Contenu du sommaire : Temps et pouvoir

This article is based upon a survey of personal recollections of young people born in large families and of their parents. It suggests that the temporal socialization of children within their family may or may not contribute to the acquisition of behavioral dispositions aligned with the expectations of education institutions. It distinguishes between two types of intra-family socialization patterns that are socially differentiated. By observing how their parents act and by acting themselves, the children from upper middle-class families who took part in our survey learn to plan and anticipate activities, and to rationalize the use of their time. By being subjected to explicit rules and predictable, deferred and stable sanctions, they get also used to reflect upon their past actions and to anticipate the future. By contrast, children from lower middle-class families develop a more unpredictable and immediate relationship to time. For this group, more than the first, limitations – and in particular temporal limitations – therefore tend to be vested in their close relatives rather than in rules and objective arrangements. They are also dependent on the context within which the children act. This fosters a tendency to expect these limitations to manifest externally rather than a capacity to anticipate and regulate their own behavior accordingly.

This article analyzes cultural inequalities in terms of access to art museums from the perspective of time. It shows the importance that the control of time has in the production of artistic competence and of a legitimate relation to art. It draws this argument by building on a database developed in the context of a dissertation which combined ethnographic observation in a room of the musée des beaux-arts in Lyon and biographical analysis of the occasional and regular visitors of art museums. The population under study comprised individuals from the upper middle class and from the cultural fringes of the lower middle class. The survey reveals two dimensions closely correlated with the relationship to time : planning (the agenda of visits made over the long term) and selectivity (the organization of a visit in the short term). It also reveals two different polarities in the relationship to the time allocated to visits : in the case of visitors driven by cultural curiosity, visits were scarce, long, and extensive ; in the case of visitors with a strong artistic competence, visits were frequent, rather short, and intensive, in the sense that they were freed from the linear structure of the visit proposed by the museum. This data points to the development of these temporal dispositions in primary socialization. The article thus suggests that the development of routines, and therefore of a control of time, plays an important role in the social differentiation of attitudes towards art.

This article illustrates the heterogeneity of the time that prescribing physicians dedicate to female representatives of the pharmaceutical industry who showcase medicines. It focuses on the relation between this temporal economy on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the position and the social characteristics of the physicians, their degree of acceptance of this advertisement, and their endowment in economic and social capital. It describes an interaction that involves a respected, powerful and essentially male profession, and pharmaceutical representatives who possess less capital than their interlocutors. Using a statistical analysis (regression and homogeneity analysis) complemented by ethnographic material, the author shows that the frequency of the visits is a more discriminating variable than their duration, in particular – and counter-intuitively – when it comes to internally differentiating the population of the physicians in terms of their opinions about pharmaceutical advertisement and in terms of their capacity to convert the time spent listening to the representatives in economic capital. The article thus adds to the literature on the temporalities of work, and sheds light on the exchanges between different forms of capital that take place in the background of the commercialization of a public health good.

Control over the public and media cycle is a key dimension of politics. It presupposes a strategic relationship to time, the acquisition of which is a fundamental aspect of politics as a profession. This article suggests as much by scrutinizing the agendas of the two first French prime ministers of the Fifth Republic, Michel Debré and Georges Pompidou. To become prime minister means first and foremost experiencing the specific temporality of power, characterized by uncertainty and emergency, which Michel Debré and Georges Pompidou were not equally well prepared to master. One then must establish one's authority over the other members of the government and the parliamentary majority. This enterprise of domination also entailed a strategic use of the agenda, which takes different forms depending on the forms of capital these two prime ministers could muster.

Why are there school holidays in the summer and why did they become a common principle for the organization and predictability of social and family life ? This is the kind of questions one ignores when the discussion of summer holidays is treated only as a matter of “scholastic rhythms” and political will. This article focuses on the 1880-1914 period, when the school holidays calendar, by pitting the educational ideal of Republicans against the tradition of agricultural work, became a matter of intense national concern. Drawing upon the Durkheimian sociology of social temporalities and the sociology of the state understood as a field of struggles, this article analyzes the battle waged by the educational administration, local politicians, the medical profession and the national daily press around the issue of the dates and legitimate use of holidays. The contested process of institution and national homogenization of the summer holidays calendar – during which these holidays increased in duration and moved from the Fall to the Summer – helps account for the historical movement of school enrolment of French society and the practical ways in which official temporal categories structuring social life were created and imposed.

Starting in the late 1970s, the gradual dismantling of the welfare state has deeply transformed the temporal power that the social programs targeting populations durably marginalized from higher education and the professional market exerted on their beneficiaries. In a context of reduced social expenses in the social work and health sectors, open-term subsidies are criticized by social workers in the field, whether they are in charge of the social and professional assistance to the beneficiaries of the revenu de solidarité active (active solidarity income) or of the assistance to mentally disabled persons. The former point at the “perverse effects” of assistance and aid. The latter criticize the long-term commitment to an institution, which is increasingly limited to the most severe forms of mental disabilities. However, several ethnographic studies of the programs targeting long-term unemployed individuals or mentally disabled people suggest that the control of time remains crucial in the management of these deviant populations. This article focuses on the new forms of temporal control built into assistance programs and on the new uses of time manifested in the care of populations durably marginalized from higher education and the job market.

What does waiting do ? Rather than analyzing waiting in a purely negative way, as a deprivation, Javier Auyero emphasizes the productive dimensions of this situation : it fashions behaviors and confines claims, primarily among the poor, who are more exposed than others to this asymmetric situation. In an interview that covers the major aspects of an ethnographic research conducted in the social services of Buenos Aires, the author of Patients of the State shows how waiting, made visible in the numerous lines outside the social service offices of the city, contributes to the production of social order among socially excluded populations.