Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation and Culture Change in the UK Rail Industry

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2006 by Murdoch, Jill

Tim Strangleman, Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation and Culture Change in the UK Rail Industry, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2004), 204 pp., £55.00.

This is a book that was waiting to be written: how has one of the most contentious privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s affected the fabled railway culture often depicted and romanticised in books and films? British Rail was thrust from public service to private profit, from one monopoly enterprise to 140 separate companies, overnight. Strangleman gives us an extraordinary insight into the changing experience of railway work through the political vicissitudes of the twentieth century. He traces workers' subjective experience of change in running a railway from the early days of the nineteenth century, through nationalisation and finally into privatisation. For Strangleman, railway culture was only ever marginally based on the muchvaunted liveries and uniforms: it was (and is) much more about the specific way that 'knowledge about work and the industry was stored and transferred between and among workers . . . and in the way this culture has been inherently dynamic and adaptable over time' (p. 41).

Strangleman shows how, for railway workers, the idea of the 'railway family' was crucial to personal identity, to consciousness of one's position in the world and to an understanding of the meaning of work. There was an idealised view of the importance of supplying a public service - a much maligned public service, perhaps, but one in which the workers believed. Railway workers were the heroes of their own stories: sustaining industry, helping travellers, turning out, unbidden, in snow and ice or rain and flood to assist with problems. Managers recognised that one of the great assets of the industry was the commitment of the railway family: much work was done unpaid and many skills were passed on before workers ever first clocked on through the literal railway family of sons (and occasionally daughters) following in their parents' footsteps.

The idyll began to crumble under Thatcherism in the 1980s when any signs of residual worker control over the labour process had to be attacked. Valuable as serious railway managers recognised that control to be, a set of tried and tested Thatcherite managers explicitly sought to break the family connections - real and metaphorical.

Strangleman's argument draws on the labour process debate, managerial literature on organisational culture and on recent literature on the search for individual and group identities. The analysis is illustrated throughout by well placed photographs, reproductions of posters and a wide range of quotes from literature, academic works, railway workers and managers, all of which are used to great effect. A particularly nice touch is Strangleman's occasional recollections of his and his colleagues' experience from his own brief railway career.

The reader is introduced to the subject of the development of workplace cultures in the first chapter. We also see how State ownership gradually comes to be 'blamed' for the railway's troubles. The chapter provides an excellent overview of what cultural change means to a workplace and how its implementation links in with neo-liberal attitudes to industry and work. It is interesting to note that, for a managerialist, 'strong, healthy organisations have strong, healthy cultures; weak organisations have weak cultures' (p. 8), meaning, logically, that the railway must have been an exceptionally strong organisation, yet it is precisely that culture that is later attacked most directly. The emergence of railway culture itself is described in chapter 2 with great sensitivity, taking us from its origins in 1830 through its many permutations up to nationalisation. The 'danger' of this culture, as perceived by the politicians of the 1980s, is shown with devastating clarity: such a strong occupational identity 'represents both technical as well as moral control over the labour process' (p. 35). The chapter on managing the nationalised industry reveals that the questioning - later brought to a peak during Thatcher's years - of whether a love of the railway could ever be a good basis for effective work began during the Beeching era, while the chapter that gives the story of the nationalised years from the experience of the workers questions many of the simplistic theories of the imposition of new technology and deskilling, pointing out that the transition to new technologies was often 'rendered intelligible precisely because there was a strong workplace culture which shared and valued a collective knowledge of railway operating procedures and practices' (p. 80).

The chapter entitled 'Back to the future' contains a subtle interpretation of the process of privatisation and the con- flicting ideologies brought to bear on the twin concepts of 'nostalgia' and 'nostophobia'. The distinction drawn between them and their ideological interplay as used by both workers and managers is a particularly original feature of Strangleman's analysis. The nostophobic focus on the past places 'responsibility for past failure . . . directly on . . . those who have worked in the industry', ignoring transport policies, lack of investment and other such determinants of success or failure. 'It therefore falls on the nostophobic to save the industry from its own nostalgia' (p. 126). The approach to organisational change at privatisation involved a wholesale eradication of the past, as far as workers were concerned, while appealing to certain approved nostalgia - like GNER's use of 'Route of the Flying Scotsman' inscribed on each of its coaches. The implication of the management's model of history was that certain aspects of the past are legitimate, or illegitimate. Critically, such programmes of cultural change 'can be thought of as an exercise in the de-legitimisation of the past, or a particular interpretation of the past, and the most powerful aspect of such a process is the attempted isolation of those who seek an alternative vision of the past' (p. 106) - as in, for example, labelling those who sought to retain traditional working methods 'dinosaurs'.