A Brave New World: Working for a Privatised Railway, 1979–2001

Abstract

The organisational theorist Martin Parker (2000) noted the ‘explosion of enthusiasm’ since the 1980s for writing on organisational culture. Management writers have encouraged their readers to think of themselves as organisational anthropologists able to tackle ‘soft’ people issues, rather than concentrating on company structure. Excellent, successful and dynamic companies are those with the ‘right culture’. Nowhere has this general shift in focus been more warmly embraced than in the UK railway industry (Bate, 1990, 1995; Guest et al., 1993). ‘Cultural’ explanations for failure have been attractive as they conveniently neglected the facts of long-term underinvestment in the industry, putting the blame instead on the norms and values of railway workers themselves. If the railways were to succeed, they required a culture change, one where values of entrepreneurship and commercial sense displaced the public-service ethos. As we saw in Chapter 5, ‘culture’, and the need to change it, structured the thinking of successive politicians involved in the privatisation process, and of the new managers who now run parts of the former State-owned British Rail. But how do we understand culture change programmes? How did workers themselves experience this change? In what ways has the fragmentation of the industry affected the workforce? Finally, what are the contradictions in this desire to ‘change the culture’? We begin this chapter by trying to understand the impulses behind the focus on culture.

The poison called History perpetuates misunderstandings and suspicions which would otherwise disappear under the present new conditions … Happy industries seem to be those with no history just as happy nations are.

(Ferdynand Zweig, The British Worker, 1952: 86–7)