Dialogical activity and micro-improvisations in the career counseling interview. We advocate the utility of considering the ordinary interactions of career counseling as an activity which needs to be analysed in reference to theories of the activity, to situated action and to conversational analysis. Our position may be summarized as follows: 1) counselling is always improvised to some extent (micro-improvisations); 2) this has to be the case, due to the properties of the situation, namely the asymmetry of the relationship between the consultant and the counsellor, the former being asked to provide the "materials" upon which the latter interactionally performs his/her professional acts; 3) so whilst they both have to improvise, they do so in different ways, because their respective uncertainties have different sources: the consultant never knows exactly what he/she is supposed to say in a given situation and the counsellor never knows what effects his/her interventions will have; 4) the success of a vocational counselling interview therefore depends on the degree of adjustment the partners will be able to reach in a joint process seen as a "dialogical improvisation". We will then focus on the vocational counselling activity as a joint process in which takes place during the course of situated interactions, with the objective of gaining a better understanding of the pragmatic processes involved in the monitoring of the interaction progress. Empirical data will be taken into account through the analysis of a certain number of excerpts from a corpus of interviews carried out by young vocational counsellors. KEYWORDS! ! activity, conversational analysis, dialogical interactions, career counseling interview, improvisation Les entretiens de conseil en orientation et, plus largement, les entretiens menés dans le cadre de la gestion de carrière ou de l'insertion font aujourd'hui l'objet de prescriptions multiples dont la formulation oscille entre recommandations générales et préconisations précises pouvant prendre la forme de scripts conversationnels. Certaines de ces prescriptions, définies dans des cadres légaux et souvent spécifiées en contexte institutionnel, portent sur le format et la place de l'entretien dans des prestations individuelles comme le bilan de compétences, le parcours d'orientation professionnelle individuel et la validation des acquis de l'expérience (Delory-Momberger, 2007 ; Lacaille, 2012 ; Mayen, 2009). D'autres sont inscrites dans des réflexions épistémo-philosophico-morales propres à l'orientation et portent sur sa finalité, ses objets et son déroulement idéal (Guichard, 2008 ; Savickas, 2011). Constatant que l'entretien constitue, et de loin, la méthode la plus utilisée dans le champ de l'orientation au point de faire figurer les métiers du conseil vocationnel parmi ceux qui s'accomplissent essentiellement au moyen de la parole, il nous apparaît utile de chercher à Olry-Louis, I. Activité dialogique en entretien d'orientation Activités, Volume 12 numéro 1 Olry-Louis, I. Activité dialogique en e...