The interwar period was characterized by the emergence of a “rationalization” movement in French industry and other sectors of the economy. While the actual extension of the various rationalization doctrines remains a matter of debate among historians, this article focuses primarily on the reactions of workers in the workplace. The relationship between new forms of work organization and workers’ working conditions has been studied in a variety of ways; the present study focuses on four elements in particular: the development of timekeeping practices and the responses they provoked; industrial discipline; boredom at work; and finally, the application of these new organizational methods in some commercial enterprises. Rather than opposing blue-collar and white-collar workers, the aim is to emphasize the similarities between their work experiences and to offer a vision “from below” of the rationalization of French companies in the interwar.
The article examines the creation of the Paris municipal police in 2021, focusing on the strategic use of history and temporalities of reform within the political debate. Rather than reconstructing an “objective” trajectory, it shows how political and administrative actors produce competing narratives that organize the past, frame the present, and shape possible futures. Drawing on interviews and archival analysis, the article identifies several registers in the ways narratives are used to make sense of and legitimize reform. It thus contributes to a discursive sociology of policy change, showing that “path dependence” operates less as an institutional constraint than as a strategic resource, produced through narratives that legitimize reform and redistribute responsibility.
As a professional group, farmers are characterized by a strong pattern of occupational inheritance through intergenerational farm succession. However, pathways into farming and the profiles of those entering the profession today are becoming increasingly diverse. Drawing on a national quantitative survey of more than 3,000 individuals who entered farming in 2018 or 2022, as well as a qualitative interview study with 23 newly established farmers, this article analyzes the steps preceding entry into the profession and their temporalities. Using sequence analysis, it highlights the diversity of pathways into farming, reflecting the fact that new entrants come from a variety of experiences, both within and outside agriculture. It presents a typology of these trajectories, then proceeds to show how these routes into the profession are more broadly embedded in life-course trajectories.
Based on two studies, involving biographical interviews with managers of wine-producing and equestrian structures, this article explores the similarities in the temporal regime of job, which determines the perceived struggles and impact on health. It demonstrates that the temporal arrangements of tasks performed are more important than their formal characteristics in determining the conditions of work sustainability. More specifically, the analysis reveals that the work organisation of the two categories of managers studies combines and interwines three common temporal environments: the ‘living’, the ‘market’ and the ‘structure’. Although these managers have autonomy at work, an imbalance in these environments creates the perception of densification of tasks, blurred boundaries between social and working time, and cognitive overload. This results in fatigue, which transforms these perceived struggles into risks of accident.
Goat dairy farms in Corsica rely on rustic animals that graze on areas of spontaneous vegetation to produce milk, which is then processed into cheese and sold locally. Farmers, working alone or in pairs, face time constraints in carrying out all of these tasks. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted in ten recently established farms, we highlight these pressures and the solutions implemented to reduce some of them. Farmers are reducing the amount of time spent on some tasks and introducing flexibility to organize their time on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis. We also identify the principles that structure these time constraints. The organization of marketing, the coordination of professional and private time, and the passage of the herd through the milking parlor in the morning and evening are at the heart of this structure. Regulating these time constraints requires planning, but this is disrupted by the vagaries of the weather, health issues, and above all the behavior of the Corsican goat breed. These disruptions are accepted by farmers as characteristic of their breeding practices.
Based on a survey conducted in the Lille metropolitan area among agricultural producers marketing their products through short supply chains, as well as diversification advisors, this article examines the time constraints resulting from the interconnection between production, processing, and sales activities. This extension of agricultural work, resulting from the limited role of industrial and commercial intermediaries in these modes of exchange, is primarily synonymous with an additional workload, which translates into a demand for time that diversification advisors draw producers’ attention to. However, producers are also exposed to conflicts of availability, as productive and commercial activities take place in distinct time and space. Finally, the timing of marketing tends to alter the pace of agricultural work upstream in order to limit the effects of these contradictions. These relationships of dependency play out differently depending on the nature of the products sold and the type of short supply chains used, and we will mainly consider the cases of market gardening and dairy farming.
This article explores the notion of the season in the daily lives of migrant farm workers in Provence. On the basis of long-term research carried out among various seasonal foreign populations and an ongoing ethnography in the Beaucaire region (Gard), we seek to understand how the season is a temporality that structures both the work and the social reproduction strategies of these workers. This work follows on from our earlier work, in which we laid the foundations for a constructivist approach to the notion of seasonality within the workings of intensive agricultural production and temporary labour migration, and analysed how the reinvestment of social time by Latin American workers settled in Provence constitutes a mechanism for overcoming temporary work. Here we return to the idea that the season is in fact a black box that must be entered in order to understand what is at stake beyond the obvious and common sense, an organizing principle of agricultural work that articulates dimensions that are at once agronomic, economic and legal. To this end, we propose to develop a four-stage approach: firstly, we will attempt to deconstruct the notion of “season” by showing that, contrary to a naturalist vision of things, it is in fact a hybrid category that is both operative and functional; we will then describe how the season produces major changes in Beaucaire, both in the agricultural labour market and in the housing and off-the-job activities of Latino seasonal workers; we will then analyse the specific features of the seasonal fixed-term contract and look at how it is used in Provençal industrial agriculture; finally, we will focus on the issue of unemployment, in order to understand why access to this additional off-season income is both central and problematic for this seasonal population.
This article analyses an unprecedented initiative implemented within a self-managed agricultural collective in Tuscany, aimed at remunerating three types of activities: baking, brewing, and winemaking. The first part shows how complex the formalisation and accounting of labour prove to be in spaces, where the boundary between “work” and “non-work” is (intentionally) blurred. Clock-watching puts into tension, on the one hand, the inhabitants’ self-management and anti-productivist ideals and, on the other, their desire to make a living from farm work without relying on external waged employment. The second part describes the temporal and material organisation of these three productive sectors. The third and fourth parts analyse the debates and conflicts generated by this project of internal salarisation: first around the status of domestic labour and then around choices concerning organisation, productivity, formalisation, and the legalisation of agricultural work, which divide individuals according to their levels of precarity and economic dependence. The article thus shows how the study of the formalisation of working time in neo-peasant collectives reveals the power relations that structure these spaces and crystallise around issues of gender and class equality.
How do farmers think about time? What are the categories and measures of time used by them in their daily life? Does the concept of working time have any meaning for this group, which declares the longest working weeks of all socio-professional categories? This article begins by exploring the ways in which farmers responded to a survey conducted in 2024, and how these ways of responding can shed light on their limited dispositions to declare “working hours” in abstracto. The second part of the article analyzes interviews in which farmers were asked to describe a day of their daily lives. It gives evidence of a recurring narrative pattern, built on an alternation between “rigid” times associated with tasks that cannot be postponed, and more indetermined times that can be allocated to a vast array of heterogeneous tasks. Farmers therefore use vernacular categories (“bricole”, “relâche”, “paperasse”, or “causette”), and, at times, adopt institutional categories (such as “astreinte”). Globally, farmers’ perception of time appears to be strongly associated with the tasks they perform. This is reflected by a language deeply anchored in the experience of practice, contrary to the abstract notion of “working hours”.
This article reexamines the creation of the French Conservative Senate (1799–1814) by situating it within the broader framework of “a far‑reaching reorganization of the societal semantics of time” (Rosa, 2013), a phenomenon that characterized 18th‑ and 19th‑century Europe. The invention of the Conservative Senate — established after the coup d’état led by Napoleon Bonaparte and Emmanuel Sieyès — is deeply interwoven with layered meanings and temporal references. Two temporalities intersect: first, the urgency to legitimize the coup by delegitimizing the previous regime; and second, the transcendence of political actions, whose significance can be understood through the shift toward modern forms of the regime of historicity of agents (Hartog, 2003). Consequently, the Senate’s function was to stabilize a social order perceived as unstable. As the configuration evolved, Napoleon Bonaparte gradually monopolized the temporal justifications of power, to the detriment of a Senate that was materially incapable of claiming control over the nation’s destiny.
Commonly used in emergency medicine since the 1970s, the concept of Golden Hour involves ensuring that a victim is hospitalized within an hour of her/his accident to increase her/his chances of survival and full recovery. As a debate in the global scholarly community, it nevertheless makes it possible to highlight the role of measurement and time management in the organization of relief. This article analyzes the modalities by which the French public authorities produced a discourse on vital emergency and defined intervention standards, at the call of medical institutions and by observing local experiences from the end of the 1940s. By combining institutional and medical sources, the aim is to study how the temporalities of the body are articulated with those of public action, by bringing into play the question of social rhythms linked to the perception of emergency as a medical and political phenomenon.
L’idée que la grossesse puisse être formalisée par un calendrier spécifique, séquencé en mois et en trimestres, marqué par des seuils (seuil des 3 mois, période de réalisation des échographies, seuil de viabilité du fœtus, etc.) et délimité par une prévision de l’accouchement au jour près semble aujourd’hui aller de soi. Cet article interroge cette évidence en examinant la mise en nombre du temps de la grossesse sous l’angle de la quantification telle qu’elle a été définie par A. Desrosières : quelles sont les conventions qui président à la quantification du temps de la grossesse ? Quelles en sont les logiques sous-jacentes ? Quels sont les effets de ces opérations de quantification ? À partir d’une enquête qualitative menée dans deux maternités hospitalières franciliennes et d’une étude de la littérature secondaire, l’article retrace la généalogie de la mise en nombre de la grossesse depuis le début du xxe siècle et son évolution, puis il analyse le caractère normatif de cette quantification, ainsi que ses effets sociaux. Cette quantification repose, comme le révèle l’examen des conventions qui la sous-tendent, sur l’idée que l’ovulation est le premier jour de « vie » d’un individu-fœtus, qui constitue l’objet principal du parcours de soin. De plus, la mise en nombre du temps de la grossesse aboutit à sa standardisation, qui s’impose dans les pratiques, jusqu’à intervenir sur les processus physiologiques.
L’« articulation des temps sociaux » devient un objectif de politiques publiques au niveau local et national à partir des années 2000 en réponse aux risques de désynchronisation qui menaceraient la société française (mutations de l’emploi, flexibilisation du temps travail et individualisation des rythmes de vie). Pour comprendre l’émergence de ces politiques, couramment nommées « politiques temporelles », la littérature remonte rarement au-delà des années 1970. Nous proposons d’élargir ce cadre chronologique jusqu’au xixe siècle pour identifier les conditions historiques qui ont rendu pensables et possibles ces politiques aujourd’hui. Parmi ces conditions, deux retiennent particulièrement notre attention : d’une part, la formation des blocs de temps qu’il s’agit de mieux articuler (travail, loisirs, rythmes scolaires), et l’uniformisation des repères temporels à l’échelle nationale (suppression des heures locales en 1891 et adoption de l’heure d’été à partir de 1917), d’autre part. Trois périodes historiques sont ainsi distinguées, des années 1830 à nos jours, selon leur contribution à l’émergence de l’« articulation des temps sociaux » comme objectif de politiques publiques. Cet article défend ainsi l’intérêt d’une analyse sur la longue durée du gouvernement temporel de nos sociétés.
En menant une enquête, depuis 2019, auprès de scientifiques en situation de handicap visuel et ou auditif, je décris comment les situations handicapantes et les compétences qu’ils ou elles en acquièrent leur permettent de répondre à deux conceptions de l’excellence scientifique. Cela soulève une énigme : pourquoi, alors que ces scientifiques répondent aux attentes professionnelles et qu’ils et elles sont évaluées comme collègues compétentes par leurs pairs, les scientifiques en situation de handicap ont besoin de procédures spécifiques pour avoir une chance d’être recrutées et d’être promues ? Je montrerai, dans cet article, comment le rapport au temps des personnes en situation de handicap (le crip time) est révélateur de la chrono-normativité imposée par les nouvelles politiques publiques, et comment cette chrono-normativité, d’une part, exclut certains et certaines universitaires, handicapées ou non, et d’autre part contraint la visée d’une certaine forme d’excellence scientifique. Enfin, je proposerai d’autres chrono-normativités possibles, garantissant l’autonomie professionnelle de toustes les scientifiques et les conditions pour une excellence scientifique innovante, performante et collaborative.
À partir d’une enquête par entretiens biographiques auprès de femmes hétérosexuelles sur la sexualité dite « sans lendemains », le présent article ambitionne d’interroger le rôle joué par le temps dans les représentations des relations sexuelles sans engagement conjugal. En mobilisant la perspective des scripts sexuels et des scènes temporelles, cette enquête met en évidence la manière dont les temporalités, comprises à la fois comme des espaces de temps écoulés et comme des décors temporels, s’inscrivent pleinement dans la construction de scenarii sexuels. Les différentes temporalités qui accueillent les rencontres donnent ainsi différentes significations aux pratiques sexuelles, participant à hiérarchiser les sexualités, des plus légitimes aux plus dévalorisées.
L’épreuve du cancer, lorsqu’elle survient à un âge avancé, est-elle avant tout une épreuve du temps ? Si la majorité des vieilles personnes récemment diagnostiquées d’un cancer souhaite s’engager dans des traitements contre la maladie, pour d’autres, cet engagement ne va pas de soi. À partir d’entretiens semi-directifs réalisés auprès de professionnels de santé et de personnes âgées de plus de 75 ans et confrontées à un cancer, l’article questionne la rencontre entre le temps de la maladie et des éventuels traitements à venir et le temps biographique (Strauss, 1992) des personnes malades. Cette rencontre donne lieu à diverses attentes de soin mises en récit par les vieilles personnes, étroitement liées à leur manière de vivre l’expérience du vieillissement. Nous montrons que le regard porté sur le temps vécu, sur leur âge civil et subjectif, sur leurs lieux, conditions et modes de vie, contribue à façonner leurs positionnements en termes de traitements à mettre ou non en œuvre contre la maladie. La nécessaire articulation entre le temps professionnel des soins et les temporalités du vieillir (nous prenons l’exemple des temporalités du care) vient inscrire l’engagement thérapeutique des personnes âgées dans un temps kairologique qui donne à voir les temporalités imbriquées de leur expérience quotidienne.
C’est à partir d’un exemple d’une situation de recherche, où le chercheur, en situation de rencontre culturelle à Mayotte, est dans l’incapacité de comprendre les réponses fournies par les enquêtés, que se construit cet article. La thématique de recherche princeps, autour du changement climatique, est alors détournée pour étudier plus largement la manière dont le chercheur pouvait comprendre, définir et modéliser la construction du temps à Mayotte. Une approche épistémologique de la construction du temps, que l’on désigne par le terme « chronoglyphe », est proposée. Le chronoglyphe, qu’il soit pensé à l’échelle collective ou individuelle, renvoie à la distribution de quatre « schèmes élémentaires » que l’on appelle « dimensions temporelles » et qui, rassemblées, constituent le temps. La subtilité des notions et de ces « dimensions temporelles » est discutée à partir des travaux d’Hartog (2003, 2020, 2022), mais aussi Philippson (1949) ou encore de Chesneaux (1996) et Dubar (2014). Ensuite, la validité et la solidité de notre modélisation des dimensions temporelles et des dynamiques qu’elles produisent, sont testées sur la base de deux conceptions culturelles du temps à Mayotte, la notion d’umri (Blanchy, 1988) et la cérémonie de shungu (Lambek, 2018). À travers une analyse discursive des écrits de ces anthropologues sur Mayotte, nous confirmons la pleine présence des quatre dimensions temporelles dans le modèle de représentation du temps chez les mahorais, et mettons alors en valeur des zones d’ombre dans les écrits des anthropologues. Cette première contribution autour de la construction du temps à Mayotte aura permis d’ouvrir des propositions méthodologiques sur des recherches culturelles, à partir d’une analyse discursive d’abord, et de proposer de nouvelles recherches articulées avec les régimes de « mondiation » de Descola (2005) et avec le sens donné aux régimes d’historicité proposés par Hartog (2003, 2020, 2022).
The fall of the Communist regimes in Central Europe in 1989 had a resounding impact on the conception and use of heritage. In the immediate post-socialist era, attention was focused first on the most visible symbols of the fallen political order, which were destined for destruction, while pre-1945 legacies were re-patrimonialized. But the material legacies of the Communist period visible in urban space are not only composed by monuments and places of power: they are also present in odonyms, utilitarian buildings (factories, stores, cultural edifices, etc.) or residential buildings, built between 1945 and 1990, which constitute elements of the everyday urban environment. Irrespective of their symbolic significance, this article focuses on these ordinary legacies of the socialist past. Some are immediately destroyed, while others are banalized or even forgotten over time, or, on the contrary, open the way to possible heritage preservation. Examples are chosen from two Romanian cities (Iași and Timișoara) and Warsaw in Poland.
This article proposes to re-examine relationships between “presentist” historicity regime and contemporary patrimoniality regime based on a study of the ongoing conflict over the heritage of the former Reille convent, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, which is awaiting reuse and/or a property development project. This wasteland is studied as revealing the fragility and temporal apories of the “all-heritagization”, which is characterized by an unprecedented disassociation of heritage recognition and protection, by a diversification of heritage processes and even by a paradox but necessary heritage by reuse. The breach of time opened by the defunctionalization of the convent is extended by a process of multiform heritagization, led in particular by the local residents mobilized, and establishes, on the occasion of the revision of the local urban plan of the city of Paris, a fruitful waiting time, conducive to the development of a heritage, social and environmental reuse project alternative to the real estate development project. Finally, the rise in generality of heritage mobilization networked at the metropolitan scale shows that different trends coexisting within the contemporary heritage regime can arise “new futures”, an alternative horizon of expectation for the metropolis.
