Entre a prescrição e a incorporação do tempo: o paradoxo do desempenho na formação de jovens engenheiros: Uma análise crítica das experiências de estudantes e egressos da Engenharia de Produção no processo formativo e profissional

Abstract

The social organisation of time constitutes a central element in shaping modern work and in the production of performance-oriented subjectivities. In contemporary capitalism, the intensification of temporal rationality permeates not only productive spaces, but also formative processes, particularly in technical-scientific fields such as Production Engineering. With this in mind, the present work aims to investigate how young students and graduates of the Production Engineering course at UFSCar experience the relationship between prescribed time and lived time throughout their formative and professional trajectories. The research is relevant insofar as it analyses time as a historical, technical, and moral construction within a field marked by rationality and metrification. The theoretical framework draws upon studies in the social history of time, sociology of work, critical theory of capitalism, and the psychodynamics of work. A qualitative approach was adopted, combining prosopographic analysis with a Bourdieusian reading of trajectories, based on thirty semi-structured interviews with agents who are socially situated within the field of study. The findings indicate that the internalisation of time as a moral principle of performance generates paradoxes and tensions, which are further reinforced by the formative process. The prescription of time is gradually transmuted into the incorporation of time, becoming an integral part of the young engineer's habitus. It is concluded that training in Production Engineering may be configuring itself as a structuring and structured instrument of temporal formation, aimed at producing an accomplished manager of systems who, paradoxically, tends to remain a prisoner of the very time he himself helps to accelerate.