulties which inevitably confront organisational learning theories. Particular attention is given to the evolutionary analysis of the firm in terms of routines [START_REF] Nelson | An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change[END_REF] and to other older analyses of organisations considered as systems for information processing [START_REF] Simon | Administrative Behavior[END_REF][START_REF] March | Organizations[END_REF]. The aim of the paper, is to show that the problem of the necessary consistency and co-ordination of individual learning in organisational learning reactivates a theoretical problem which had already been tackled to a certain extent by [START_REF] Cyert | A Behavioral Theory of the Firm[END_REF] as part of their work on the analysis of organisations in terms of information processing. This is the issue of "conflict" or more generally of the existence of a political and social dimension underlying organisational realities. By returning to so-called, "old" concepts it is possible to cast some light on the current debate on the subject of organisational leaning.

In the Section I the term organisational learning will be defined for the purposes of the article, with a brief review of the various problems posed by the concept. As the question of an 'organisational or institutional link' is central to the debate, the second section examines how the theories of organisation in terms of information processing have tackled the question [START_REF] March | Organizations[END_REF][START_REF] Cyert | A Behavioral Theory of the Firm[END_REF]. Section III considers the way in which the issue has been treated by [START_REF] Nelson | An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change[END_REF]. Finally the implication of this aspect of the problem for organisational learning will be discussed in Section IV. [START_REF] Levitt | Organizational learning[END_REF] defined organisational learning as an evolution of the routine processes in the organisation over time. "The generic term "routines" includes the forms, rules, procedures, conventions, strategies and technologies around which organisations are constructed and through which they operate. It also includes the structure of beliefs, frameworks, paradigms, codes, cultures and knowledge that buttress, elaborate and contradict the formal routines" (Levitt and March, 1988, p. 320). In this approach, organisational behaviour can always be explained by the different routines. Levitt and March cite Cyert and March (1963) and [START_REF] Nelson | An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change[END_REF] as important references here. Neither the validity this nor of the very extensive definition of the term "routine" the propose will be discussed in this paper. The term routine does not cover exactly the same concepts in the work by Nelson and Winter, Cyert and March or even Simon (1945), who also occasionally refers to the "routines of the organisation" (on this point, see Mangolte, 1998).

I. ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING RAISES THE PROBLEM OF THE ORGANISATIONAL LINK

Definition of organisational learning

The argument put forward by [START_REF] Levitt | Organizational learning[END_REF] is arguably closer in spirit to that of [START_REF] Nelson | An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change[END_REF] than to that of [START_REF] Cyert | A Behavioral Theory of the Firm[END_REF]. The essential thing which is common to them, however, is the idea that the behaviour of the organisation rests on two principles: (a) First, the principle that the organisational behaviour is determined by existing routines. This is "a logic of appropriateness or legitimacy more than a logic of consequentially or intention". (b) Secondly, a principle of heredity or permanence over time.

"Routines are based on interpretations of the past more than anticipations of the future" (Levitt and March, 1988, p.320) Routines are also put forward as characteristics of the organisation in their own right; as such they are "independent of the individual actors who execute them and are capable of surviving considerable turnover in individual actors" (Levitt and March, 1988, p.320) Organisational learning is thus defined as a process whereby organisational routines are transformed over time. This process is driven, since the behaviour of organisation is linked to targets and is dependent on the deviation between these targets and the results actually achieved (success/failure). "Organisations are seen as learning by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behaviour" (Levitt and March, 1988, p.320). The individuals (humans) are merely carriers of certain organisational routines -together with other components of the organisation (technologies, codes, cultures, etc.). These routines define the organisation and its behaviour. This emphasis on the routines of the organisation obviously distinguishes this approach to organisational learning from other approaches which only focus on individual learning in an organisational framework (Argyris and Schon, 1978, for example). From the outset, centre place is given in the analysis to all those features of the organisational features -its structures, coherence and unity -which can be considered to be embodied in routines. In this approach, therefore, the behaviour of the organisation at any given moment in (the effective activity of a firm for example) is distinguished from underlying factors which generate (and explain) this behaviour, in other words everything which can be classified under "routine".

Multiples "problematics" of organisational learning

In the theoretical approach sketched above, organisational learning raises three types of questions which can be separated as in figure 1 :

Routines and their cognitive aspect :

which definition, information ? knowledge ? competence ?

« Learning » as a process in time : which process ? one or several processes ? completely upturns all previous approaches in terms of information processing; however none of this is important for the discussion here.

We will focus on the "organisation" point of the triangle and its relationship with learning (the third point of the triangle). The problem of the transformation of routines must be considered from the viewpoint of the organisation. The problem here is that of the coordination and coherence of all the different individual routines; this also implies a problem with assuring mutual co-ordination and coherence between the various learning processes.

Levitt and March clearly identify two (principal) mechanisms which result in a transformation of the routines -in other words which lead to organisational learning. : (1) trial and error experimentation, which is a response to the daily pressures of the direct experience of the organisation (2) and organisational search where the organisation draws from a bank of existing alternative routines and adopts the best (Levitt and March, 1988, p. 321). In this rather abstract specification of two organisational learning processes, there is on the one hand, research that may be planned and centralised which can be the work of one person or a specific department within the organisation. However, on the other hand, the process of incremental accumulation of knowledge is, as a general rule, neither planned, directed, nor regulated from any central point. The problem of the coordination and coherence of the different separate learning actions is clearly stated, provided we are referring to learning within the organisation.

Obviously, the starting point must be the fact that the organisation cannot be considered to automatically benefit from internal unity. On the contrary, the definition we have used is that of March and Simon, which is as good as any other: "Organisations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests or knowledge differ. Organisation theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilisation of resources, and the co-ordination of effort, that facilitate the joint survival of an organisation and its members" (March and Simon, 1993, p.300).

The central problem is the constitution and maintenance of the unity of the organisation.

Even if that unity exists at a certain moment in time, it is inevitably challenged by the learning process. Which factors are responsible for maintaining "cooperation" and "coordination of effort" from one time period to the next ? Which specific factors are responsible for maintaining coordination during the learning process, given that the principle of heredity (embodied in routines) is itself affected by learning ? What is the nature of the organisational link ? In will be useful to return to some of the details of these organisation theories in order to see how different authors have tackled the question by separating the two dimensions described above (see fig 2). Only [START_REF] Cyert | A Behavioral Theory of the Firm[END_REF] have tried to articulate these two analytical dimensions It is necessary to consider the two dimensions together if organisational transformations are to be properly understood.

II. FROM SIMON TO CYERT AND MARCH : ORGANISATIONAL EQUILIBRIUM

THREATENED BY CONFLICT [START_REF] Simon | Administrative Behavior[END_REF], [START_REF] March | Organizations[END_REF] and to a lesser extent [START_REF] Cyert | A Behavioral Theory of the Firm[END_REF], base their analysis of organisational phenomenon on the idea that there are limits to human, capacity for rational decision making. The organisation is primarily perceived as a system which processes information : "in man as much as in organisations, everything is a matter of decision processes and problem solving […] and in order to make decisions and to solve problems, information must be processed ; in short, everything is based on the processing of information" (Simon, 1945, p. 38). Organisational structures (the division of labour, the system of authority, communication channels, etc), the rules, procedures, standard practices, training and indoctrination of the members are seen as just so many means for taking decisions at all organisational levels:

The organisations that human beings have constructed in the modern world to carry out the work of production and government can only be understood as machinery for coping with the limits of man's abilities to comprehend and compute in the face of complexity and uncertainty (Simon, 1979, p.501).

The organisation is seen as a tool serving a specific target with the individuals being the tools of the organisation. As Simon, 1945, p. 108) puts it, "The behaviour of individuals is the tool with which the organisation achieves its targets". However, this does not mean that the targets of individuals and the targets of the organisation must automatically coincide -nor should the individuals be confused with the posts they occupy. March and Simon -unlike Barnard (1938) -state that if the individual achieves his own target (income for example) by means of the organisation, his personal aims are not confused with the targets of the organisation. Thus, the behaviour of the individual is neither automatically cooperative nor of the type which allows decisions to be taken at the level of the organisation as a whole. In other words the behaviour of the individual is not necessarily compatible with the "survival" of the organisation.

The structures and "routines" of the organisation must be considered at this point. They define the situations and constitute premises for the different decision processes for individuals -more generally speaking the individual units of the organisation. Dividing up very general problems into smaller sub-problems according to the specialisation of functions, allows individuals to focus their attention on these sub-problems. Decisions are taken within this (limited) framework and the general and abstract targets of the organisation are replaced by real, measurable targets which can be processed by the various individuals (or basic units of the organisation) involved, within the framework of their individual cognitive limits. The final decision is thus to a large extent pre-determined by the structures.

The structures and procedures which allow for organisational decisions to be taken then become the object of study and analysis in their own right. Comparison is constantly established between the function of the human brain (thinking processes and human heuristics), the computer (with its programs) and the organisation (with its rules). This follows from the view that, "the basic features of the structure [of the organisation] derive from the characteristics of human problem-solving processes and rational human choice" (Simon, 1945, p. 165).

The general principle of an organisation designed as an information processing system can be further refined. Organisational decisions are arranged in a kind of continuum. At one extreme there are the totally programmed decisions (the "execution schemes") such as processing an order or following machining instructions (developed by the Methods Department); at the other extreme there are the non-programmed decisions which involve all problems which are not structured at the outset, such as the launch of a new product or modifying execution instructions, etc. Decision-making intervenes when satisfactory solutions are sought within a framework of limited rationality.

The "Barnard-Simon" organisational equilibrium

As [START_REF] March | Organizations[END_REF] have observed, even the existence of all the structures and procedures taken together cannot explain the existence of cooperation around a common target, which, nonetheless, is essential for any adequate theory of organisational decision making. In order for the functioning of an organisation to be analytically equivalent to a data processing system, the individuals in the organisation must accept the targets of that organisation, or simply the sub-objectives that correspond to their place in the organisation. In this approach, the individuals must identify psychologically with the targets. The social, relational and conflict dimensions of the organisation which are not compatible with on-going organisational "problem solving" must disappear or be neutralised. Only then can a formal analogy be set up between the organisation, the computer and the human brain, which according to Simon constitute three archetypal examples of symbol processing systems.

In 1958, the problem was solved by a specific theory of the organisational link or connection which allows individuals to be assimilated to their prescribed roles in the organisation. By definition this role is coherent with the targets of the organisation. This is the "Barnard-Simon" theory on the equilibrium of the organisation. According to this theory "each participant will continue his participation in an organisation only so long as the inducements offered him are as great or greater (measured in terms of his values and in terms

of the alternatives open to him) than the contributions he is asked to make" (March and Simon, 1958, p. 103-104). The organisation can only survive if the balance between the advantages and the contributions is such that the individuals participating in the organisation choose not to leave it and accept to assume their organisational role fully.

This theory could be interpreted as a specific analysis of the social link of the organisation. However, in the opinion of Simon, this amounts to a theory of motivations assumes a specific psychological attitude among the members of the organisation, namely "loyalty". This attitude is considered independent of all considerations of either direct or indirect interest. The strength of "organisational loyalty" is the factor which ensures the "identification" of the individuals to the targets and to the culture of the organisation. All this is enhanced by the existence of certain permanent psychological characteristics specific to human beings, or at least some human beings. This is what Simon describes as "docility" or "open-mindedness". In certain contexts, "docility" can include the enthusiasm exhibited by an individual to obey and conform; however in more general terms it is the propensity of an individual to enter into a process of adaptive learning, imitating others, accepting social influences and the organisation as it is, and to thus construct his own decisions. Simon doesn't hesitate to suggest that this "docility" is the result of natural selection. The individuals most likely to survive in the social life are those who possess the highest levels of what is known as docility. "That fitness [of an individual] is derivable from being docile becomes evident when we consider the opposite to docility : intractability, unmanageability, unteachability, incorrigibility" (Simon, 1991, p.35 and 36).

The firm (and the organisation) as a coalition

In 1963, Cyert and March tried to go further by discarding "de facto" the hypothesis of the psychological identification of individuals to the organisation and the 'Barnard-Simon" theory of organisational equilibrium. Nonetheless, the starting point for their work was the same. The firm (or organisation) is defined "as an information-processing and decision rendering system" Cyert and March, 1963, p. 20). However, they immediately invoke the problem of individual and organisational "goals", thus questioning the hypothesis of the psychological identification of individuals to their organisational roles.

How, they question, can the creation of "organisational goals" be explained, when only "people (i.e. individuals) have goals" and "collectivities of people do not [have goals]"? How can these goals be specified without the existence of an "organisational mind" starting from the goals existing in different "individual human minds" (Cyert and March, 1963, p.27) ?

These two questions underline a certain incoherence in the orthodox approach to the firm. On the one hand, there is the claim of methodological individualism, while on the other hand there is a certain practice of reification in the sense of attributing to the firm "goals" and a maximising behaviour that only human individuals should have in this theory. However, the problem constitutes a real theoretical question for Cyert and March. In their opinion, the organisation is a system of conflicts, where the basic units (supposedly coherent in their preferences) have contradictory preference systems with respect to the resources of the system (March, 1988, p. 18-19).

This leads to a definition of the firm in terms of a "coalition"; a viable coalition of "different" individuals, each having different goals and distinct "orders of preference". This coalition of individuals, occasionally with sub-coalitions, includes "in a business organisation,

[…] managers, workers, stockholders, suppliers, customers, lawyers, tax collectors, regulatory agencies, and so on" (Cyert and March, 1963, p. 27). In this coalition, there is always a potential internal conflict. This conflict is the result of the divergent goals of the different members of the coalition. In order for the firm to exist and prosper over time, a state of "quasi-resolution of conflict" must be achieved. If the firm is viable, the very conflict movement gives birth to a political process which allows a certain adjustment to be made between several different or contradictory courses of action. The process takes the form of a "bargain", which defines the dominant "coalition" and the "objectives of the organisation", at the same time and in the same movement. The stakes of the bargain are the allocation of resources and the different "payments" (monetary or not) that each member of the coalition wishes to keep or obtain.

"An organisational coalition is viable if the payments made to the various members are adequate to keep them in the organisation. If resources exist to meet all demands and those resources are distributed so as to meet demands, the coalition is a feasible one" (Cyert and March, 1963, p. 36). In general there is a gap between the resources and payments necessary to maintain the coalition, in other words the organisation. This gap is described as the "organisational slack". It provides reserves which allow a "quasi-resolution of the conflict" to be achieved and the establishment of different compromises between the existing interests.

The bargaining occurs more or less continuously, however the compromises achieved can be more stable than they seem at first sight. In effect, previous compromises are memorised (in the form of rules or precedents) and thus channel the conflict process in the organisation. "The coalition agreements of today are institutionalised into semi-permanent arrangements" (Cyert and March, 1963, p. 34) ; budget agreements for example. Real changes in the organisation are gradual in general, even if the conflict in the organisation is never totally resolved. The structures, rules and different "routines" of an organisation are thus to a certain extent constructed within the political bargaining process. They are born and evolve in conflicts, give rise to compromises -and are not simply the cognitive human limits developed to deal with incertitude. This approach places emphasis on the institutional constraints which constrain problem solving, particularly while the coalition is being constructed.

III. NELSON AND WINTER AND THE "TRUCE IN INTRA-ORGANISATIONAL CONFLICT"

Nelson and Winter state that 'routine' is a central concept in their theory of firm.

Questions about rationality, deliberation and the limits of rational choice tend to disappear because routines are conceived as organisational memories which provide direct information on the behaviour of the members of the organisation. The "logic of appropriateness" takes over from the "logic of consequentiality or intention" 1 . This approach, which is constructed in analogy with the ways in which human beings acquire and implement their know-how and skills, must tackle the problem of organisational coordination much as the previous approach in terms of information processing.

Nelson and

Winter give an answer to this problem different from that of the authors who stress the importance of preferences, motives, psychological predispositions of individuals or even the bargaining process. The organisation's internal conflicts are directly brought into the analysis. Conflict is seen to be a permanent feature of the organisation regardless of whether it is overt or latent. This point lead to the conclusion that the effectiveness of routine performance depends on the existence of an intra-organisational truce (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 107-112).

They start by analysing the operation of an entirely routinised firm, firm which always displays the same behaviour from one period to the next. This is referred to as the model of "circular flow". In a firm which is functioning in this manner, the individuals comprising the 1 In Nelson and Winter's evolutionary theory of economic change, a routine is seen as the equivalent of the biological gene. The "evolutionary process", is defined to be based on three factors : a principle of heredity (gene/routine), a principle of variation (innovation/mutation), and finally a principle of selection.

company at any given time only need draw on a subset of the memorised routines. " […] what is required for the organisation to continue in routine operation is simply that all members continue to "know their jobs" as those jobs are defined by the routine. This means, first of all, that they retain in their repertoires all routines actually invoked in the given state of routine operation of the organisation" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 100).

Thus, in order for organisational coordination to exist (and to be maintained) each member of the organisation must know, at any given time, which routine in his repertoire to apply. He must be capable of correctly receiving and interpreting messages either from other members of the organisation or from the surrounding environment. These messages can take many forms : explicit orders (either written or oral), hand signals, gestures, winks, bells or even the simple arrival of the product to be transformed (on a production line for example). In turn the receiver of the message(s) gives similar messages, either directly, in which case it is part of his skill, or indirectly by simply fulfilling his task.

The capacity to interpret and react in an appropriate way to the "messages" which circulate through the organisation constitutes an integral part of individual competence. This capacity is seen to be stored within the individual memories that make up the routines, or to be stored in external memories (files, machines, etc.), which are part of the organisation.

"What is central to a productive organisational performance is coordination; what is central to coordination is that individual members, knowing their jobs, correctly interpret and respond to the messages they receive. The interpretations that members give to messages are the mechanism that picks out, from a vast array of possibilities consistent with the roster of member repertoires, a collection of individual member performances that actually constitute a productive performance for the organisation as a whole" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 104).

In this approach, the organisational link rests first and foremost on a cognitive link; the different pieces of knowledge (articulated or tacit) which are memorised in individual member's repertoires must, at least to a some extent, be coherent with one another. Here, coherence means that when activated they result in a unified collective performance, which is itself the expression of a certain degree of organisational coordination. However, this is not sufficient in itself. The existence and maintenance of this coordination -and the different organisational routines -brings us back to the conflicts, the "motivations", and more forms" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 109).

However, even a highly developed checking and rule-enforcement system cannot completely channel behaviour. There is always ample latitude for the discretionary behaviour of different members of the organisation, and different individual behaviours can be generally associated with differing the results for the organisation in terms of performance. And "within the substantial zone of discretion that exists in most cases, the conformity of individual members to organisational requirements is motivated by considerations other than the routinised organisational mechanisms that enforce the rules" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 109-110).

A range of techniques exist to motivate individuals in the deployment of routines, encouraging them to adapt to the requirements and rules of the organisation. These motivating mechanisms (motivators) are added to the coercive mechanisms associated with checks. They contribute to stabilising standard behaviour and maintaining organisational coordination.

However, in the opinion of Nelson and Winter, even these mechanisms do not completely neutralise the discretionary element in individual behaviour. Consequently conflict persists. In our diagram (fig 3), the complete range of actions A(n) is not automatically empty, n is not necessarily equal to zero; and certain actions of the members of an organisation invariably can disrupt the "circuit", or even undermine organisational coordination, if only an unintended consequence. Nelson and Winter thus put forward a intra-organisational truce hypothesis and state that the routines of an organisation are necessarily based on a certain "internal political equilibrium" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 111).

For this reason, in their 1982 volume, the various routines of an organisation could not be analysed simply as "stores of knowledge". The memorisation of the knowledge necessary for effective organisational coordination is not enough to maintain "the circuit" and, more generally, the organisational link. Routines thus necessarily include a truce, and social or institutional rules which determine or channel the use of knowledge and individual behaviour.

Organisational routines thus imply a both a cognitive and "motivational/relational" link (Winter, 1995, p. 9-10), each with its own evolutionary path.

If the analysis is based on the routines which constitute and maintain organisational coordination, different types of routine can be identified. Some of the routines rely heavily on knowledge. They are of a more technical nature and depend little on a social dimension, neither in their implementation nor in their existence. On the other hand, others are basically defined by their institutional content. They represent a certain stabilisation (which may even be codified) of the various social relations specific to that organisation.

"When one considers routine operation as the basis of organisational memory, one is led to expect to find routines patterned in ways that reflect characteristics of the information storage problem that they solve. When one considers routine operation as involving a truce in intra-organisational conflict, one is led to expect routines to be patterned in ways that select features of the underlying problem of diverging individual member interests. The obvious example of such patterning is the existence of ruleenforcement mechanisms as an ongoing feature of organisational routine, even when serious breaches of the rules are infrequent and most of the sanctions that are nominally available are not applied" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 110-111).

IV. LEARNING OR TRANSFORMING THE "ROUTINES" ?

We can now turn more directly to the subject of organisational learning. From an analytical point of view, it has been shown that organisational routines comprise two dimensions, namely the cognitive and institutional ones. The (unitary) existence of an organisation generally supposes a certain state of "truce". In other words, it supposes a certain degree of cooperation. This draws into question the validity of the definition given by [START_REF] Levitt | Organizational learning[END_REF], and more fundamentally points to the limitations of an analysis of organisational change in terms of learning, which is a process which necessarily operates at an informational or cognitive level and at this dimension only.

Can the following situations be qualified as organisational learning? Can they be assimilated, compared or interpreted in the same way and without taking any special precautions?

(a) Learning to pedal a bicycle (a child of about two and a half for example). This involves the construction of two learning units, the first one for the right foot, the other for the left foot without considering the rest. Any other type of similar learning situation of the same type could be included. (f) The unilateral (or negotiated) modification of the working times and wages within a company and any other similar transformation associated with salaries.

At first sight, it would seems that the first case can be eliminated as not being an example of organisational learning. In this case there is no organisation (formal or informal).

However, from the point of view of a purely cognitive analysis of the organisation, one might argue that such pure problems of coordinating different informational (or cognitive) processes can be appropriately defined as 'organisational learning'. In the case of the child learning to ride a bicycle, the learning tasks are constructed separately (left foot, right foot), and together in a coordinated fashion. From an analystical point of view, the problem of organisational coordination seems to be the same. This allows us to understand more clearly the tendency in the literature to use 'organism' as an analogy for 'organisation'2 .

In both the example of the child (a) and the sailors (b) there is learning -indeed it is the most important factor in these situations. Here we have the creation of a package of tacit knowledge which must be inscribed in the body-and-mind of the participants in order to generate individual (a) or collective (b) know-how. The only factor which differentiates the two cases is the existence -a necessary condition for learning -of a certain social cooperation in the team of sailors; whereas the "cooperation" between the left foot and the right foot (not to mention the rest), is in principle automatically ensured by the child's own physiological and psychological mechanisms (his "motivation") or, in other words, by the unity of his bodyand-mind. On the other hand, the unity of the team of sailors is not a given despite the fact that this unity is a condition of learning; however in this case, to achieve the unity there must be a social agreement, a common willingness (whether spontaneous or imposed by discipline)

which allows all the sailors to row together.

Case (e), the skyscraper, is also a situation where learning dominates the situation. This learning is for the coordination of the interventions of the different specialised teams (and even of different companies) in space and time. In fact, this is a classic example which illustrates learning by doing (individual or collective). However, here also, an underlying relational dimension favours (or possibly thwarts) learning. If operations are to flow smoothly, one or several "coalitions" must be formed, to use Cyert and March's expression, which must be interconnected.

Cases (c), (d) and (f) all represent formal organisations (firms) and are examples of the transformation of organisational routines. Hence, the definition put forward by [START_REF] Levitt | Organizational learning[END_REF] of organisational learning as a transformation of the organisation's routines can be questioned. If the term "learning" is taken seriously, there should be a transformation in the cognitive dimension of routines and a cumulative and driven process which affects this cognitive dimension. However, it seems absolutely obvious that in the last case (the modification of salary rules), the cognitive dimension is not the most important and is in fact a negligible factor. There is no accumulation of experience in this case, and the modification of procedures (which are so many specific routines) has nothing to do with any type of "learning" process. However, the modification does challenge the "truce" -which appears to be broken. Analytically speaking, the main question here is the constitution of a new political equilibrium in the organisation.

For cases (c) and (d), the transformation of routines implies a transformation of the cognitive dimension. Consequently, one can talk about "learning" in the strict (and usual) sense of the word. These two examples also illustrate the processes evoked by Levitt and March (1988, p.321) for the selection of a set of efficient routines from a batch of existing routines. However, the Taylorian redefinition of tasks with imposed standards is of more consequence to the social and political dimension than the other example (d), where in principle neither the job nor the role definition of the different operators are at stake. Of course, the different routines of an organisation are based on acquired and used skills or, in other words, on a stock of stored knowledge. The stock is transformed, and in certain cases this transformation can be characterised as relevant to the learning process in the strictest sense. However, the fact that these same routines are "organisational" most of the time, implies the existence of coordination between the different 'carriers' of routines (human beings), and these carriers always retain a certain level of autonomy in the activation of their repertoires. Consequently, the routines also rely on stabilised social relationships. Here, "truces" (or coalitions) are necessary conditions for the effective and unitary existence of the organisation. One should not confuse these truces analytically with memorised knowledge within the organisation and their processes of evolution must also be distinguished. The logic of "conflict" is not one of learning. Modification in the level of effort or evolution in social relationships within the organisation is neither a simplified version of a process of inference nor a subdivided accumulation of knowledge. It should not be assimilated to such a process.

The subject of organisational learning would thus seem rather ambiguous, even inappropriate or simplified, in that it leads us to consider organisational transformations merely from a cognitive angle, whilst completely ignoring the underlying political and social dimension. Yet this dimension must be included here. In effect, any transformation of routines implies the redefinition of "truces", of "coalitions" and of the social link which is to a greater or lesser extent the foundation of the organisation.

CONCLUSION

In all the theories of the organisation (or the firm) which we have discussed above -Cyert and March being slightly different to the rest -the accent has been on the informational and/or cognitive dimension which defines the organisation. The organisational unit nonetheless raises the problem of coordination. In the various theories discussed, this leads to another dimension. Simon defines this dimension as psychological and in other theories discussed it treated as being social and political; this dimension cannot be merely simplified to information processing or the simple activation of previously stored knowledge.

The existence of an organisational decision process in the approaches which treat the organisation as an information processing systems rests on the hypothesis of an organisational equilibrium (March and Simon). Or it leads to the presentation of the firm as a coalition (Cyert and March). This coalition is formed and maintained in what must be a "quasi resolved" conflict in order for the organisation to exist. Nelson and Winter consider the analytical situation to be somewhat different; the problematic aspect of organisational decision making is replaced by the creation of a routine for the entity. This routine is a product of the ordered activation of different repertoires of knowledge, located here and there in the organisation. However, the same problem appears. The "circuit" cannot exist without an analogous hypothesis. A certain number of institutional conditions and even a "truce for the conflicts" are necessary between the members of the organisation. The "relational/motivational" dimension of the firm -which Cyert and March have presented as a political dimension capable of evolution -must be stabilised or neutralised in order to allow the different organisational routines to be deployed in an ordered way.

The theoretical difficulty of analysing the organisation in it informational and cognitive dimension, and only in this dimension, inevitably reappears when the organisation is analysed not only in static terms but also dynamically in terms of changes in different organisational routines. The fact that each routine contains something of the truce leads us to reject a definition of changing in organisational routines which would systematically conflate this change with learning (or inference processes). The logic of evolution is different. Even when organisational learning is under consideration, when this term is given a specific definition, the situation cannot be analysed without consideration of the social, institutional and political dimension of the organisations. This dimension is often ignored and unfortunately rejected by the organisational learning literature.

Fig 1 :

 1 Fig 1 : Three types of problem associated with organisational learning

Fig 2 :

 2 Fig 2 : An analysis of the organisational link based on two dimensions

  Fig 3 : The « truce » in the activation of routines

  (b) Learning to work as a team (a crew of sailors for example), in a perfectly coordinated way, the oars of a canoe which are responsible for forwards, backwards or stopping movements for example; or any other similar learning experience. (c) The planned conversion of a mechanical workshop, with redefinition of the different tasks and imposing standards within a Scientific Management framework, the various workers adapting to the new work organisation; and any other similar transformation of routines. (d) The introduction of more efficient machines and the scrapping of old ones whilst retaining the same workforce; or any other change of the same type (e) The improvement of practices for different relatively autonomous teams (or why not even for different companies); these teams all working to build a skyscraper, executing the same working plan floor by floor. In this case there are different specific learning tasks and a continuous transformation of the coordination mechanisms (organisational or bargaining) between the teams, the entire process resulting in the work progressing at a regular rate as the building increases in height. And any other similar situation.

Fig 4 :

 4 Fig 4 : The transformation of routines, some examples and two different approaches

  et Schön D. (1978), Organizational learning, Addison-Wesley. Barnard (1938), The functions of the executive, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1968. Cohen M. D. et Bacdayan P. (1994), Organizational Routines are Stored as Procedural

  Figure 4 summarises these observations.

		Existence of	Importance of the	Importance of the social
		one (formal)	cognitive processes	and political dimension
		organisation ?	(learning in the strict	[the logic of conflict]
			sense)
	(a) the child	NO	dominant	nil (or negligible)
		NO,
	(b) the rowers	informal social	dominant	cooperative will
		cooperation
	(c) Taylorian	YES, hierarchical	Implementation of	constraint : standards
	rationalization	relationship	standards,	imposed and/or
		(employee)	individual	negotiated ; conflict ?
			adaptation
		YES, hierarchical	knowledge	activation of functional
	(d) new	relationship	incorporated into	specialization and the
	machines	(employee)	machines,	hierarchical relationship
			adaptation for	(authority) ; very low
			everything else	conflict situation
		YES, formal	in situ learning :	importance of the
	(e) the sky-	organisations and	scheduling,	relationship dimension in
	scraper	trade relationships	procedures and	teams and between
			coordination, etc	companies
	(f) employment
	rules (salaries)	YES	negligible	dominant ; conflict

See, for example,[START_REF] Levitt | Organizational learning[END_REF], for example, who refer to the « intelligence of organisations » (p.

333) ; orCohen and Bacdayan (1994) who in discussing tacit knowledge evoke a certain « organisational unconciousness » (p.556).

different routine repertoires. It is thus necessary that the members of an organisation exhibit "willingness" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p 104) in the implementation of their routines and that the intra-organisational conflicts be maintained within limits compatible with overall coordination and performance. A "truce" is required here. Nelson and Winter state that organisational routines must be constructed on the basis of a truce if the "circuit" is to operate properly.

Routine operation involves a comprehensive truce in intra-organisational conflict.

There is a truce between the supervisor and those supervised at every level in the organisational hierarchy : the usual amount of work gets done, reprimands and compliments are delivered with the usual frequency, and no demands are presented for major modifications in the terms of the relationship. There is similarly a truce in the struggle for advancement, power, and prerequisites among high level executives" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 110).

The important thing here is the existence of a certain "adjustment" between the motivations of the members of the organisation and the requirements of the routine operation of the organisation. In addition, this adjustment must be maintained over time, in order that, "the members of the organisation are rarely surprised at each other's behaviour and also that involuntary separations of members from the organisation do not occur" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 108).

We see here the same sorts of problems which confront a theory of the organisation conceived as an information processing system. The solution in terms of the hypothesis of an organisational truce has much in common the "Barnard-Simon" concept of an organisational equilibrium. However, the interpretation given by Nelson and Winter is very different. They directly invoke institutional mechanisms which tend to stabilise the political, social and relational dimension of the organisation. These mechanisms, which are part of the organisational routine, channel behaviour -in other words the way the members of the organisation do or do not implement their own routines.


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Information, know-how and knowledge management : a strategic factor for logistics suppliers facing the temptation for shippers to reintegrate logistics operations

Nathalie Fabbe-Costes

To cite this version:

Nathalie Fabbe-Costes. Information, know-how and knowledge management : a strategic factor for logistics suppliers facing the temptation for shippers to reintegrate logistics operations. Transport Forum Linköping, VTI (Väg och Transport forsknings Institutet) and KFB (Kommunikations Forsknings Beredningen), Jan 1996, Linköping, Sweden. hal-01294177


Mathieu Loiseau
email: mathieu.loiseau@u-grenoble3.fr

Georges Antoniadis
email: georges.antoniadis@u-grenoble3.fr

Claude Ponton
email: claude.ponton@u-grenoble3.fr

"Facets" and "Prisms" as a Means to Achieve Pedagogical Indexation of Texts for Language Learning Consequences of the Notion of Pedagogical Context

Keywords: Pedagogical indexation, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Natural Language Processing, Metadata, End User Programming

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Pedagogical Indexation

The MIRTO project, started in 2001, stemmed from the observation of various recurrent issues in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems: rigidity, inability to adapt the learning sequences to learners and unavailability of means to manipulate concepts pertaining to the teachers' field of expertise (language didactics) [START_REF] Antoniadis | Modélisation de l'intégration de ressources TAL pour l'apprentissage des langues : la plateforme MIRTO[END_REF]. The aim of MIRTO was to promote the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to address those problems by adding an abstraction layer between the user and the material. Antoniadis et al. consider that the formulation of problems in didactics relevant terms depends on handling language not as character sequences but as a system of forms and concepts [START_REF] Antoniadis | Modélisation de l'intégration de ressources TAL pour l'apprentissage des langues : la plateforme MIRTO[END_REF]. MIRTO thus proposes to separate treatments (e.g. gap-filling exercise generation script) and the data on which they are to be applied (a text in this case).

Definition and Objectives

This made evident the need for a text base, which, for consistency's sake, would have to allow users to perform language teaching driven queries. In other words, a subpart of the problem was the conception of a system that could perform pedagogical indexation of texts. In this work we defined pedagogical indexation as "an indexation performed according to a documentary language that allows users to query for objects in order to use them for teaching" [10, p. 15]. Considering the aforementioned context, we are therefore working towards pedagogical indexation of texts for language learning.

Indeed, a study of the literature concerning the most often used language teaching methods and a series of interviews with some language teachers prompted us not only to consider this problem in the context of the future use of the text in a CALL activity, but to try to consider the problem globally: few of the teachers we had interviewed were really computer savvy, all the same, they all underlined the importance of text search in their practices. We later got confirmation of this nature of things by a larger scale study, which established text search as a common task in language teaching [10, p. 170].

Having modified the scope of our work -without completely cutting ties with MIRTO, for integration remained a perspective -into the conception of a model for pedagogical indexation of texts for language teaching, we started to consider the existing means to achieve it.

Learning Resource Description Standards

A wide array of research tackles the definition and use of learning resource description standards. The principal standards we analyzed were LOM [9], SCORM [START_REF]Specifications SCORM 2004 3rd Edition Content Aggregation Model Version 1.0[END_REF] and some teaching oriented application profiles of the Dublin Core (edna [START_REF]edna: edna resources -metadata application profile[END_REF] and GEM [START_REF]GEM: Listing of gem 2.0 top-level elements[END_REF]). As for providing a solution to our problem, all the standards we studied came with the same flaws, most of which stem from the fact that these standards try to integrate in the same model, entities of very different conceptual level: the ressources used to set up activities (low aggregation level in the LOM terminology) and the activities themselves (higher aggregation level) [14, p. 2]. Balatsoukas et al.take this analysis further in pointing out that the lower the aggregation level of the learning object the broader its spectrum (i.e. the range of activities that can be performed with it) [START_REF] Balatsoukas | Learning objects update: Review and critical approach to content aggregation[END_REF]. Indeed, in the particular case of texts (raw resources), the descriptors provided by the standards seem, at best, difficult to use: how does one assign a "Description" ("Comments on how this learning object is to be used" [9, element 5.10]) when the resource potentially could be used in different contexts.

The approach advocated by Recker & Wiley proposes to treat differently what they call intrinsic ("derivable by simply having the resource at hand") and extrinsic properties (which "describe the context in which the resource is used") [16, p. 260]. All the same, their analysis cannot be directly transposed to our problem, for their aim is to provide a collaborative resource description system in which authoritative and non-authoritative annotation coexist. On the other hand our aim is, in the first place, to provide a model that would allow a system to automate as much as possible the pedagogical indexation of texts. User annotation is, in this context, more a potential extension of the system than a core feature. There was therefore at this point no clear cut direction in which to go: the pedagogical properties seemed to constitute extrinsic properties for the raw resources that are texts, thus potentially discarding educational metadata as a solution. We therefore decided to resort to an empirical study to confirm this hypothesis and get a grasp of teachers practices regarding text search.

Pedagogical Context

Our empirical study took the form of a survey, which built on a series of interview and an exploration of the literature, part of which we have just summed up above. Beyond the confirmation of the hypothesis of the multiple uses texts can have in language teaching, we aimed at obtaining a first look into the process of text search. We meant our point of view to be as general as can be, in the hope to extract invariants that would remain unaffected by variables such as the language taught, the country in which it is taught or to whom. The study was mostly filled online, but also in paper form, both medium adding up to 130 testimonies. Beside confirming unequivocally that texts can be used in various language teaching situations1 , the survey allowed us to extract a (non necessarily exhaustive) list of four practices that lead to texts being used in language learning: search for a text to use in a precise activity, writing the text, text encounter during personal readings and texts from a syllabus (of any form). We will focus here on the provenance that is closest to the role of a pedagogically indexed text base, i.e. the search for a text in order to use it in a specific activity, which also happens to be the most widely represented practice (concerning nearly 97% of the teachers answering the survey).

Adaptation of Yinger's Model

To describe the task of searching for a text for a given activity we resorted to using Yinger's model of planification [START_REF] Yinger | A study of teacher planning: Description and a model of preactive decision making[END_REF] or more precisely part of it. Yinger defines planing as a three stage process: problem finding, problem formulation/solution and finally implementation, evaluation, routinization [18, p. 30]. In our task, the problem is already found (the teacher has an activity in mind) and the search is supposed to provide a text to actually use in class and thus precedes implementation. We focus here on the problem formulation/solution, which according to Yinger is an "helicoidal" repetition of three phases: elaboration, investigation and adaptation [18, p. 35], which we adapt to our problem under the labels selection, evaluation and transformation (cf. figure 1) [10, pp. 205-210].

The dashed semi-ovoid at the bottom of figure 1 contains a set of texts the teacher has access to. The intensity of the gray inside the form represent to which extent they are pedagogically "connoted". For instance a text taken straight from a newspaper and that has never been used in teaching (to the knowledge of the teacher) is not connoted, whereas a text recommended by peers or found inside a textbook has some sort of pedagogical connotation. The aim is not to evaluate this "connotation" or even theorize it, but to acknowledge that the teacher can resort to sources with different statuses.

The selection phase consists in the teacher relying on his necessary preconceptions2 projecting onto the text properties linked in a way or another to the activity they are planning. An example of such a behavior is choosing an author based on properties attributed to their writing: "Roald Dahl, [...] all his short stories are packed with these verbs [...] for emotion and gestures [...], that in French [require] a whole phrase [...]." (testimony from our study).

Once the text is selected, based on the properties that the teacher has attributed a priori to it, it is actually in the hands of the teacher (or virtually so) for the first time in this planning sequence. They can now attribute a new set of properties to the text. The latter are no longer projected properties, they constitute the teacher's actual perspective on the resource based on the activity they want to set up with it. This set of properties can confirm or invalidate the ones that have been assigned during the first phase or concern totally different aspect of the text. For instance, it is completely imaginable that the teacher we quoted above should confirm her hypothesis, but conclude that the short story can turn out to be difficult for her learners, which brings us to the last phase: taking action upon the evaluated properties. The action transforms the text status-wise, there are three alternatives:

the text is assigned a use context corresponding the teacher's current search and is transformed into actual teaching material (solid arrow in figure 1); the text, though considered unfit for this particular activity, is deemed useable in another context and can be kept for future use in a personal repository: it is transformed into potential teaching material (dotted arrow);

the text is not relevant from the teacher's point of view and is just discarded (not represented).

First Definition

The description of these three phases allowed us to precise the role of a pedagogically indexed text base: it is meant to assist the teacher in the selection phase and possibly allow him to perform it according to less instinctive criteria when applicable (for example concerning the linguistic content of the text), but it also allowed us to introduce the notion of Pedagogical Context (PC)3 as: "set of features which describe the teaching situation" [12, p. 487]. This notion is especially useful in order to describe the process of text search and its integration in a learning sequence for the various iterations of the above scenario correspond to a gradual definition of the PC. The material is a component of the teaching situation [8, p. 31] thus influencing it. At the same time its choice is influenced by the other components of the PC since the search is performed for a given activity. In order to achieve pedagogical indexation of texts for language learning, it seems necessary to be able to take into account the PC, which means studying the link between components of the PC and the actual properties of the text.

Definition Update: Pedagogical Context as an Influence

Among our objectives with our second survey was trying to establish relations between properties of the PC and properties of the text. We cross-examined:

the activity type (gap-filling exercise -3 types -, comprehension activity, introduction of new notions -vocabulary or syntax -) with the size of text, the number of representative elements of a notion (if the notion is the preterit this will be the number of preterit conjugated verbs present inside the text, and the tolerance to newness (vocabulary and grammar-wise); the learners' first language and tolerance to newness ; the learners' level and tolerance to newness.

The length of the text and the number of representative elements were numerical variables and were asked for each activity type. In this case, the tolerance to newness was evaluated using two separate categorical variables, one concerning new vocabulary (other than the object of the lesson) and the other concerning new grammatical structures (other than the object of the lesson). Both variables could take their values between "proscribed", "tolerated" and "sought". For each activity type used, we asked the teachers to rate their tolerance to newness using this scale for both variables.

When crossed with the learners' level and first language, the tolerance to newness was also the object of a closed-ended question. These questions allow the teacher to state that the criteria is not relevant or can decide not to answer. The other two possibilities depended on the question and do not distinguish vocabulary and grammar:

first language : the more similar the mother tongue and the learned language, [the more/the less] one will accept unknown grammatical structures or vocabulary; level : the higher the level, [the more/the less] one will accept unknown grammatical structures or vocabulary. The results have been summed up by figure 2 4 . Properties such as the length of a given text are totally independent from the Pedagogical Context and thus do not need it to be computed, but our study showed that the activity type had an effect on text length 5 , which means that depending on the activity type, teachers will be looking for texts of different lengths. A text property such as the number of representative elements of a notion obviously depends on the notion, which in turn is a direct consequence of the pedagogical goals of the teachers. Likewise, the number of representative elements of a notion considered appropriate by the teacher will depend on the activity type (e.g. 4 or 5 occurrences might be enough to introduce a notion, whereas to practice it under the form of a gap-filling exercise teachers seek an average of 11 occurrences) 6 . Finally, if the amount of unknown vocabulary/structures is a property of the text, it cannot be evaluated unless we link it with the audience with whom the activity is going to be used. It directly depends on the level of the students, which is also used differently afterwards to take a decision on whether or not to use the text: the higher the students' level the more tolerant the teachers will be regarding the presence of new vocabulary or structures (other than the object of the lesson). The activity type 7 and the proximity between the learners' language and the one that is taught also seem to have a significant effect on the tolerance to "newness" 8 .

The various tests we have performed on the above series of variables tend to show that the Pedagogical Context indeed influences text properties. We lack data to precisely characterize the relations between text properties and the PC, but we have been able to demonstrate their existence. The fragmentary knowledge we have come to gather has allowed us to explore examples of ways to take into account these concurrent influences that the Pedagogical Context has on text properties or on the way to act upon them. Interestingly, they all follow the same pattern, the properties which depend on the PC represent a sort of point of view of the text reflecting the problem of the teacher in his search. The Pedagogical Context, despite still representing the same entities in the real world, thus becomes, thanks to this switch of focus, "a paradigm casting its influence on the texts' properties".

Prism-Facet Based Model

The following model aims at taking into account the role of the Pedagogical Context in the evaluation of text properties, in order to propose help to the user in his selection task. It is a second version of the model which has been introduced in [START_REF] Loiseau | Model for pedagogical indexation of texts for language teaching[END_REF]. We will first describe this new version of the model, before we conclude by explaining the main differences between the two versions.

Recursive Definitions

The model is articulated around a couple of two indissociable notions: prism and facet. The prism insures that the properties are coherent in the way they are computed: "a prism is a mechanism -computerizable or not -associated to a property defined considering the texts' later exploitation in teaching, which allows to assign a value to this property for all text depending on a given pedagogical context" 9 . This definition allows us to highlight the link with pedagogical indexation: the definition of the prism depends on the needs of the teachers. This definition revolves around the difference between the conceptual level of the properties (class of properties) and their value (after instantiation). It is the essence of the prism which is the procedure which allows to make the transition from the first to the latter, when applying the concept to a given object (a text).

This leads us to the formalization of the property. Like the prism depends on the property it is meant to describe, the latter depends on its alter ego: "a text facet is a property of the text, which was defined with a view to its pedagogical exploitation in laguage teaching and for which an evaluation procedure can be defined and applied to any given couple (text, PC)" 9 .

Facet and Facet-Value

Before we go on and explore the consequences of the above definitions, we shall enter a terminological issue. Like the term "property", the word "facet" is, as we use it, polysemic. It can, depending on the context, designate either the concept or the attribute. For instance, "parallelism" is a property (concept) which is applicable to a certain type of object, and two planes (for instance the ground and a shelf) can have the property to be parallel. In the case of facets, we might use the word to designate either the property in its conceptual form -facet F i , text facet or just facet with no other precision -or its value for a given couple (text, PC) -a given text's facet, F i[CP ] (T ) -.

Constant Facets

From the point of view of the task of selection, the facet is the central entity on the conceptual level: in the planning process, the facets represent the notions upon which the teachers base their reasoning. A pedagogically indexed text base will not be able to take into account every teacher's individual point of view of every facet presented to them (or at least in the near future), the usability of such a system therefore relies on the prisms, which offer consistency through their mechanical, systematic, nature.

Going through some of the properties represented in figure 2 will allow us to explain further the model.

In figure 3, we indicate two examples of facets. The word count (F wrdCount ), which is exactly the same as the property in figure 2 and F author corresponding to the author of the text. The diagram also presents the values of these facet for a given text T . We introduce a functional notation based on the facets, even though strictly speaking the application that allows the computation of the 9 Translation of the definitions page 257 of [START_REF] Loiseau | Élaboration d'un modèle pour une base de textes indexée pédagogiquement pour l'enseignement des langues[END_REF]. values is defined inside the prisms (P wrdCount and P author , here), which precise the status of both entities:

the prism is a tool, materializing a process; the facet is a concept, a text property which has a value for every couple (text, PC).

The Pedagogical Context in the Model

In these first examples, the Pedagogical Context does not influence the value of the facet, which remains constant for a given text T for any PC. The aim of the model is to represent more complex properties. In figure 2, the number of representative elements is an example of such a facet. We represent it in figure 4. In this figure, a sole prism (P repE t ) is shown revealing two facets for each and no preterit, while T 2 contains 2 occurrences of haber que structures and 3 occurrences of preterit. figure 4 also represents the metaphor behind the name of prism and facets. In this metaphor the Pedagogical Context is a light cast on a text through a prism, thus revealing one of its facets. Consistently with its optical counterpart the prism divides the ray of the PC to keep only the components (frequencies) which are necessary to compute the value of the facet. Applied to a system which would assist the user in its selection task, the choice of prisms would have an expressive function: the user would only be asked to provide the PC components required by the prisms selected, thus providing them with means to describe the features of the teaching situation which are relevant for their search. The notation introduced in figure 4 is meant to render the status difference that exists in the model between PC and texts. It comes from the function of the model, namely to provide a framework for the implementation of a system of pedagogical indexation of texts for language learning. When performing a given iteration of the cycle described in 1, the PC is constant. Of course, for a task of text search to yield a text that is actually used in language learning, the Pedagogical Context might evolve during the various iterations of the cycle, but the PC will be constant inside a given selection subtask (for which a system is supposed to provide assistance) of a given cycle. Yet, each prism is evidently meant to be reusable from one cycle to the other and, by definition, has to be able to compute values of its associated facet for all PC 11 , hence the notation.

Prisms as a Means of Selection

By definition, indexation is essentially a description task [3, p. 419], yet it is aimed at allowing users to easily spot the texts that satisfy their needs, an objective of discrimination. In our case, part of the discrimination task, will not be automatable (e.g. based on interestingness or on the ability to give rise to a debate), the other part will mostly rely on constraining the tolerated values of facets. We have concluded that the better way to model that kind of constraint is to integrate it inside the Pedagogical Context and thus to take it into account in the value of the facets. A constrained version of a facet just adds a phase to the mechanism associated to its computation: after the value of the non-constrained avatar of the facet is computed a simple test instruction can be added, to return false if the constraint is not met and the value computed otherwise. In the constrained facet obtained, the expression of the constraint is part of the Pedagogical Context. Indeed, it is relevant to the problem of the 11 The implementation of certain facets, such as the number of occurrences of a given type of reported speech (direct, indirect, free indirect) would require manual intervention. All the same a mechanism can be defined in order for a human to annotate it (making it a facet). In a system, such a facet could be implemented on a set of texts. To make such texts coexist in a system with not annotated texts (treating it as a subcorpus), not applicable has to be an accepted value of a facet for a text in a certain pedagogical context.

teacher to decide, depending on the situation they want to use the text in, to exclude texts based on the value of facets such as its length.

We have been convinced of that when trying to consider higher level facets. For instance, one can imagine developing a prism which would allow to take into account the information we have gathered in our study regarding the activity type 12 : let F AN be the facet associated to this prism. F AN could be a boolean property telling whether a text is potentially suitable for an activity. The PC components used would be the activity type and the notion on which to work. The treatment would rely on the facets we have called F wrdCount and F repE t , fixing threshold values for each activity type (for instance a gap-filling exercise could not be longer than n words and could not contain less than, say, 5 occurrences of the notion). The constraint of F wrdCount and F repE t is directly derivable from the PC of F AN , which is a clue in the direction of our solution. But the decisive element is the fact that the threshold values that could be defined based on our study, despite lacking precision, come from teacher declarations. They were given the possibility to consider the criteria not pertinent, which means that it is very likely that it corresponds to a conscious feature expected in the text (if not explicitly evaluated) and thus qualify as a component of the Pedagogical Context. We do not consider this the only solution for devising a prism associated to F AN , but find it a consistent and practical one.

Facet vs Metadata

The notions of facet and prism allow to:

associate the concept (facet) and its modeling, making explicit the sense of the concept handled by the tool (prism); model the influence of the Pedagogical Context on the properties of the objects (texts).

These two characteristics distinguish facets from metadata. According to Bourda, metadata is information on objects which can be understood by humans and processed by software [7, pp. 116-117]. Both facets and metadata are therefore meant to propose a global point of view of an object rather than highlight information contained in the document (for instance F repE t means to provide a unique value associated to a structure, not to list all the occurrences of the structure). This similarity in the object of both notions is especially conspicuous for constant facets (cf. figure 3), which could be treated with metadata. But in the same way that constant functionals such as f (x) → 0 are a particular case of functionals, constant facets are only a particular case of a generic notion, which cannot be efficiently modeled with metadata.

This can be shown with the example of F repE t . In order to implement comparable description with metadata one would need to anticipate any possible request made by teachers. The text "Rabbits run." would require a descriptor saying it contains one occurrence of the form "rabbits" but also one occurrence of a form the lemma of which is "rabbit". The text should also be found if the teacher is looking for the form "run", but also if they are looking for a text containing occurrence of the present simple of the verb to run. We already have 4 descriptors indicating one occurrence of a given structure. But it might also be pertinent to know that the text contains one occurrence of "rabbits run", one of a form whose lemma is "rabbit" with the verb run, one occurrence of the form run associated to a plural subject, etc. And this only concerns a 2 word text.

When the Pedagogical Context offers a certain variety of potential values each of which should be associated with a value for each text -the fixedness of metadata requires to anticipate every single one of them, making it potentially hazardous or inefficient as far as storage is concerned (in our example, despite not being exhaustive, we have found 7 descriptors for a single facet and a two word text). Facets and prisms, by associating a property and a means to compute it introduce flexibility and dynamicity in the description of resources, which seem necessary to handle the notion of Pedagogical Context.

Towards Implementation

The example of F repE t leads to considering implementation options. Indeed, in order to introduce flexibility and to make computation of facet values possible, the information on the text provided by F repE t relies on information of the text. The computation of values of F repE t could be handled first by performing morphological analysis of the text, before using regular expressions on the resulting annotated version of the text. We will refer to the information of the text added by the first part of the process as underlying properties of the text. They are to be analyzed to provided information on the text, namely facet values.

When implementing this sequence of treatments in the perspective of indexing them, the addition of underlying properties (morphological analysis for F repE t ), which will be referred to as pre-processing, should be performed once and for all, when the text is added to the system. On the other hand, in order to introduce the dynamicity that metadata lacks, the computation of facet values, which we will refer to as "computation", needs to be performed when the user queries the system.

Prisms and functions

This decomposition of the prism's mechanism as a sequence of treatments grouped into pre-processing and computation allows us to answer the question asked by note 11 : when implementing a facet based system, a prism mechanism can require human pre-processing but computation needs to be fully automatable.

As far as implementing prisms, to provide evolutivity and take advantage of already developed tools (especially NLP procedures), we recommend reusing the concept of function as defined in MIRTO [START_REF] Antoniadis | Modélisation de l'intégration de ressources TAL pour l'apprentissage des langues : la plateforme MIRTO[END_REF]. According to this point of view a prism is linked to a facet and composed of two sequences of functions: pre-processing and computation (cf. figure 5).

Views

In figure 5 prisms are not the only entity composed of functions. As an extension of the indexation system and a means for the user to interact with the system we introduce the notion of views. Considering the complexity of certain properties which intervene in the process of searching for a text to use in language teaching and the difficulty to achieve reliability in NLP when moving away from the form, a realist approach needs to acknowledge the amount of work left to the user during the phase of evaluation. Among other considerations, the fact that "100% reliability is, and may stay in the future, an unattainable goal. Therefore it is more realistic to stress on 'assisted' rather than 'fully automated' approaches" [START_REF] Blanchard | Mastering noise and silence in learner answers processing: simple techniques for analysis and diagnosis[END_REF] is at the origin of Blanchard et al.'s "didactic triangulation strategy". Adapting it to our problem, views come as a means to assist language teacher in the evaluation phase. They are meant to allow the user to access to some of the underlying information, in order to help them in their evaluation, adopting a qualitative point of view where prisms are quantitative. The Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks. She went for a walk in the forest. Pretty soon, she came upon a house. She knocked and, when no one answered, she walked right in. At the table in the kitchen, there were three bowls of porridge. Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl. "This porridge is too hot!" she explained. So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl. "This porridge is too cold," she said. So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.

Text List

Fig. 6. Example of views linked to F repE t for PC preterit For instance in figure 6, a user looking for a text to create a structural exercise on the preterit tense in English might want to make sure that, beyond the number of occurrences, the text contains irregular verbs including "to be". To discard a text the list view would be sufficient and might be more convenient than the highlighted view (see figure 6). The latter would offer to the teacher an in context glimpse at the verbs, that might be preferable to make sure that the resulting activity would not prove too difficult (or easy) for the learners.

The notion of view has not been fully formalized yet. The link with facets has to be specified further: are some of the views completely independent from any facet (and thus prism), relying on their own pre-processing or should they all be linked to a facet the way the views in figure 6 are to F repE t ? Should the ones that are linked to specific facets solely be linked to them by their common pre-processing or should they before all be linked to a prism ?

Conclusion

We introduced this model as a second version of a previous work [START_REF] Loiseau | Model for pedagogical indexation of texts for language teaching[END_REF]. This new version is not only justified by a concern to make it clearer: despite being similar in philosophy, it comes after the theorization of the notion of Pedagogical Context. Even though present in the first version of the model, PC was roughly defined. The work on the notion has allowed us to build on sounder basis the notions of facet and prism, which have been subject to semantical alteration. The prism was in the first version a global module of the system handling all processes. It is now explicitly linked to a facet, thus underlying the tight link between the two of them.

Despite its simplicity, prism P wrdCount exemplifies this relation, the kind of approximation inherent to the task at hand and the usefulness of NLP in the implementation of such a system. Depending on the capacities of the preprocessing 13 the definition of the facet can be altered (or the other way around). The word count can be based on a list of separators between which lie the words to be counted. In this case, the French "chou-fleur " could be two words, while it actually designates a precise object (cauliflower) 14 . The decision of which kind of treatment to use can come from a didactic question: one wants to evaluate the length of the text, in order to provide an idea of size of the text, considering compounds as separate words might not be a problem. But one might consider that the word count should be as consistent with the linguistic definition of word as possible. Yet, what interests teachers could actually be to consider as words only non function words in order to get a better grasp at the quantity of vocabulary necessary to understand the text. On the other hand the choice of what the facet actually means might come from purely practical reasons: the available word count function works with no dictionary whatsoever and cannot distinguish function words from others or even identify a compound. In all possible solutions, the link between the concept behind the facet and the prism should remain explicit and unaltered, might it mean modifying the prism, the facet or both... The meaning of view has also changed (the view of this version of the model corresponds more or less to the visualization of the former) leading to alteration of the implementation. The questions raised in the previous section by this extension to the evaluation task are among the various implementation questions at hand. We have yet to implement a prototype of this version of the model. It will undoubtedly raise more questions, such as the storage of all the information added to documents, which can be partially answered by the many works in the field of multi-structured documents (see for instance [START_REF] Portier | Multi-structured documents and the emergence of annotation vocabularies[END_REF]).

But one key issue in our opinion is that of the definition of a framework for prisms in order to make their integration and development easier. This issue could lead us to consider the problem of the system's adaptation to its users up to allowing them to create their own prisms and facets. Indeed we have seen with F AN that a new prism could with didactic added value could be implemented with very little treatment (threshold values definition) beyond the grouping of two existing prisms. Careful analysis and specification of implementation consequences of the properties of prisms might constitute a viable path toward end-user programming functionalities [START_REF] Nardi | A Small Matter of Programming : Perspectives On End User Computing[END_REF] through the creation of compound prisms. This would not have been a perspective with the monolithic prism of the previous version of the model.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Yinger's model adapted to text search

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Influence of the pedagogical context on the attribution of text properties

6

  ANOVA: F (127) = 4, 739 ; p <, 005. Post-hoc tests are significant when comparing "introduction of a new notion" with "comprehension gap-filling exercise" and "introduction of a new syntactic notion" with "form aimed gap-filling exercises" [10, pp. 239-240]. 7 χ 2 (10) = 32, 2 ; p <, 001 [10, pp. 240-243]. 8 81.3% of teachers taking into account their learners first language considered that closer languages allow more tolerance[10, pp. 243-244] and 71.4% consider that the higher the level of the learners the more unknown vocabulary/structures they will accept[10, pp. 244].

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Prism examples and values for the corresponding facets (PC independent)

FFig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Prism examples and corresponding facets for 4 different (text, PC) couples text. Each of the two facets of T 1 and T 2 corresponds to a different Pedagogical Context for which both text could be compared, in order to come to a decision. In the example of figure 4, text T 1 contains 4 occurrence of haber que structures 10 10 Expression duty in Spanish: Para soñar hay que dormir (to dream, one has to sleep),Habrá que resistir un tiempo más (One will have to go on resisting for a while).

Fig. 5 .

 5 Fig. 5. Proposed general architecture for a facet based system

97,3% of the teachers who answered the question declare they consider that a given text can be used with various goals in different contexts and 94,5% of them (92% of our the sample) declare having done so.

Without preconceptions this phase would consist in a random selection of texts.

In order to avoid exceedingly numerous repetitions, we will either refer to it using "PC" or its complete form "Pedagogical Context".

Due to room restrictions we cannot include detailed statistics in this paper, they are available in section

5.3 (pp. 231-245) of [10] though. 5 ANOVA: F (143) = 3, 362 ; p <, 01. Post-hoc tests are significant when comparing "comprehension activity" with the various forms of "gap-filling exercises" [10, pp. 238-239].

The actual implementation of such a facet would require much more experimentation: we only have declared practices, which would lack precision.

"Facets" and "Prisms" as Means for Pedagogical Indexation

In this case the pre-processing actually could evaluate the property, due to its independence from the PC.

[START_REF] Pernin | Normes et standards pour la conception, la production et l'exploitation des EIAH[END_REF] '-' should be a separator in French since it is added when the verb and subject are inverted to form a question: Dort-elle ? Oui, elle dort comme une masse. (Is she sleeping? Yes she is sleeping like a log)

Appendix: acronyms