From the Invisible Hand to CEO Speak: Enron and a Rhetoric of Corporate Collapse

Thesis (Ph.D.), Department of English, Washington State UniversityIn the immediate aftermath of the Enron Corporation's 2001 collapse, economic discourse occupied center stage as a largely uncomprehending public sought to make sense of previously unimaginable fiscal circumstances. That conversation continues even now, for we've come to understand that Enron's failure was no isolated corporate incident. Rather, the rhetoric of markets and market failures has resurfaced again and again over the decade following Enron's collapse, played out in scenes of institutionalized fiscal malfeasance from Adelphia Communications, WorldCom, and Tyco International, to the mortgage finance debacle that subsequently brought this country to its economic knees. How we attend to that economic discourse - indeed, whether or not we attend to it, much less understand it - may well prove the difference between learning from mistakes made versus repeating them yet again. The familiarity, clarity, and recognition that were once provided through classical, "scientific" economic analysis, however, cannot be relied upon exclusively in today's times. Rather, a bridging device is needed, a rhetoric of corporate collapse that acknowledges the historic sources of and routes taken by western market discourse as it crosses into matters of contemporary power and economics. Such a rhetoric is a necessary predicate to comprehending and explaining the present business culture, and the evidence of same that Enron supplies. The rhetoric conceived of here first invokes Enlightenment theoreticians, then classically-trained economists, and later draws from twentieth-first century social and literary scholars, among others. Beginning with the foundation established by interdisciplinary practitioners such as Adam Smith, philosophies of the marketplace carry forward in twentieth- and twenty-first century economic formulations that are complicated by social, political, epistemological, and discourse theories with equally legitimate standing in the semantic queue. When taken together as a rhetoric of corporate collapse, these disparate elements contribute to an understanding of CEO-speak and other coded discourses found in the crisis climate of today's marketplace. This interplay of traditional economics with the concerns of contemporary political economy provides the frame that will be used to assess the rhetoric of corporate collapse, particularly as demonstrated by the case of the Enron Corporation's spectacular demise in the winter of 2001.Department of English, Washington State Universit