ACCOUNTING AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURES 357
line. Business Managers are taking a maintenance holiday [i.e. neglecting
maintenance]. In five years someone will be faced with exactly the situation
I inherited.Former regional General Managers have been replaced with sympathetic men.
They repudiate the old traditions. They are proud to subscribe to the business
culture. A newly appointed General Manager had this to say:
I personally feel that this new approach is right. I support the businesses. I
see it as my job to influence my current staff to accept the business managers.Far from being equals in a team, the regional General Managers are seen to be
subservient to Business Managers. ‘‘Business managers set policy and standards;
regions implement’’. Career patterns have changed. To become a regional General
Manager was the ultimate aspiration for a railway-man; by the end of the field
research it was to become a Business Manager. There was open discussion of
removing the regional General Managers from Railway Executive.
Accounting and culture
Initially, there was a dominant ‘‘railway’’ culture. The Business Managers brought
a counter ‘‘business’’ culture. This cascaded across the senior managementelite ́
to become dominant. The Business Managers had an abstract idea of a business
railway. New accounts were crafted representing the railway as a series of
businesses. The Business Managers gainedcontexts to interact with others. In these
contexts, they recast dialogue and debate from a railway language of operations
and engineering to their business language of markets and profit. Gradually the
idea of a business railway became more specific. Moving from remote concerns
to immediate issues, they persuaded others of their interpretations. There were
contests over the definition of specific activities. The outcomes became symbols
through which people attributed new meaning to railway operations. Momentum
built up behind the business culture. People converted, others left. For senior
managers, the abstract idea became a tangible, energizing reality, a source of
pride. Now the railway culture is repudiated.
A broad range of theories can be brought to bear to interpret the pattern of
these events. Fundamental to this account is the notion of culture as a system of
ideas: beliefs, knowledges and values in which action and artifacts are vested with
expressive qualities (Geertz, 1973, 1983); and the idea that organizations have dis-
tinctive cultures (Pettigrew, 1979). This is exemplified in the contrasting ‘‘railway’’
and ‘‘business’’ cultures described. Associated with this is the conceptualization of
organizational change as a process of uncoupling and recoupling (cf. Greenwood
& Hinings, 1988): exemplified in the railway by the uncoupling of activities from
the railway culture and their recoupling to the business culture.^20 We can also see
(^20) This characterization, of course, emphasizes change; and there is also a sense in which there is
continuity. The railway still runs trains, it still provides a transport infrastructure (of sorts), and