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While digital labour platforms are booming, their ability to constitute a sustainable alternative to the managerial firm and to salaried work is questionable. To date, this debate has been approached mainly from legal or political angles, and the organizational sustainability of such platforms remains underexplored. We respond to calls to study more specifically the cognitive capabilities of platforms by mobilizing knowledge-based theories of the firm. We contribute to the literature in three ways: (1) we introduce the concept of 'cognitive sustainability', which we define as the capacity to ensure the integration, conservation and creation of knowledge; (2) we develop a set of propositions aimed at identifying the activities that platforms are most likely to carry out in a cognitively sustainable way; (3) we argue for the possibility of an increased hybridization of digital labour platforms to perform complex activities. Mobilizing knowledge-based theories of the firm to explore new objects such as platforms and taking such hybridization processes into account adds to this body of literature by extending its application domain and taking a more dynamic perspective.

International audience ; In this paper, we contribute to the study of the heterogeneity of professional service firms through an extreme case, by investigating the conditions of the existence and sustainability of democratic forms of organizing in a professional setting. To do so, we studied DemEx, a long-standing mid size consultancy, over the course of three years and three consecutive intervention researches. At the time, DemEx was confronted to dramatic changes in client demands, which led to both a competency and a governance crisis, questioning the democratic essence of the company's functioning. We show how the crisis was overcome thanks to a move from an "individual craft" model to a refashioned organization obtained through the development of career management, the creation of expertise groups and executive governance which also redefined and redynamised the democratic functioning. We finally discuss the conditions of DemEx's alternative organization and its sustainability through the crisis and shed light on five key factors: environment, strategy, history, membership and capacities to organize exploration and re-design.

International audience ; In this paper, we contribute to the study of the heterogeneity of professional service firms through an extreme case, by investigating the conditions of the existence and sustainability of democratic forms of organizing in a professional setting. To do so, we studied DemEx, a long-standing mid size consultancy, over the course of three years and three consecutive intervention researches. At the time, DemEx was confronted to dramatic changes in client demands, which led to both a competency and a governance crisis, questioning the democratic essence of the company's functioning. We show how the crisis was overcome thanks to a move from an "individual craft" model to a refashioned organization obtained through the development of career management, the creation of expertise groups and executive governance which also redefined and redynamised the democratic functioning. We finally discuss the conditions of DemEx's alternative organization and its sustainability through the crisis and shed light on five key factors: environment, strategy, history, membership and capacities to organize exploration and re-design.

In the context of management and organisational literature, boredom has largely been seen in individual, psychological and negative terms, both for those experiencing it and for organisational outcomes. Through selective references to a wider sociological, historical and philosophical set of perspectives, we make a case here for refiguring boredom at work as a more relational and political notion. Rather than being seen as negative or trivial, we suggest that it is central to the concerns of organisation studies (and more widely) as a ambivalent everyday condition and experience. In particular, boredom is intimately linked to the project and promises of modernity and its associated effects on time, from factory industrialisation to contemporary work platforms. Both in terms of philosophical argument and applied fields such as art, literature, architecture and design, we suggest that boredom is both emancipatory/productive and alienating. Such an understanding establishes opportunities for research which would be central to the experience of contemporary paid employment and wider experience.