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Research conducted at the Union des Caisses Nationales de Sécurité Sociale ( UCANSS), a little-known component of France’s social security institution, and focused on how occupational trainees there learn to use a computer tool that will enable them to work at a distance (teleworking), shows that analysis of the processes by which agents appropriate communication technologies needs to take into account the long-term history of the institution those agents are operating in. A set of tensions related to the political and legal origins of UCANSS and the processes the state uses to homogenize the architecture of the general social security scheme are making it difficult to routinize use of this tool, a tool initially put in place to decompartmentalize the system. In fact, trainees are not at all likely to use this transversal technology, preferring channels inherited from a period characterized by autonomous local organizations.