The journalists between employees and profession
This thesis analyzes the French professional journalists considering them from their status as employees in companies subject to management requirements and profitability, following the insights of Max Weber on the press. This stance led to ask a central question about the tension between the legal subordination of the employee and the professional autonomy that requires work. Professional autonomy and wage conditions of journalists are designed from the joint analysis of wage dynamics (defense of the wage) and professional dynamics (defense of professional autonomy). Without denying the specific nature of the good produced (information), directed by a group including other categories of workers, the prospect intends to complete a sociology of journalism that was widely considered on the basis of their professional characteristics by a sociology of industrial relations and firms. Based on a socio-historical analysis based on complementary methods (interviews, observations, documents), it first analyzes the structure of the professional group of journalists employed as a category in a specific company, the press firms. We show how this group is historically as a set of professional employees. Various collective organizations of the group are then understood as instances of representations of journalism taken in a wider system of industrial relations. Analysis of mobilization when restructuring is finally showing how journalists try to arrange concrete room for act against the power of the employer. This general position leads to depart the classical point of view based on the relationship of journalism to money, to capture the wage dynamics in which journalism become a professional category.