(Mis)Using Numbers in the Enron Story

Abstract

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.

An ethnostatistical analysis of performance measurement

“…Through ethnostatistical analyses, a researcher can expose and analyze three aspects of the life of statistics and their use: (1) reduction of reality to data, (2) assignment of data to categories and subjecting of these data to statistical analysis, and (3) use of statistics as a form of rhetoric to ''make things'' and ''get things done.'' Ethnostatistical analyses show that practices of measurement, analysis of data, and use of data rarely if ever fulfill the image of rationality and objectivity with which quite frequently they are unquestionably associated (Boje et al, 2006;Garfinkel, 1967bGarfinkel, , 1986Gephart, 1988;Latour, 1987;Latour & Woolgar, 1990;Lynch, 1993;Winiecki, 2006a).…”

“…A similar analysis was performed by Boje, Gardner, and Smith (2006), who analyzed rhetorical use of the rational logic of free-market economics and accounting data on the part of personnel at Enron in order to produce the ''accountably correct'' view that the corporation was not only solvent but highly successful. The commonsense view that accounting and auditing are unquestionably objective and based on hard data was played up by members of Enron to build a rhetoric that enticed real investors to commit real money to the corporation.…”

“…For example, ethnostatistical analyses have been used to analyze, among other things, how officials at Enron were able to produce evidence of financial success; account for nonscientific and nontechnological ways in which clinical health care decisions may be made; and the complex of technical and nontechnical processes involved in rating, ranking, and subjectifying workers as highlevel or deficient-even when these processes do not adequately account for the actions performed or decisions made (Boje, Gardner, & Smith, 2006;Garfinkel, 1967bGarfinkel, , 1986Gephart, 1988;Winiecki, 2006a). Because business consultants and performance technologists focus on organizational measures in all phases of their work, understanding the social underpinnings of the tasks of creating data-that is, using it to produce statistical or other types of measures and then using them to influence what has come to be called performance-can have substantial impact on how HPT practitioners envision and act to create and improve systems within the larger social system.…”

Using an ethnostatistical analysis to interpret data: the Nike case

“…Ethnostatistics has been used to examine a variety of work (Boje et al, 2006;Kilduff and Oh, 2006;Mills et al, 2006). We use a historical document that was highly publicized and very controversial at the time of its release, and we analyze it from the three levels of ethnostatistics.…”

Sustainable Oil and Profitable Wind

“…It is a paradigm that deconstructionist CSR research (e.g., Aras & Crowther 2009;Fougère & Solitander 2009;Slack 2012) actually shares with the functionalist business discourse on CSR (e.g., Basil & Erlandson 2008;Preuss 2015;Waddock & Googins 2011;Wagner, Lutz & Weitz 2009;Yoon, Gürhan-Canli & Schwarz 2006). However, such a theoretical positioning expects the impossible of empirical research, requiring the identification of practices beyond communication (Boje, Gardner & Smith 2006). Instead, we would follow a paradigm that conceptualises communication as social practice: Communication Constitutes Organisations (Ashcraft, Kuhn & Cooren 2009;Taylor & van Every 2000).…”