TIME MANAGEMENT AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

This paper is grounded in a sociological thesis which argues that managing university students’ time is not merely an individual organizational skill, but rather a complex social phenomenon resulting from the conflictual interaction between institutional structures and the self-awareness of the actor. It addresses the issue of how temporal behavior is shaped under the tension between “institutional time” as a tool of control and regulation, from a Michel Foucault perspective, and “lived time,” which represents the student’s space of autonomy and personal representations. The analysis, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s approach, reveals that the ability to “rationalize time” is closely linked to habitus and class background, making time a non-democratic resource influenced by variables such as gender, economic status (e.g., working students), and the nature of spatial environments. The study also highlights the challenges of “liquid time” and the digital attention economy, which have produced fragmented time lacking academic depth. It suggests that phenomena such as procrastination or time waste may, in essence, represent a silent protest or an expression of student alienation within the system. The paper concludes with the need to move from “waiting time” to “action time” by humanizing university time and fostering critical awareness among students. It emphasizes that time management is fundamentally a process of “self-politicization,” reflecting the degree to which students are integrated into the values of modernization and rationalization, thereby determining their position within the dynamics of academic and professional success.