Responsible Co-Workers and Irresponsible Counter-Workers

Abstract

The Railway Authority was to be deregularized and marketized. The state grants were to be strongly diminished and the authority had to procure other receipts. At the same time there was still no other customer than the administrative parts of the same authority. But new and buyer-seller-oriented organizational forms, adjusted to a market, were to be introduced. ‘We must be more modern’, management thought, and thereby they meant that the organization should be more like a market agent: the public sector is antiquated, now there will be a market! What marked this transformation was the adjustment to the market. This was to make the employees ‘move double-quick’, as the managers liked to say. Instead of the buyer purchasing services from divisions of the department, they were now to purchase them in competition with ‘agents’ and ‘players’ at the market. There were almost only positive associations with the market and almost only negative associations with the public sector: the rigid bureaucratic authority that, protected by its monopoly, could trot along at its own pace totally unencumbered by what happened around it. With the help of the market, this department would now be restructured into an entrepreneurial consultant business.