Public enterprise governance

Abstract

Public enterprise management displays unique inherent tensions between its ‘publicness’ and ‘enterprise’ elements. The complex dynamics between these two sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting notions in managing a public enterprise can be interpreted with the aid of the concepts of governance. Public enterprise governance can be understood in terms of the dynamics among actors from the state, market and civil society in governing and managing collective affairs, each of very different values, norms and logics. This article introduces an analytical framework using the concepts of governance and public enterprises, and applies it to the wholly government-owned railway corporation, Kowloon – Canton Railway Corporation (KCRC) in Hong Kong. The KCRC can be regarded as commercially successful but this profitable public corporation has been plagued with many public governance controversies in its twenty-year history. Lessons from three major cases (the golden handshake affair, Long Valley saga and Siemens fiasco) are discussed.