Rentsch and Finger (2015) who term the state–SOE relationships ambiguous. However, this study shows how it changes over time, that more relationships can occur and that, because of the ambiguity, it is not just a principal–agent relationship of powering interest, but also based on a process of puzzling and meaning making where influential actors are shaping the role of the SOE together.
For SJ the roles are closely related because it used its former monopoly to strengthen its position first in the tender market through alliances and later in the open access market owing to historical, now commercial assets like the fleet and the brand. However, SJ as a market actor without any formal institutional role is threatened by both the regional authorities and the commercial market actors. While not being formally renegotiated on national level, SJ is faced with historical expectations by other stakeholders (Yeung, 2005) and turn it into a strategy to play a privileged role in coordinating sectorial challenges pointing to a New Public Governance approach (Osborne, 2010) to the SOE. In the Danish case DSB used an international strategy to become less dependent on its domestic position. However, the international strategy backfired and DSB influenced the external marketization domestically. In this process, via its own strategies and the Ministry’s wish to regain control, DSB has returned to being the institutional national SOE and for now is protected by a negotiated contract that can be seen as a New Weberian approach (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011) to SOEs.
authorities as endogenous actors pushed the layered set-up, which created a displacement of the historical role of the SOE to the regional level. It has left SJ as a market actor in drift, but with the societal expectations of solving national sectorial challenges and thus a New Public Governance IMA. In Denmark, the SOE was redirected towards new goals, but finally reconverted to a New Weberian IMA as sector coordinator because of problems with the SOE as market actor and closeness to the national political level.
The article contributes to the academic discussion of gradual institutional change in the post NPM era (Christensen and Lægreid, 2011, Bezes and Lodge, 2015) by suggesting that when analyzing a reform of an organization that has institutional features, but that also becomes a market actor, more mechanisms are at play simultaneously and can change over time and even be reversed. The IMA is a contribution to the current academic enquiry into contemporary SOEs (Thynne, 2013, Bernier, 2014, Florio, 2014, Grossi et al., 2015). It extends the actor-oriented accounts to SOEs by providing an gradual institutional perspective that can account for how historical and political legacy (Paz, 2015) and ambiguity (Rentsch and Finger, 2015) influence the state-SOE relationships and thus point to how state matters (Bruton et al., 2015) to contemporary SOEs.
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