An ‘oversized’ participation?
This article analyses the way in which the social and academic temporalities of a social scientist may impact her survey system and the way she investigates during the field phase of her research. To illustrate what that means, the analysis looks back at a participating observation in an army officers’s school in France, conducted by the author while she was doing her doctorate. The article shows how the author’s involvement in the officiers’s struggles for prestige was related to the theoretical questions of her own claim for scientific recognition. Also at stake was her involvement itself, related to her academis position in the academic field as a PhD candidate. This paper proposes that an unduly ethnographic involvement can be seen as an alternative academic and scientific ressource for a special kind of academic profession’s candidates.