Nationalization and the Professional Ideal

Abstract

There is no evidence that the choice of the public corporation as the preferred form of public enterprise in Britain was the result of a rational decision-making process (AST 1951c: 23-24; Shinwell 1955: 172-173; Hanson 1961: 28). It would be rather surprising to find that, after a review of all the possible forms of public enterprise, the public corporation just happened to be the most suitable form for all the industries and services that have been nationalized in Britain, and that it should remain the most appropriate form, despite all the social and economic changes since the establishment of the first corporation in 1926. Nor does the selection of the public corporation appear to have been a political choice. Pre-war Conservative and Conservative-dominated governments pioneered the public corporation in this country when they nationalized the BBC, the London Passenger Transport Board, the Central Electricity Board and BOAC (Imperial Airways). Whilst there was a long, and at times bitter, debate within the Labour Party before and after the first World War over the desirable form of future public enterprises (Dahl 1947, Hanson 1954, Tivey 1966: 37), virtually all Labour nationalization measures have adopted the same structure. The British appear, in fact, to have established some of the largest organizations the world has ever known, in a intuitive manner, and to have taken the form more or less for granted. One may infer, therefore, that the form they have chosen expresses, in part at least, a cultural preference, especially as, by contrast, with the French, Italians, Swedes and others, they seem to have been very consistent in this respect. In this paper, I will attempt to identify this cultural preference. The limitations of available data give little opportunity of doing this with a fine degree of precision, but one may reasonably attempt a piece of sociological detection: to try and make sense of the evidence we have, to state some tentative conclusions and to provide some concepts and questions for future investigation.