This article deals with the relationship between a certain approach to work (as "industrious activity") and the manipulation of the essential coefficients of economic and social management. We suggest that there is a need to equate these two things more deeply because of the difficulties that are increasingly appearing in the so-called "service sector". From this point of view, the growth of services could be an opportunity to generally rethink the way management coefficients are designed. Clearly, in order to make use of the notion of activity it will be necessary to carry out a brief investigation of the history of this concept, particularly after its ambivalent use by Marx. Finally, in the text, we expand the idea of "values without dimensions" in so far as the articulation - always able to be renegotiated and in a very problematic way - between quantifiable values and the so called values without dimensions (that operate initially in a universe alien to measurement instruments) seems to us an essential and critical point in the matrix of historicity in the social space. And there we find once more the operational challenges of these conceptual questions: what impact will they have on the type of management that experiments with new ways of building economic coefficients, as it considers these "complex negotiations of efficacy-efficiency"?
work activity; service sector; work management