98

A considerable proportion of employees (one out of five working in industry in 1996) no longer works solely on their company’s premises. This observation tends to raise the question (once again) of the place of work in the production process in the geographical sense of the term. Furthermore, this decoupling of the work activity and the workplace (firms) would appear to suggest that we should enlarge the range of spatial functioning indicators for economic activity by completing the traditional geographic analysis of firms with that of the geography of work. The article proposes a general framework that explains this decoupling phenomenon based on the notion of negative indirect action and it offers a statistical description of these forms of work which are no longer carried out solely on firm’s premises, based on data from the Changements Organisationnels et Informatisation survey (Organizational and IT changes).