Working the System: Journeys through Corporate Culture in the ‘Railway Age’

Abstract

In the 19th century railway work was a high-status occupation; a strong sense of occupational community and identification with work was present within the industry. Railway companies were uncompromisingly modern large-scale bureaucratically organised corporations, developing extensive networks of lines, changing physical, social, and economic geographies, and producing new forms of administrative space, In this paper it is argued that for its workers, both as the immediate subjects and as the producers of new forms of spatial organisation, experience of the corporate geography of the railway was intrinsic to the meaning of work and the status of railway workers in society. The metaphorical relationship between the story and the journey made by de Certeau is used to trace the relationships between the large-scale public geography of the railway corporation and the intimate private geography of individual biography.