2026
Journal article
Professor
Marie-Noëlle Albert
Research rooted in human experience, in relation, and in complexity.
The essentials
Understanding the person in all their complexity, in order to transform management, organizations and the making of knowledge.
Marie-Noëlle Albert is a professor of workplace persons management at the Université du Québec à Rimouski. She was a manager first, for about ten years, before turning that experience into an object of science.
It is this displacement — from practice towards research, without ever disowning practice — that gives her work its signature, and that explains why the question of the validity of knowledge drawn from experience has occupied her for twenty years.
Three ideas
A theoretical and methodological contribution that can be named
These three notions are not keywords: they are constructed propositions, published and discussed, which can be followed from one article to the next.
Trajectory
Twenty years of research, one question asked five times
From work engagement to artificial intelligence, each period takes up the one before it and displaces it. This is the recursivity of complexity thinking, applied to a career.
2003 – 2009
How can engagement be understood as it is actually lived?
- Interactionism
- The concept of “self”
- Narratives
- Visualization tools
- Systemic modelling
A doctoral thesis, and a way of building generic knowledge out of field experience.
2010 – 2014
On what conditions does a practitioner's account become scientific knowledge?
- Pragmatic constructivism
- Reflexivity
- Autobiographical research
- Experiential testimonio
An explicit epistemology for legitimating knowledge drawn from experience — the prefiguration of autopraxeography.
2015 – 2018
How do we stop treating human beings as resources?
- Person
- Vulnerability
- Professional judgement
- Dialogue
- Community of persons
Persons management as an avowed theoretical proposition, and autopraxeography named as such.
2019 – 2023
How do we act within diversity and within complexity?
- Inclusion
- Immigration
- Solidarity
- Resilience
- Ingenium
- Dialogic
Regional applications, university programmes, and a thematic issue on the complexity paradigm.
2024 – today
How can human action be sustained through contemporary transformations?
- Benevolence
- Reverse mentoring
- Irrationality
- Human-AI coopetition
- Diverse persons
An extension to the work that is coming: artificial intelligence, transmission between generations, regulation through benevolence.
Recent work
What she is publishing at the moment
2026
Journal article
2025
Journal article
2025
Journal article
Method
Autopraxeography
A first-person research method: a practitioner builds scientific knowledge out of their own experience, through a play of successive reflexivities and a dialogue with theories drawn from several disciplines.
This is not autobiography. It is an equipped approach for turning a lived practice into legitimate knowledge — including, and perhaps above all, a difficult practice.
A sign of vitality
Two of the master’s theses she has supervised carry the words “une autopraxéographie” in their very titles. She did not merely propose a method: she passed it on.
Proposition
A person
is not
a resource.
The vocabulary of the “human resource” is a category error, and it has practical consequences: it produces the organizations it describes. A person is singular, irreducible to their skills, and cannot be managed like a stock of goods.
The proposition has been carried since the manifesto article co-signed with Michèle Fortier in 2015, then extended in the notion of a community of persons: an organization where dialogue and mutual recognition are not decorative extras but conditions of functioning.
Network
Reliance en Complexité
A transdisciplinary scholarly network devoted to spreading Edgar Morin’s complexity thinking, born of a meeting between Edgar Morin and Régis Meissonier in March 2019. Marie-Noëlle Albert is listed by name among the network’s members; the network devoted a video portrait to her.
A clarificationA member — not a founding member. The network calls its members “reliantes” and “reliants”.
Video portrait
Portrait of a “reliante” — Marie-Noëlle Albert
A video portrait produced by the Reliance en Complexité network, in which Marie-Noëlle Albert presents her thinking in her own words. It is the most substantial audiovisual document available about her.
The most current
Benevolence, transmission, artificial intelligence
The most recent work extends the same architecture: what human beings do that nothing can replace, and on what conditions an organization takes care of it.
She supervises master’s theses and doctoral dissertations in persons management.
Marie-Michèle Couture, whom she supervised at the master’s level in 2012 and then at the doctoral level in 2021, is today a professor at UQAR and her co-author. It is probably the best possible argument for anyone looking for a research supervisor.