Teliesyn: A Singular Welsh Media Company’s History Through the Lenses of Cottle, Bourdieu and Berne

This chapter offers a detailed examination of the Welsh media production company Teliesyn (Cardiff, 1982–2002) based on paper records, oral testimonies from former employees, and the theories of Simon Cottle (media and communication), Pierre Bourdieu (sociology) and Eric Berne (transactional analysis). It focuses on the lived experience of the employees, so as to shed light on what was, on the one hand, a successful mix of collectivist and corporatist approaches to media production and organisation, but on the other, a failure in a period of turbulent change within the broadcasting environment. This chapter is also a reflection on historiography with specific attention being paid to the dialectical interaction between singular events (individual occurrences) and systemic narratives (general context). To this end, it draws inspiration from Cottle’s “macro-meso-micro” analytical frame, from Bourdieu’s concept of “autonomy” and from Berne’s “model of organisational dynamics”.