Post bureaucracy and the politics of forgetting: The management of change at the BBC, 1991‐2002

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the imputed “fall” and subsequent “reinvention” of the BBC during the 1990s, relating a managerialist “politics of forgetting” to the broader ideological narratives of “the post bureaucratic turn”.

The paper draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, combining case study analysis with long‐term historical perspectives on organisational change.

The paper shows the ways in which public sector professionals contested “post bureaucratic” pressures for marketisation and organisational disaggregation.

The paper shows the ways in which large‐scale technological, regulatory and organisational change was mediated by cultural continuities and recurrent “surges” of managerial control.