The Mis/recognition of Enron Executives' Competence as Cultural and Social Capital

Abstract

This case study examines Enron's top executives' activities through Bourdieu's notion of misrecognized competence or ''capital.'' Top executives' practices were misrecognized as valuable and legitimate competencies against the backdrop of the company's changing new-economy context. Most approaches to intellectual, social, and cultural capital assume their automatic value. In contrast, this essay shows that the perceived value of executives' practices was the result of Enron's context and executives' communicative efforts to position their own contributions as the most important. As outsiders scrutinized the company, however, executives' activities were exposed as self-serving and primary contributors to Enron's troubles.Recent texts explore the concepts of intellectual, social, and cultural capital as ways to account for previously hidden assets (e.g.

The different impact of personal social capital and intra-organizational SC

“…The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) posted it on the web for public use (Bartling, 2015), and many studies have used this corpus in order to investigate and better understand organizational life. Lyon (2008), for example, analyzed executive e-mails qualitatively through keyword searches that focused on e-mails to, from, or pertaining to the most senior executives. Eckhaus et al (forthcoming) employed language processing techniques to analyze e-mails from Enron, in order to comprehend the perspectives and reporting of senior managers before and after the collapse.…”