(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.