This doctoral dissertation analyses the functioning of a workplace community and reflects upon the role of television in the construction of contemporary cultural symbols. The results of a five-year long participant-observation study of the editorial staff of a national television station are presented on order to examine, from a semio-pragmatic point of view, the recycling of archive footage in television news as a communicational proposal. Subjected to strong external and internal constraints, journalists utilise visual resources on a daily basis in their reporting. In the context of a high-pressured working environment where time is of the essence, documentalists in charge of the indexing of these programs anticipate recurring requests by means of "key word tools", which tend to indicate the high potential of reuse of a particular sequence. The study of these artifacts allows us to establish a typology of the most often reused images and to distinguish between "pregnant" and "illustrative" images. "Pregnant" images summarize and symbolize an event, whereas "illustrative" images, as "probable" visual aids for journalistic commentary, constitute archival resources which are little known to the TV viewer. Our study of the symbolic and stereotypd nature of these visual forms shows that the process of recycling serves to create, to stabilize, and to maintain such forms in our cognitive repertoires. TV news thus plays a key role in the homogenising of our representations of the world and is an important source of "neutral" conversation in interpersonal exchange.
