The traditional system of elite education in France, which could be considered as a “French exception” (Lazuech 1999), is challenged by processes of internationalisation and globalisation of the field of higher education. The grandes écoles – the French elite colleges – with their two-year preparatory classes (classes préparatoires) at some prestigious lycées can be considered as unique in the severity of the selection processes (the concours), on which is grounded the great symbolic weight of these institutions of elite education, even more than the universities in France.  

The ongoing reorganisation of the French field of higher education, which Musselin (2017: 226) designates “fusion mania”, has led to the formation of greater research units such as the “Communautés d’universités et d’établissements” (COMUES) [Engl. Communities of universities and institutions]. These have recently been transformed into "universities”, which are new higher education formations that include the former universities, but also the grandes écoles and other research institutions.   

Against the backdrop of these transformations of the former power relations in the academic field in France, our paper focuses on the processes of reconfiguration of the traditional identities of the very nationally anchored institutions in elite education: the grandes écoles. Our research question is how discourses of self-construction and -positioning of the grandes écoles – in our study the Écoles normales supérieures – as well as their social constructions of an ideal student have evolved in the context of the reconfiguration of the higher education field in France. These constructions and positionings are understood as constituting elements of institutional habitus (Schippling 2018), a concept that develops the fruitful potential of the Bourdieusian theory of habitus for an organisational sociological perspective.  

From the theoretical perspective, our paper is situated within critical research on the education of elites (e.g., Bourdieu 1989; Hartmann 2002; Maxwell et al. 2018) and can be understood as a contribution to continuing research on the field of French elite education in line with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues on La noblesse d’État (Bourdieu 1989). Our work refers mainly to the triad of the concepts, ‘habitus’, ‘field’ and ‘capital’. These concepts function as heuristic elements which are developed and, if necessary, modified within the research process. 

Our study includes two Écoles normales supérieures: the ENS de la rue d’Ulm and the ENS de Cachan (since 2016 École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay): two prestigious grandes écoles in France, which regard themselves as institutions forming the future research elite (ENS / PSL 2023). Bourdieu (1988: 19) designates these colleges “the apex of the whole academic hierarchy” in France. Our aim is to ascertain how these traditionally small and internationally less visible institutions, strongly founded in a national culture, react to the transformation of the field of French higher education in the construction of their institutional habitus.  

On the whole, our focus is on contributing to an update of the theory of social reproduction of the field of power – in this case the academic power field – which was developed in La noblesse d’État, taking into account processes of internationalisation and globalisation in the field of the grandes écoles: this perspective was not considered in Bourdieu’s work. In parallel, we open up comparative perspectives with other international contexts of elite education in the higher education system that are also affected by global transformations, but react in different ways (e.g., Verhoeven et al. 2022). 

Our study on the French elite colleges is based on a qualitative-empirical research design. We carried out semi-directed expert interviews with in total 18 lecturers that have or had representative functions at the two Écoles normales supérieures. These interviews approach thematic fields as, for example, the institutional image of these colleges, the recent transformation processes, the selection procedures and the constructions of an ideal student. Moreover, the data corpus consists of representational documents of the institutions on the internet (websites) or in brochures as well as participant observation of culture-related events (e.g., welcome events for new students, graduation ceremonies, other festive events, etc.). The data analysis relies on the methodology of the documentary interpretation method (e.g., Nohl 2017; Bohnsack 2021). This method allows, on the one hand, an analysis of the topics related to the self-constructions and -positionings of these elite colleges – based on the expert interviews as well as representational documents and participant observations. On the other hand, it offers a reconstruction of the underlying implicit knowledge which is the basis of these topics. The method is appropriate for the analysis of text material as well as images that can be found, in this case from websites or print media.

Our paper firstly offers new insights in the French field of elite education and the processes of social reproduction as it focuses on the transformation of the institutional habitus of the Écoles normales supérieures in the context of internationalisation and globalisation processes: a perspective that does not play any role in the classical works of Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues on La noblesse d’État. Secondly, our qualitative-empirical study responds to a desideratum in the field of research on French grandes écoles, which since the 1990s has mainly concentrated on the social selectivity of these institutions with a quantitative research design (e.g., in an overview: Bonneau 2021). Our work is aligned with more recent qualitative studies that focus on the internationalisation of this elite education field (e.g., Darchy-Koechlin & Draelants 2010; Darchy-Koechlin et al. 2015; Bian 2017). For the first time, we analyse the perspectives of professors in their function as representatives of these grandes écoles on the reorganisation of the French academic power field, focusing on the role of the Écoles normales supérieures. We contribute thirdly to reworking the research tools of La noblesse d’État – the triad of habitus, field and capital – that Bourdieu developed on the basis of a paradigm of methodological nationalism (Schmitz & Witte 2020, pp. 104–106) and, subsequently, we open fruitful analytical frameworks for researching elite education within a global comparative perspective.

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