Boundary making in public-private-partnerships (PPP): A historical account of the British railway industry

Since its emergence in 1980s, public private partnerships (PPP) have become a predominant approach for delivering social and economic infrastructure in the UK. This has inspired many scholarships into how such arrangements can bring about better performance for all. In much of the extant work, the focus has been on finding more effective ways of configuring the relationships between the public and private parties, often taking assumption that each of these sectors are homogenous entities. In this paper, we raise the question as to whether boundaries between the public sector and private sector are ever so clear cut. We do so by drawing upon an on-going archival study in to British railway industry in the 1960s. We found that the roles played by stakeholders were often messy, and that the labels of what constituted "public" and what constituted "private" were not always clearly defined. Indeed, relationships were often blended between the two spheres. Rather than to focus on finding better ways of bringing the public and private together in delivering PPPs, it is argued that these arrangements between public and private sectors are better studied as fertile context for boundary making and identity formation.