29

This paper aims to extend understanding of student sociability in the context of France’s grandes écoles by analyzing a freshers’ weekend. It takes as its starting point the actors’ reading of the event as an opportunity to facilitate student socialization, but questions this interpretation. The paper demonstrates how the functioning of the induction event –the process of familiarizing students with campus life, assimilating group rituals and getting to know fellow students– also needs to be decoded as a process of differentiation and domination. During the freshers’ weekend, students discover a number of different groups that structure the student community, in particular the existence of an elite that serves as a model for newcomers to emulate. Successful socialization therefore means joining different associative bodies. This is partly contingent on structural constraints related to gender, social origin, and pre-university education, and partly dependent on a political game-playing that requires students to pursue strategies of distinction and to form the “best” possible alliances with like-minded others.