342 ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGERS
findings of the research project were noted and informally discussed with various
participants.^9
The organization: an overview
The research was undertaken in a major railway company. The company is referred
to here as ER^10 (‘‘Euro Rail’’). It is, and has been for some while, in public sector
ownership. It is large by any standards, employing approximately 160,000 people.
It has a distinguished history.
History and traditions
ER has its origins in the great private-sector railway companies set up in the
middle decades of the last century. These each built and operated a main line out
of the capital city, i.e. radial routes and associated branch lines.^11 The companies
are legendary. They raised capital to fund their projects on an unprecedented scale.
Their railways were built by world-famous engineers who pioneered emerging
industrial technology, designing magnificent steam locomotives and tracks and
bridges which the world admired. The railways were, and are, a visible celebration
of Victorian accomplishment.
These companies enjoyed a monopoly in the nation’s transport well into this
century. They had good relationships with successive governments. They paid
consistent dividends and their shares were blue-chip stocks. This monopoly
position and government patronage, coupled with a remarkable continuity in
the underlying nature of their operations, rendered them highly bureaucratic:
rules and procedures were well defined, there were clear chains of command
and formalized systems for managing operations.^12 Their managements were
conservative, cultivating a belief in the uniqueness of railway management and
the wisdom of practices built up over many decades.
(^9) There were several fascinating aspects of this last stage in the field. One was that many managers
had simply forgotten what had happened, or at least had retrospectively reconstructed it. In
particular, some seemed to forget how tentative their initiatives had been, the anguish and
stress of trying to imagine a new future, the tense moments at the heights of political intrigue
and the sheer uncertainty of the outcomes. They read the past through the present. Geertz’
(1973, p. 19) notion, drawn from Ricoeur, of the ethnographer ‘‘...tracing the curve of social
discourse; fixing it in inspectable form...He turns it from a passing event which exists only in
its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which...can be reconsulted’’, is particularly
pertinent here. Secondly, my intervention at this stage actually constructed a past (and hence a
present) for participants; in other words, the theory developed here on the constitutive potential
of accounting may be a general theory of accounts.
(^10) The company’s name has been disguised.
(^11) This is an oversimplification, for in fact there were then a multitude of local regional railway
companies in addition. It was only in the 1920s that government inspired mergers led to their
consolidation around the major routes.
(^12) This was not unique to ER. See Chandler (1965), Crozier (1964) and Gourvish (1986).