MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Cognitive rules and culture
been the essence of the conflict in PCS over two and a half
years. Nobody would say that the CPSA was anything other
than General Secretary centred and it has been a battle of
cultures really between that highly centralised approach with the
DGS having his use of language -- his use of capital letters --
corrected on a memo by the General Secretary. He was not
impressed. Down to the approach that gradually PCS is
definitely becoming which is more of a team led approach
(Interviewee C)
Nor a happy diversity in political terms:-
This was a very difficult political merger because in a sense the
ruling group on the national executive of PTC was, I would have
described it as the majority being centre or centre left Labour
Party. The majority of the ruling group in the CPSA I would have
described as right wing Labour Party and some not even Labour
Party at all. Also, two different cultures in the two organisations.
CPSA having a culture probably best described, I think by
James Naughtie once, as the Beirut of the trade union
movement but very much one in a centralist dictatorship style
whereas the PTC culture was one that was more open to a
degree of -- you debate things with due respect and tolerance at
your Conference as opposed to a sort of bear pit atmosphere of
the CPSA; so there were two different cultures and two different
political mixes that were there. (Interviewee D)
However, there were suggestions that cultural perceptions were a good
deal more complex than any of the descriptions so far offered. One
interviewee was a joint union appointment immediately prior to merger
and she gives some valuable insight into the cultural makeup of the
union:-
I think I very quickly realised that there were not just two
different cultures, there were four because I would say that IRSF
had a different culture, they were still at Victoria and although
they had merged with NUCPS to form PTC, that had only been
in existence for 18 months and they had not really merged. They
were still a separate union down at Victoria. And then I think the
regions have a different culture again which to me seems more
near to the members really, more focused on the members and I
felt the Victoria IRSF was more like I was used to in local
government, really, with a focus on the customer. The PTC
culture -- I mean the part down at Southwark -- which had been
the NUCPS mainly although there were some staff, like the
Director of Finance, for example, and the Head of Education
who had been IRSF staff who had moved and become more
integrated with PTC -- but the culture there was that we would
try to be modern, that we would try to improve management and
they were putting things in place but I felt that they were not very
thorough in the way that they did it. It was all a bit slapdash and
143