Drafting the ‘time space’. Attitudes towards time among prep school students

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the ‘time space’, defined following Bourdieu as a set of distinct and coexisting attitudes toward time related to individuals’ social positions. Based on an ethnographic study of French ‘prep schools’ (classes préparatoires aux Grandes écoles), it sheds light on the specific temporal culture of these schools (the routinization of urgency and ‘temporal panic’) but shows the existence of different attitudes toward time among students. These variations can then be explained by the volume of capital possessed by students, thus differentiating those who can ‘master time’ and those who ‘suffer’ it. But the article also aims at unveiling ‘timestyles’ which, like lifestyles, would be connected to the compositions of students’ capital (economic versus cultural) and not only to its volume.

KEYWORDS:

• Habitus
• time
• elite education
• social space

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the organizers (Dieter Vandebroeck and Annick Prieur) and the participants of the meeting of the Network for the Studies of Cultural Distinctions and Social Differentiation [SCUD] in September 2014 at the Free University of Brussels [VUB], where I presented an earlier version of this article. I am particularly indebted to the two discussants of the paper, Mike Savage and Virgilio Pereira. I also want to thank the guest editor (Dieter Vandebroeck, again!) and the anonymous reviewers of European Societies for their great help in improving the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Muriel Darmon is a sociologist and a Senior Research Fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the CESSP-CSE (EHESS, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). She studies socialization processes in various contexts (weight-loss groups, hospitals and schools). She is the author of Becoming anorexic: a sociological study (Routledge), La Socialisation (Armand Colin) and Classes préparatoires: la fabrique d’une jeunesse dominante (La Découverte).

Notes

1 Studies conducted in the United States during the 50's and 60's on the influence of social class on time orientation (such as Coser, 1963; LeShan, 1952; Schneider, Kysgaard, 1953 …) also concentrated on class-based ways to envision the future (Lallement 2008: 11, 19).

2 I have chosen to keep the French term of ‘Grandes ecoles’, as is often done in English, but to switch from the usual ‘preparatory classes’ to ‘prep schools’ to translate ‘classes préparatoires’.

3 Only a few students were coded as ‘intermediate’ since their attitude towards time was distinctly heterogeneous (fitting some criteria of total mastery and lacking one or two). For an analysis of these cases, see (Darmon 2013: 172 sq.)

4 Since my own research did not include a study of family socialization, I have to rely on previous sociological studies to give an idea of the temporal socialization processes that took place and can account for what I observed. But as noted in section 1, not only are those studies rare, but they focus on working-class families, with the exception of Lareau's ethnography (2002). This is why I take the liberty of using this American study, which I believe to be applicable to socialization in France since what Lareau writes on the attitudes towards institutions and towards time in American working classes is coherent with French studies on the same subjects. I furthermore go as far as to equate Lareau's ‘middle class’ characterization of bourgeois families to families I deemed ‘upper-class’ because I do think they belong to the same quadrant of the social space, respectively in France and America (double-income, professional families, with university diplomas and upper-class cultural practices).

5 As shown by a principal component analysis based on all the students enrolled in economic and scientific prep schools in 2004–2005 in France (Bouhia 2005: 4), which have been confirmed by different studies (for a review see Darmon 2013).