Statistics as Fetishes

Abstract

Research into compensation management continues to draw attention from scholars in many organizational disciplines ranging from accounting and finance to human resources and strategic management. Scholars search for empirical links between various compensation strategies and improved performance. A prime example is the institutionalization of executive compensation contracts that theoretically, at least, should reward executives on the basis of their firms' financial performance. Yet scholars are finding inconsistent evidence of any links. The authors suggest that an ethnostatistical analysis of these studies will yield one consistent finding: obsession with the value of rational data as the “truth” about organizational practices. This reliance on quantitative measures has become an organizational fetish. In this article, the authors explain how compensation strategies have become fetishes and then use semiotics and ethnostatistics to explore the fetish nature of compensation contracts that award annual salaries and bonuses based on various price and earnings measures of organizational performance.