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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]