Organisational culture and privatisation: A case study of the Argentinean railway sector

Public units that have been through a deregulatory process operate in a new market, see their legal framework radically altered, have to fight for customers and to generate their own resources. Such changes affect the way a company operates and obviously also affect the culture an organisation has. This study illustrates how the organisational culture of Ferrocarriles Argentinos, an Argentinean state-owned-enterprise, was transformed as a consequence of the company's partitioning and subsequent transfer into private hands. The case provides a good example of how a weak and dysfunctional culture was re-oriented towards an emphasis on customers, cost-reduction and efficiency. It also provides an interesting example for the management of ongoing as well as future privatisation processes. The insights gained through this study could find application within organisations that, though belonging to the private sector, have been heavily regulated and are trying to get rid of the pernicious cultural by-products of this regulation.