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Biology and Politics (or Biopolitics) has been a part of the political science firmament since the 1960s. Over time, it has become less an odd outlier in the discipline and more a tolerated (and sometimes respected) part of the enterprise. After about 50 years of existence, this is a proper time to reflect on where biopolitics has been, where it is now, and where it might go as an academic endeavor. Indeed, some have said that the best step would for biopolitics to no longer be seen as a special, narrow part of political science – but a part of every field in the discipline, integrated into the larger world of the study of politics.

This chapter discusses the cross-sectional relationships between national and local government, citizens and hybrid organisations via a historical case study, that of the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) during its existence 1933–1948. It finds that the LPTB was a good example of hybridity located in an earlier time period than most research examines, and that the arrangements by which it was governed resulted in some counter-intuitive outcomes which challenge the findings from research located in more recent periods concerning the performance of hybrid organisations. However, it supports other research proposing that the role of elites as well as institutional contexts is a key factor in the creation and operation of semi-autonomous organisations, and it accepts that objectively measuring the performance in order to make meaningful comparison is not only extremely problematic but may even inhibit performance.