ABSTRACT
This work has a clear objective: it seeks to examine and understand the organisational cultures of two large organisations. Coupled with this, it attempts also to examine and understand processes surrounding the ways that these organisations changed in the middle of the decade of the 1990s. In so doing, the study raises a number of significant theoretical, methodological and operational dimensions that arise directly from the study’s empirical investigation. They are treated in more detail at appropriate places throughout the work as a whole, but their identification and exploration begins in this chapter. The cultural analysis of the two organisations is a worthwhile objective in the context of the middle and late 1990s in Great Britain, because the two organisations were formerly in the public sector. However, at the time of presentation of this study they have each been part of the private sector for more than ten years. In the early and middle years of the 1980s each organisation became subject to fundamental review as a consequence of the privatisation measures of the Conservative political administrations of that time. Each of these internal reviews, following on from the government statutory intervention, identified the need to render each organisation studied much more accountable to a number of constituencies (of course, a number of other organisations that were not part of this study faced a similar task as a consequence of similar privatisation measures). So, attempting to understand what happened as a result of the impact of enforced organisational change is judged to be an interesting task.
