L’invention des routines

• Main Author: Frédéric de Coninck
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille 2015-07-01
• Series: Espace populations sociétés
• Subjects: agency; individualisation; routine; daily schedule organisation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/eps/5951

Speaking of routines, in social sciences easily carries connotations related to alienation. Routines, it is said, come from the fact that individuals and households, depend on heavy macro-social time constraints that impose their mechanical time on their daily schedules. Individual agency is thus supposed to be built on fluidity and on improvisation in situation.Such a point of view has already been discussed by some research works. We come back to that point, speaking of daily schedules organisation, in a context where individuals and households are mainly struggling, today, to protect their time against an unstructured, chopped, heterogeneous time.Individuals and households build routines to preserve their time. They use a series of devices, mixing social and technical resources, to manage more comfortably their daily lives.Relying on a survey by semi-structured interviews, we describe this activity of inventing, testing, strengthening, changing those routines in this paper.