The role of scripts as a job design tool, and the functional and dysfunctional impacts of mindlessness that can result from the habitual and repetitive performance of scripts is examined from a service perspective. Five dimensions of scripts are then proposed: script complexity – the degree to which scripts require cognition during their performance; script intensity – the degree to which the script permits variation and adlibbing in its performance; number of scripts – an absolute measure of the number of scripts that must be learned to perform the job; percentage of time in script – the percentage of work time spent in scripted behaviour; and percentage of scripted duties – the percentage of a worker′s job duties or tasks that are scripted. These dimensions are then examined in the context of the degree of customer‐induced uncertainty experienced by service organisations. Finally, a model is proposed that relates the five script dimensions to high, medium, and low levels of customer‐induced uncertainty.

Research Interests include entrepreneurship, legal and management issues in small and medium-sized businesses and virtual corporations. Doug Eichholz, Graduate Research Assistant, School of Business, Emporia State University. Research interests include entrepreneurship, ethics, and management issues in small and medium-sized businesses.

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This article investigates the numeric construction, rhetorical moves, and metatheatre (defined as multiple stages for performing organization stories) pertaining to the widely publicized failure of Enron Corporation. The authors thus examine how statistics in financial reports and executive metatheatric presentations were used to persuade Wall Street experts to recommend Enron stock, when the writing was on the fourth wall. The authors' contribution to ethnostatistics is fourfold. First, they show that financial reports and discourse are a suitable and important topic for ethnostatistical analysis. Second, they extend ethnostatistics beyond how academic professionals tell stories with numbers, to how professional practitioners in organizations tell such stories. Third, they show the important role the rhetorical construction of financial performance measures played in the Enron failure. And fourth, they extend ethnostatistics by integrating ethnostatistics' third moment of rhetoric with theatrical theory to show the situated and staged nature of the rhetoric of quantification.

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Incoming freshmen are typically required to write essays which are then holistically rated to determine composition course placement. These placement essays vary not only in topic, but also in the way the topic is structured. Two topic structures are most commonly used: Open (students draw on their own knowledge) and Response (students read a given text and respond to it). It has been established that students perform differently on topic structure itself. To investigate this effect, one topic was used but presented as (1) an Open topic structure, (2) a Response topic structure with one reading passage, and (3) a Response topic structure with three reading passages. The essays, written by college freshmen, were holistically rated for quality and analyzed for fluency, total error, and error ratios. The results indicated that the structure of the topic made a difference in quality, fluency, and total error, but not in any error ratio. These results suggest that, for placement testing, one should first decide which types of students one wishes to identify because each topic structure distinguishes low, average, and high ability students differently.

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