The Fragmentation of a Railway: A Study of Organizational Change

Abstract

abstract This paper considers pathways of organizational change within British Rail (BR) during its long period of commercialization culminating in privatization. TheLaughlin (1991) andParker (1995a) frameworks are used to demonstrate how a new interpretative scheme supplanted the previous interpretative scheme within BR between the 1970s and privatization in the mid‐1990s, leading to a fragmented organization. BR did not survive and privatization of Britain's railways remains controversial. The study demonstrates that without the earlier changes in interpretive scheme from ‘social railway’ to ‘business railway’ to ‘profitable business’, and the associated changes in design archetypes and sub‐systems, privatization would have been both less tempting and less feasible. It is intended that the approach developed here to analyse organizational change in BR should be applicable to the study of other privatizations and to other forms of organizational change in both the public and private sectors.