The Fragmentation of a Railway: A Study of Organizational Change

Abstract

This paper considers pathways of organizational change within British Rail (BR) during its long period of commercialization culminating in privatization. The Laughlin (1991) and Parker (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. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.

Driving Water Management Change Where Economic Incentive is Limited

“…Within a corporation, metarules are likely to be focused on the maximisation of profit. Cultures, beliefs, values, and norms comprise a secondary level to an organisation's interpretive schemes (Tyrrall and Parker 2005). Organisational culture will not necessarily be integrated and homogeneous; Martin (1992) suggests that culture might differ from one organisational sub-unit to another, or be fragmented.…”

Public sector reforms, privatisation and regimes of control in a Chinese enterprise

“…His subsequent research (1992) on changes of MAS following management buy-out showed that owner-managers use MAS in a selective manner to facilitate changes in organisational structures and in the attitudes of participants, and to improve efficiency and profitability. More recently, Tyrrall and Parker (2001) investigated the changes of accounting systems in British…”

“…Empirical research on the differences of management control between the public and the private or privatised sector is scarce and often inclusive 5 (Boardman and Vining, 1988;Cragg and Dyck, 1999;Martin and Parker, 1997;Karatas, 1995;Jones, 1985;Tyrrall and Parker, 2001;Letza and Smallman, 2001). Very few studies have researched the changes in control, performance and accountability after privatisation in less developed and post-communist countries.…”

Qualitative Research: A Case for a Multi-Angle View to Enhance ‘Validity’

“…In other words, they should "…bind the organization together and make it a coherent whole" (Laughlin, 1991, p. 213). According to Tyrrall and Parker (2005), however, the organizational change model given by Laughlin (1991) emphasizes more on the design archetypes of an organization. Since the adjusting and tailoring of design archetypes of an organization is a job that pertains purely to the senior management, Tyrrall and Parker (2005) argue that in most studies that resort to Laughlin's model the focus is on looking at the organizational change from the top management point of view rather than other staff levels.…”

“…A number of frameworks have been devised by organizational and other researchers for the analysis of organizational change (Tyrrall & Parker, 2005). The 'organizational change' dimension of the microfinance sector's paradigm shift could be best analysed by the Laughlin's (1991) organizational change theoretical conceptualization (see figure 1 below).…”