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The article describes the waiting of exiled families staying in hotels. What is daily life like while waiting for papers for each family member, a permanent contract, housing? We propose to focus our attention on the relationship between the time lived and the material life, in other words space, objects, money, administrative papers, undeclared jobs, concrete exchanges, too often evacuated from sociological research on exile. Because the living space gives a particular substance to waiting, we propose to seize these social temporalities as particular configurations of the relations between space and time. The ethnographic survey conducted in four hotels in the Oise and Ile-de-France regions of France underlines the extent to which waiting has a very material reality. Families live between the impossibility of settling in France - in the sense of the common law of “taking up residence” - and the time that carves their presence, accumulating relationships and experiences. A form of paradox between the precariousness of status and the thickness of time lived.

The article describes the waiting of exiled families staying in hotels. What is daily life like while waiting for papers for each family member, a permanent contract, housing? We propose to focus our attention on the relationship between the time lived and the material life, in other words space, objects, money, administrative papers, undeclared jobs, concrete exchanges, too often evacuated from sociological research on exile. Because the living space gives a particular substance to waiting, we propose to seize these social temporalities as particular configurations of the relations between space and time. The ethnographic survey conducted in four hotels in the Oise and Ile-de-France regions of France underlines the extent to which waiting has a very material reality. Families live between the impossibility of settling in France - in the sense of the common law of “taking up residence” - and the time that carves their presence, accumulating relationships and experiences. A form of paradox between the precariousness of status and the thickness of time lived.

This paper deals with the coerced relationship to (work) time among migrant labour working in the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs) in Jordan. Based on a qualitative survey conducted in production, work and workers’ living places, I explore the effects of circular migration on the temporalities of migrants’ work. In an export-oriented textile industry dominated by foreign firms, I suggest that the adjustment of residence time to work time tends to reduce these migrants to their sole function as a labour force. Their confinement in dormitory buildings located close to the factories further accentuates their captivity. The paper (1) situates the long-time frame of Jordanian migration policies by linking them to the liberalization movement that presided over the creation of the QIZs; (2) compares the working conditions – and their effects on work time – of both Jordanian and foreign workers in the QIZs; and (3) illustrates how migrant workers, because they are subjects to a coerced time, are more vulnerable to productivity and availability injunctions than their Jordanian counterparts.

This paper focuses on some considerations about the temporal, stratigraphic and epistemological relationships between the archaeological surface (and the ceramics materials collected during the preliminary prospection) and underground levels (and their information). Therefore, this paper is not a specific study, nor a detailed discussion of a methodological problem. It is rather a series of reflections on contradictions implicit to some archaeological approaches : linear reading of time, linear evolutions, application of typical (even if useful) Western epistemological tools and ideas to a non-Western context, absence of archaeological interest for the current materiality (on the surface). The traditional linear temporality (based on the notion of a Great Divide between past and present, antiquity and “modernity”), is strictly linked to the assumptions of an old colonial linear evolutionism and it creates some archaeological aporias that can be overcome by the adoption of a non-linear and “flattened” temporality. Some archaeological evidence are briefly presented to show that technological and cultural changes are often non-linear, as well as that current material-cultural conditions can be explored with an archaeological approach.

This paper is an ethnological analysis of the long strike that occurred in 1995-96 within the Public Transportation Society of the French city of Marseilles. The analysis grid is inspired from the social drama concept of Victor Turner. The analysis of the strike is being understood as a diachronic reading of modernization processes within the public utility sector. The research was conducted through an ethnographic field work which took the form of driving regular buses in a popular neighbourhood of Marseilles as the strike broke out. Through the detailed ethnography of the successive steps of this social drama – breach, crisis, adjustment, redressive action - the paper stresses the breach phenomenon which this social drama brought along as well as the outstanding communitas symbols. These symbols are markers for the crisis phase within the broader social drama of the strike. Thus, the long december 1995-january 96 strike was turned into an identity marker itself and was called among the bus drivers “the Great Strike” in reference to “the Great War”.

This paper presents different kinds of temporality emerging from the historical study of an industrial plant. The first consists in the author’s taking over the memory of an industrial worker’s former experience, and building a methodical relation to the past. By reworking in the plant, he clearly establishes his research in the present. The paper then breaks the apparent continuity between past and present, and adopts the specific historical approach to elements of the past. Through questions concerning the job, this approach attempts to make those elements work together, in order to create a representation of the past independent from the present perspective. In this historical representation, dynamics and rhythms of change and continuity vary according to the questions asked in past tense. Whether it is about working conditions or working hours, about employment or conflicts, the dynamics show particulars conducive to envisaging time as plural and plastic.

This paper explores the issue of time in migration and the employment processes of posted workers in intensive agriculture. We propose to analyze the relationship between the temporalities imposed by the posting of workers to meet productive needs and posted workers temporal behavior. This will enable us to understand how they experience these temporalities, but also how they circumvent them in order to articulate the spaces-time of social reproduction. Our research is based on a qualitative survey on posted workers provided by Spanish employment agencies in three departments of the South of France (Bouches-du-Rhône, Vaucluse and Gard). The analysis is structured around migratory paths, posted work system and social times. Thus we are able (1) to understand the effects of migration policies on seasonal workers’ long-term career paths ; (2) to chart strategies for overcoming the time restrictions of posted work mobilty, which lead to settlement and direct employment ; (3) to identify attempts of “community building” through commercial and collective leisure activities developed by migrant workers.

The time of asylum seekers is made up of waiting. This time is constrained by the procedure. Over the long term, boredom predominates. But one must also submit to the tempo imposed by the institutions in charge of the asylum, which differs in France and in Germany and removes the pure uniformity of the lived-time.The main objective of this paper is to show the materialization of this long time of the procedure on the daily life of seekers, from the most passive sides to the possibilities to face the imposition of temporal norms by finding a time for oneself. Nevertheless, I will claim that even if seekers are as inventive as can be in protesting against what the institution imposes on them, the permanent switching between the “lifeworld” and institutions makes their temporal experience particularly hard to face. The experience of waiting is not always overcome.

The paper offers a literary and temporal exploration of the Gospel of John to demonstrate the creation of forms of (a)temporality. The analysis is outlined along three temporal modes (narratological, historical and theological/spiritual) to define the manners in which the Gospel constructs different conceptions of time (linear and cyclical) that it tends in turn to negate and transcend. Constructing time serves its negation, which founds the literary genius of the word of Christ becoming text. The article first elaborates upon the linear frequency of signs whose function is to enlighten the identity of Christ and the reality of the kingdom. Secondly, one needs to explore the temporality of the celebration of the Christological Ego, especially in the farewell speeches (Jn 14-17). Finally, these precedent stages allow us to define the possibility for the word to become text as inherent to the nature of Jesus’ speeches understood as spirit and life. This passage from word to text, of writing becoming spirit and life defines what I term a textual incarnation. Once consumed, this textual incarnation opens new horizons of (a)temporality.

Marriage is one of the most important rites of the life cycle in Chinese society. The choice of the wedding date is rarely made lightly, on the contrary, it is carefully carried out by following specific processes in order to find a day that is considered auspicious. Based on an ethnographic survey carried out between 2013 and 2016 in the village of Zhang in Henan Province and in a company specialized in wedding organization –“Eternal Love” Aijiujiu 爱久久-, this paper proposes an analysis of the temporalities of marriage in contemporary rural areas, focusing on the study of the seasonality of marriage and the choice of the wedding date. Concerning the seasonality of marriage, the inhabitants of Zhang must take into account the calendar of non-agricultural economic activities of migrant workers and find a compromise with the peasant temporality punctuated by agrarian tasks. As for the choice of the wedding date, they systematically call upon the almanac in order to harmonize the personal life trajectory and the cosmological order. This study demonstrates the modifications and readjustments adopted by the villagers to cope with the change in the rhythm of life resulting from the social, economic and political transformations in post-Maoist China: they seek to be part of the process of modernization and urbanization of Chinese society while at the same time wanting to respect the cosmological ideology in the organization of family and social life.

The paper addresses the issue of relational networks in two artistic worlds: movie production and the performing arts. It mobilizes the notion of “coupled careers”, in line with the analyses that H. Becker and A. Strauss devoted to the “important others” in their study of medical careers (Becker and Strauss, 1956). The lasting relationships that develop during project work between film directors and their producers on the one hand, stage directors and their production administrators on the other, are studied on the basis of these professionals’ career prospects. The article focuses on the contexts in which the working relationships emerge. It then examines how the fact they are long-term propositions is an important stake for the professionals involved. A long-term relationship with a film-maker and stage director gives producers and administrators access to two types of resources that are decisive for the development of their own activities, i.e. film and theater ventures and funding opportunities. The article also examines the factors that may threaten these lasting relationships and cut short the dynamics of a coupled career.

In the field of migration studies, social networks represent a keystone in the analysis of transnational dynamics, which are processes bridging spaces of origin and destination over distance and time. This research deals with the building of social networks over a period of 30 years, in a group initially formed by 72 Jumma children, who were placed in French families in 1987, after their exfiltration from refugee camps in India where they had been exiled due to the civil war in Bangladesh. In their country, Jummas suffered centuries of oppression. The article combines a micro-scale analysis of individual trajectories, observed in the evolution of a few personal networks over a 25-year period, in order to understand the logics of belonging between here and there; and a meso-scale analysis of the social networks’ extensions that over time build a transnational community. By spatializing these networks, the paper analyzes how temporality and space question the role played by distance and connection in the territorial dynamics of belonging.

This paper aims to understand the dynamics of a scientific network of researchers by observing their individual publishing activity. Empirically, we propose to reconstruct the personal network of five emeritus chemists attached to the University of Poitiers and to identify the moments when their relations with a co-author emerge and when those relations are weakened or strengthened. This exploratory and comprehensive study is based on an original methodology combining quantitative and qualitative materials: while publication data provide exhaustive information on the researchers’ co-authorship, CVs and semi-structured interviews with the protagonists allow for a detailed analysis of the dynamics of their relations as their careers unfold.

This research focuses on the temporalities governing the development of professional networks of populations affected by high mobility, such as building contractors and site foremen. Royal construction sites in Piedmont during the first half of the 18th century are an interesting case study. The sources, especially public contracts, record the time this network was constituted, highlighting its specific nature, namely its dynamism and continuous regeneration. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the temporal framework that guided the behavior of the actors by giving rise to those networks and this dynamism. Structuring the corpus with the help of a two-mode network combining documentation and individual data provides an effective way to access the different dimensions that contribute to understanding entrepreneurs’ network, to judging its relevance and its evolutions. It is also a way to observe the temporalities specific to each component of the corpus: the outcome of a public contract related to the political situation of the Sardinian State, the operational sequences of each site which imply the various specializations of the contracts and contracting parties, the relational trajectories of entrepreneurs (the nature of their interventions and their roles that change with each contract), the biographical and migratory itineraries of those individuals. The protagonists’ rationales are organized amidst this complex set of interactions marked by diverging temporalities, according to what they perceive. The resulting practices shape the professional environment of building contractors in Torino during the first half of the 18th century.

My aim has been to grasp the dynamics of small groups and personal networks from their genesis to their disappearance. To this end, since 2011, I have conducted ethnographic surveys in three student residences located in France, the United States and Canada. In the present paper, I develop a two-tiered analysis: 1) between the three residences and 2) between several groups studied simultaneously during each of these fieldworks. In addition, I have built a graphic, qualitative representation of personal networks. This social network analysis enables us to define the concept of “affinity relationships”, as well as to specify the degree of linkage intensity. It also highlights the evolution of personal networks during the residents’ stay. Ethnographic descriptions, on the other hand, reveal residents’ reflexivity concerning their personal networks and the evolution thereof. Lastly, our analysis allows identifying four phases during the process of formation and transformation of small social groups. Despite the plurality of the configurations studied, these four phases were to be found in the process of formation of all the groups Thus, I make the assumption that every social group goes through the same phases. Consequently, this research contributes to the study of personal networks, providing a novel ethnographic and micro-sociological approach.

This paper analyzes post-Mao China as a complex risk society in which social, economic, and ecological risk syndromes pertaining to highly diverse levels and systems of development are manifested simultaneously. Complex risk society is a theoretical extension of Ulrich Beck’s thesis on risk society, focusing on complex developmental temporalities that are pervasively symptomatic of rapidly but asymmetrically developing political economies. In my earlier study, Korea was defined as a complex risk society in which risk syndromes of developed, un(der)developed, and compressively developing societies are concurrently generated. In the current study, post-Mao China is also analyzed as a complex risk society which is, in fact, more complex than Korea. Paradoxically, due to its explosive development in the post-Mao era which even dwarfs Korea, China is now confronted by all of its capitalist neighbour’s risk syndromes. Besides, due to its so-called gradual approach to reform, China is beset with a complicated mix of socialist and post-socialist (marketized) syndromes of risks. Gradual reform is in practice a sort of peripatetic pluralism in economic and social reform for maximizing developmental utilities of all types of human, material, and institutional resources—a policy line inevitably accompanied by similarly plural sources and factors of social, economic, and ecological risks. The unprecedented temporal and systemic complexity in China’s risk structure has crucial implications for the country’s much deplored tendency for inequalities. In particular, class inequalities and regional disparities seem to be manifest in risk dimensions no less critically than in material dimensions. The state’s developmentalism alone is no solution for risk complexities or inequalities.

The reform of China’s housing system has gone through a complex historical process from private real estate before 1949 to public ownership and then partial privatization. These successive temporalities of housing rights (space rights) can be seen as a concentrated expression of the social transformation process in China. This paper aims at emphasizing both process and structures, revealing a complex relationship between government, market and society, but also the characteristics of the regime behind the events and phenomena described.The research is based on a longitudinal fieldwork and was conducted by a team of teachers and students from Tsinghua University. From the perspective of the politics and sociology of action, housing is the most important contributing factor for the quality of life; to safeguard legal residence rights as well as property rights means to safeguard human rights in the sense of rights of subsistence.Therefore, to safeguard legal residence rights and to pursue social justice are citizens’ most relevant political issues.

This paper analyses the spatial dimensions of an industrial temporality in Datong, a medium-sized city in Shanxi, nicknamed China’s “coal capital”. The city center was at the core of an ambitious plan of urban makeover around the theme of the “historical and cultural city”, put in motion between 2008 and 2013, which led to a large operation of demolition-reconstruction. The project was suddenly abandoned during a period of difficult political transition. In Datong’s mining district, the state-owned company Tongmei progressively absorbed numerous mining sites during the growth of the coal activity. In 2006, the miners, who used to live on the coal mine sites in precarious and uncomfortable self-built houses, were relocated in a new urban area, built and financed by Tongmei. But in 2013, the company’s activity suddenly slowed down in the context of the coal crisis. The places reflect the traces of this trajectory of decline. The mining area is now a restricted zone with remains of the residential ruins, where the last inhabitants wait for rehousing. In the city center and in the mining district, the urban space reveals a state of waiting, with no clear deadline. This research focuses on these two places in order to develop an ethnography of a reconversion in progress, by analyzing the political temporality of urban planning, the economic temporality of the coal transition and the social temporality of urban renewal operations, two massive projects but still non completed.

In this paper, we examine the reflexive link between the temporal unfolding of a sports game and its broadcasting live on TV. Borrowing from a video-ethnography in the control-room of technicians producing video football matches in real-time, this article aims to study how professionals deal with the time-out pauses and the interruptions during a match. Those interruptions, generally triggered by the referee’s whistle, constitute a practical problem for TV broadcasting. When the game is stopped, actions that then take place are not directly controlled by the rules of the game but the broadcasters need to show something to the spectators. A micro-analysis of the interaction demonstrates how the referee’s whistle creates a transition towards slow-motion sequences, i.e. filmed actions allowing one to see an event under a new angle. Thus an element of the game is re-used as a temporal and descriptive resource in the on-going activity of broadcasting.

Nautical activities (sailing, surfing, kitesurfing…) are frequently conceived by sea resort municipalities as products for the tourist industry and therefore associated with vacation time. But they are also working time for those who are in charge. Nautical sports instructors are forced to work on the off-beat. They must integrate temporalities - school holidays, public holidays or week-ends - which are different from the ordinary working world. That is sometimes problematic, especially when conciliating work and family life.This paper focuses on the way sports teachers experience working on the off-beat, and how they perceive the situation. It will try to identify and to characterize the resources and strategies used for dealing with the various effects and consequences of working on the off-beat. The results presented are based on fieldwork with interviews and observations carried out on the coast of the Pays-de-la-Loire Region.

While breaking with a perception of the serendipity as the product of a hazardous luck relative to the “scientific mind”, this paper aims to highlight how the serendipity results from a structural concordance of “temporalities of fields”. As the latter refer to an agency of times relative to the habitus, activities and institutions specific to each field, they serve as a concordance standpoint among fields, from which conditions of production and identification of a discovery by serendipity are defined. Such an approach allows fulfilling a relative lack in the literature – the central function of temporality in the structuration of fields – and crafting a structural analyze of the discovery process by serendipity, in which the latter can be apprehended as a “coordinated practice of institution”.

This paper focuses on the memories of the past as reported by adults aged between 20-24 and 80-84. Which socio-historical changes and events occurring during their own lifetime do they retain as particularly striking ? Results are based on two surveys conducted in Geneva in 2004 and 2009, and allow a double comparison : between age groups (or cohorts) on the one hand, between the answers five years apart on the other hand. Some events (World War II, the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, or 9/11) are particularly recalled by groups whe were entering adulthood at the time they occurred. Thus, the perception of a historic event varies with the age of individuals ; furthermore, changes that take place between ages ten and thirty have a great impact on memory. However, this is not a universal mechanism but depends on several conditions, including the fact that history has ushered in one or more changes at the same time.

This article sheds light on the construction and uses of timetables in public administrations. Comparing two compatible examples of fieldwork – a survey in an applied school for middle ranking civil servants and a survey in a one-stop shop for job seekers – the paper shows the extent to which collective work schedules are devices whereby human resources are made to fit material resources over time. Agendas reveal what managers are aiming at, and how major administrative shifts – like new public management-oriented initiatives – tend to modify everyday life in public workplaces. On the other hand, as street level bureaucrats become more and more aware of the importance of quantitative benchmarks in their managers’ annual evaluations, schedules become objects of conflict and bargaining.

This paper rewiews the occurrence of the following key words: age(s), generation(s), life cycle and life course, in the titles of 259 articles published in scientific journals. Rather than indentifying the authors’ intentions, the lexical analysis of the corpus objectifies the way certain orientations, topics and objects were highlighted. This study of the communication of scientific knowledge offers an alternative perception of how sociological reasoning has integrated the analysis of human and social temporalities. In order to demonstrate their historicity, four American general sociological journals (the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, the American Sociological Review and Social Problems) appearing between 1940 and 2000 have been systematically analyzed.

A scientific research project tends to crystallize various tensions linked to time constraints. When studied as a characteristic set up, as a device in its own right, we notice that it transforms research practices and more specifically, communication practices. In the particular case of ecology, field experiment (the sign of a modernized ecology) brings along difficulties linked to the manageability of natural phenomenons and their own temporality. We examine time management practice - as well as communication about this practice - during the Inbioprocess project, in order to understand how scientists deal both with field experiment and planning constraints. Data include ethnographical and discursive material as well as interviews. Action B of the project consisted in diverting the water away from one branch of a river, during which scientists had to face delays and changes due to technical difficulties. This paper stresses the function of discursive production as a record of temporality as well as an attempt to control natural phenomenons. While scientists naturalize time criteria for evaluation, writing allows them to turn unpredictability into a narrative account. Moreover, document circulation gives the different temporalities in action a necessary complementarity. We stress the importance of adjustment practices and the risks of organizing temporalities into a hierarchy that gives more visibility to the short time of the project, rather than to the team’s longer temporality. The communicational management of temporalities appears as a central issue when pursuing a scientific project.

This paper aims to analyze how and to what extent the transformations of practices, temporalities and research organization in the field of history are generated by the changes in the way public funds are allocated. In view of the two theses confronted in this matter, stressing on one hand the hypothesis of researcher’s de-professionalization and loss of autonomy, and on the other hand the reorganization of academic professions, the survey conducted in three History labs highlights the fact that there is no single model for adaptation when research teams and academics deal with the rising power of project-based funding. In order to assess these patterns, considering the organizational level turns out to be crucial. Besides, unlike the disciplines requiring expensive experimental equipments, the fact that research in History demands a moderate level of resources, leads historians to make a limited use of project-based funding, which can be considered a strategy of avoidance. This position is also reinforced by the specific system of academic quality evaluation related to the discipline, where individual work and long term investment are significant.

This article focuses on the research activities conducted in both industrial institutions and and academic laboratories and in certain intermediary organizations (joint laboratories, spin offs etc.). Punctual observations done over the last twenty years in chemistry and biology labs evidence an increased exposure to competition between academic and industrial institutions, but also between individuals globally. First, the hypothesis of this paper is that this overexposure to competition among firms, academic laboratories and scientists led to the development of strategies targeting the specific reduction of the presciber’s reserved time (“official time”) and to the rationalization of scientific work, in order to accelerate the release of the products onto the market to reduce production costs. To reflect this evolution, the organization of working time as “operations research” will be compared to the one called “project-logic” which seems to be prevalent nowadays. Secondly, these new constraining standards affect the “temporal availability” of research workers, making it therefore necessary to question the role of researchers within the wage earners system.

Durkheim's Elementary forms of religious life contain a formulation of the foundations of a sociology of time which has constantly sparked the reflections of his successors. He himself did not develop it much further but his followers, Hubert and Mauss, or Halbwachs, drawing their inspiration from a critical reading of Bergson, gave it more scope and substance. Taking off from the way the notion of time intervenes in the critical notes and studies of L’Année sociologique, this papers attemps to retrace the emergence of the notion of time in the Durkheimian school and to locate its earlier positioning.

This paper deals with the coerced relationship to (work) time among migrant labour working in the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs) in Jordan. Based on a qualitative survey conducted in production, work and workers’ living places, I explore the effects of circular migration on the temporalities of migrants’ work. In an export-oriented textile industry dominated by foreign firms, I suggest that the adjustment of residence time to work time tends to reduce these migrants to their sole function as a labour force. Their confinement in dormitory buildings located close to the factories further accentuates their captivity. The paper (1) situates the long-time frame of Jordanian migration policies by linking them to the liberalization movement that presided over the creation of the QIZs; (2) compares the working conditions – and their effects on work time – of both Jordanian and foreign workers in the QIZs; and (3) illustrates how migrant workers, because they are subjects to a coerced time, are more vulnerable to productivity and availability injunctions than their Jordanian counterparts.

This paper is an ethnological analysis of the long strike that occurred in 1995-96 within the Public Transportation Society of the French city of Marseilles. The analysis grid is inspired from the social drama concept of Victor Turner. The analysis of the strike is being understood as a diachronic reading of modernization processes within the public utility sector. The research was conducted through an ethnographic field work which took the form of driving regular buses in a popular neighbourhood of Marseilles as the strike broke out. Through the detailed ethnography of the successive steps of this social drama – breach, crisis, adjustment, redressive action - the paper stresses the breach phenomenon which this social drama brought along as well as the outstanding communitas symbols. These symbols are markers for the crisis phase within the broader social drama of the strike. Thus, the long december 1995-january 96 strike was turned into an identity marker itself and was called among the bus drivers “the Great Strike” in reference to “the Great War”.

This paper focuses on some considerations about the temporal, stratigraphic and epistemological relationships between the archaeological surface (and the ceramics materials collected during the preliminary prospection) and underground levels (and their information). Therefore, this paper is not a specific study, nor a detailed discussion of a methodological problem. It is rather a series of reflections on contradictions implicit to some archaeological approaches : linear reading of time, linear evolutions, application of typical (even if useful) Western epistemological tools and ideas to a non-Western context, absence of archaeological interest for the current materiality (on the surface). The traditional linear temporality (based on the notion of a Great Divide between past and present, antiquity and “modernity”), is strictly linked to the assumptions of an old colonial linear evolutionism and it creates some archaeological aporias that can be overcome by the adoption of a non-linear and “flattened” temporality. Some archaeological evidence are briefly presented to show that technological and cultural changes are often non-linear, as well as that current material-cultural conditions can be explored with an archaeological approach.

Based on a comparative and qualitative study conducted in France and Quebec, this paper shows that the integration phase of the newly-recruited nurse’s aides in geriatric organizations is a complex test of experimentation of a job full of collective norms of paces of work. The collective labor, through the voice of « elder » nurse’s aides, judges the ability of the new recruits to respect these paces and transmits locally created control strategies in order to respect the conflicting guidelines. However, the current situation of work intensification experienced in geriatric organizations in France and Quebec led to a dangerous weakening of the work collective or even to an individualized relationship to organizational issues. Such individualization may lead new recruits to ethical suffering because of the shortcuts they need to take in order to respect temporal norms.

This paper discusses the relationship between temporality and conflictuality based on a research on French telephone operators, a feminized professional category at the bottom of the scale of the PTT (French public administration of postal services and telecommunications). In the 1950s and 1960s, their social status was marked by two types of conflicts : an activity conflict and a social conflict. The telephone operators’ confrontation with rationalized worktime encouraged an activity conflict which triggered health problems. The interpenetration of various simultaneous tasks exposed them to numerous requests in a tightened temporality. Furthermore the operators had great difficulty to juggle the accumulated constraints of their professional time and personal time engaged with family demands. Therefore the telephone operators were implicated in a social conflict, demanding a reduction in working hours, as well as the business conflict. This was made possible by a feminist CGT labor union which demanded a five-days week with the slogan "having the time and the means to live" in order to rally the telephone operators to the union cause.

This paper starts from a field-work survey in a Parisian department store, to focus on the conflicts caused by the lengthening of working hours in the stores. Our first aim is to analyze how the question of non-standard working hours (Sundays, bank holidays, late evenings) is dealt with or imposed on the personnel. Our second aim is, on the one hand, to assess the way in which the personnel cope with this “necessity” and, on the other hand, to shed light on the difficulties that the unions face when handling such a thorny issue. Indeed, what may be supported as an agreement in principle may not necessarily be in keeping with what the employees do.

Cashiers and their clients are part of two different time frames, with conflicting conceptions of time. Clients are focused on their individual situation, in a sequential temporal regime and in the here-and-now, while the cashiers worry about ensuring a satisfactory service for all the recipients of their work, simultaneously, in a longer time frame. These conflicting representations depend on a relationship of service where one character is working and the other isn’t. According to the balance of power between the service provider and the recipient, both the time conflict and the service relationship can be very different. In order to bring this discrepancy to light, this paper focuses on the case of cashiers at automatic self-service checkout, in an asymetric relationship that favours the clients. The setup of these checkouts increases the participation of clients, puts the cashiers’s work in a simultaneous time frame, and reinforces the discrepancy. Eventhough it might not seem so, the automation of checkouts leads to an intensification of the cashiers’ workload. But as the clients can’t see it, they keep expecting a total availability from the cashiers. This misunderstanding leads to a tense situation between the characters, that brings to light and reinforces the structural antagonism of time between the cashiers and their clients.

For a long time, most historians considered that the organization and discipline of working hours was the one factor that made the difference between the industrial period and the one before. This paper presents another point of view : conflicts about working hours should be considered in light of long-term industrial social relationships. We present here a broad sketch of the conflicts where working hours contributed to motivate the workers, from the XIVth century to the beginning of the XIXth century. Although in the Middle Ages, some conflicts were clearly questioning the definition of working hours, the topic seemed to fade during the XVIIth century. But at that time, other conflicts start on the amount of work that needs to be done in a given period of time. The first industrialization doesn’t really change the nature of the claims. Most of these claims actually came from people who worked in traditional areas, while factory workers remained rather quiet until the 1860s or 1870s.

This paper focuses on standards of availability induced by the commercial temporality and employees’ resistances to a maximum flexibility. It is based on a fieldwork study in chain store shops located in France and Belgium. We study the principles of commercial organization through managerial practices of adaptation to commercial flow and the subordination of workers to employment times. In order to become more profitable, chain stores try to adjust the presence of their personnel to the variations of customers’ flows. Managers are in charge of this maximization of the profitability, therefore they expect their personnel to be flexible. It puts strong pressure on them, but it also gives birth to resistances against this constraint. Such resistance takes place in reaction to arbitrary changes of working days or hours; it can also lead them to refuse to work extra hours or to switch temporarily to full-time work.

The kafala is a system of guarantee for immigrants in the Arab world. In Lebanon, it produces a highly restrictive regulatory environment for non-Arab migrants; this institution organizes the import of a vast majority of women from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to become domestic employees. It imposes its - as defined - global institution's temporality to migration. It conflicts with the other temporalities that shape the migratory space : temporalities of individuals on the move, whose careers fit into the hierarchy of socio-economic baseline and into the hierarchy between host countries; temporalities of migration industry, that develop a cleaved rationality of their own. In this paper, we want to present the contradiction of migration time and temporalities, in order to understand the resulting negative social relationships. We also study the normative workarounds that migrants and other actors operate in the pursuit of their goals on this globalized scene.

The switch to retirement cannot be reduced to a date that separates two disjointed periods of existence in a strict way. On one hand, this switch takes place on a certain duration of time, before and after the formal date when activity stops. One the other hand, retirement is the occasion to undertake activities, whether new ones or the prolongation of former ones, that spring from the individuals’anterior path. More precisely, this particular switch is an occasion to think again on the organisation of social temporalities, and to rearticulate activities in a new way : professional activities (for the ones who keep a job along their retirement) as well as family, artistic, leisure activities. A diversity of retirement paths can be derived from this constatation, as can be observed from the variety of activities that pensioners undertake. This diversity reflects a certain autonomy in the choices that actors make, but it also depends on the choices (« capabilites ») that they can actually reach. In this sense, this paper reviews the advantages and limits of an approach in terms of an « enabling environment », in order to account for the unequal distribution of the capabilities to grasp the opportunities of retirement. More precisely, an « enabling environment » is considered here as all the temporal frameworks for the individuals to build their life paths before retirement. In this sense, three temporal frameworks can be identified : the macro-economic policies, business (or sector) policies, and family biographies. Each of these three frameworks hosts tensions between rigid « accounting time » and more flexible « lived time ». Depending on what will come out of these tensions, individuals will or won’t be able to develop the capabilities to think about their temporal organisation and to invent « time for themselves » when they switch towards retirement.

This paper puts the analysis of cultural practices in a temporal perspective. Its aim is to locate the key moments of the members of the audience’s life, when they turn towards one path or the other, beyond the mechanisms of cultural legitimacy or social reproduction. It relies on several qualitative and quantitative surveys on outings to live shows (theatre, music and dance). Whether it be the first time or continous practices, theses studies outline « careers as an audience » in which the steps of the life course and social intercourse are the main sources of variation and invention of times of reception. This relationship aspect of cultural socialization leads us to consider these practices not only as consumption but as acts of reception, negotiated in a social space that’s both cultural and generational, diverse and changing.

At first glimpse, when curators set up an exhibition on the Old masters, they give to their audience an occasion to go back in time. Mediators are supposed to put the curators’ knowledge and understanding of the artists and their time within reach of the public. However, these actors rely on a plurality of representations and practices that fit together only because they are not completely explicit nor closely negotiated. This paper starts from an exhibition on Fouquet, a painter and illuminator from the XVth century in order to consider an exhibition, and time itself, as « boundary objects », around which curators, mediators and audience gather. The exhibition illustrates a specific conception and a professional practice of the history of art, that are both all about piecing together a past we don’t know anymore. Curators are preoccupied with rebuilding the temporalities of the works of art ; but that’s not necessarily what the audience is concerned with, nor what the mediator should be working on. Indeed, they might concentrate on bringing back to life a story that revolves « around » the work, for example the history of lifestyles.

The revival of ancient music gave rise to an interesting pas de deux, an original game of stacked temporalities. Indeed, in order to play « the old way », one has to start with being modern, and to understand the past as being past. It is not as much about playing « as we used to do » as it is commonly written on disk sleeves. On the contrary, it’s all about understanding how far we are from bygone days, dealing with that loss, and measuring all we have to do to rebuild the past. This is a practical lesson on history writing, that music brings to life on a sensitive mode (changing tastes) as well as on a material mode (playing again other instruments). This paper starts from several examples, as Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s study of the taste for Roman statues, or how a theatre company reopened a « game » from the Middle Ages, in order to follow Michel de Certeau on the issues that history of art and sociology have to face in their own relationship to the repertories and works they inherited from the past.

French rap music is now an established industry, although it is still a recent innovation. This paper shows that its establishment is the result of the complex relationship between three generations of artists, oligopolistic music production companies and radio networks. In particular, we studied the discographic conventions (chorus, featurings, producers…) used by French rap artists between 1990 and 2004. The artists of the first generation released their first album between 1990 and 1993 with the support of major music companies. The second generation, emerging between 1994 and 1997, didn’t enjoy the same context. Internal divisions, caused by the way radio networks promoted them, ruined their efforts to distinguish themselves from the first generation. Some of the second generation artists benefited from informal accreditation through collaborative work with the first French rap artists, while the others were excluded. Rap music thus appeared as an autonomous profession, which can be described as an exception within the recording industry. Lastly, the artists who started their career after 1998 distinguished themselves by behaving as candidates in a social world that they thought predictable. Analysing the growth of this new vocal technique within the French music industry highlights the relevance of generations as a conceptual tool, to understand art worlds and professional dynamics.

Temporality is rarely used as a point of view to consider the relationship between interaction and structure. However, it is a heuristic way to combine different scales of observation. This paper offers a framework of analysis, centered on a model of meshed processes. It considers action as « a motive in search of a sanction ». The immediate « interactional » stakes, as well as the long-run, « structural » stakes, are meshed together : satisfying the latter is both a condition and a regulation of the satisfaction of the former. Several implications, that are as many theoretical reminders that can prove useful to build a research, are applied to an empirical case : a free jazz show. Describing the interactional form, as a prerequisite and as a test mechanism, allows us to combine the plurality of stakes that people carry along with them. This analysis aims to establish, for each of them, the temporal horizons of their social scopes.

This paper provides an in-depth review of a book published by the American economist David W. Galenson on the “two cycles of artistic creativity” and their developments in various domains, including science. It offers a few applications to contemporary art, before demonstrating, out of a specific case, that the issue of temporalities should also be extended to the modes of artistic recognition.

This text focuses on the implementation of two public policies for troubled teenagers. The aim of these two public programs is to establish homes for troubled teens : “Unités à encadrement éducatif renforcé” (1996-1997) and “Centres éducatifs fermés” (2002-2003). This paper takes temporalities into consideration. We show that different temporalities were in conflict during the policy processes: political temporality, administrative temporality and professional temporality. Political temporality imposed its calendar and its rhythm to all actors. The context of “hyper-politicization” didn’t leave non-political actors much room for manoeuvre. This situation bore consequences on the relationship between professional actors and political actors.

After an overview of recent trends in data collection and of the different strategies applied to the demographic analysis of life courses embedded in their context, this paper presents the analysis of a specific level of interpersonal interaction : the intertwined dynamics of the life courses of both members of a couple. To this end, we reconstruct the dynamics of the activity space of couples defined as the territory covered by their place(s) of residence and place(s) of work since the beginning of their union, taking advantage of a rich data source, the INED Biographies et entourage survey. We then detail the principles of the data analysis method (Qualitative Harmonic Analysis). The description drawn from the typology obtained sheds light on the choices couples make for their residential moves, taking into account their family and occupational priorities. The limits of the method and future research paths are then discussed in the conclusion.

If no area of research can avoid resetting the life stories being studied in their context, the issue becomes exemplary in the specific field of the sociology of migrations. Is it possible to assess a migratory process with conclusions drawn from fieldwork in a single location, in accordance with the hic et nunc principle ? It is precisely because their object of study is at stake that migration studies are confronted by the spatial anchorings (necessarily plural) of the individual trajectories they aim to reconstitute, as well as by the temporal framework within which they occur. The very telling of a life story, which cannot be done both “here” and “there” at the same time, places interviewer and interviewee in a context of discourse production the effects of which need to be analyzed. Such questioning raises the issue of the impact of context – i.e. the spatial and temporal framework where the investigation is carried out – on the very telling of a life course. This paper aims to apprehend the interviewer/interviewee relationship within the framework of the investigation device, as well as the resulting process of subjectivation, in order to fully understand the contexts of enunciation of biographies, and their effects on the contextualization of life stories.

Observing advisor-customer interactions in banks provides interesting data to analyze what happens when two different approaches to time come together: those promoted by the banks and those belonging to the family sphere, the home and the social worlds in which they are embedded. In this paper, such data allow us to test the hypothesis that the Bourdieu exemplified approach of collective forms of anticipating the future in the context of the deep social changes taking place in Algeria in the 1950’s, can also apply to the less spectacular evolutions in societies with a longer capitalist past, such as banks opening up to market laws and practices as has been the case in France over the last few decades. Market procedures have deeply modified the banks’ commercial strategies. They have contributed to promoting new forms of economic action aimed at customers, bearing a relation to the future, including a belief in progress, the need to have projects and make quick decisions. That way of relating to the future is sometimes interiorized by customers, but it is sometimes specifically rejected by them.