Electronic bits and ten gallon hats : Enron, American culture and the postindustrial political economy

This dissertation uses the Enron Corporation as a case study to examine the ways in which large-scale corporations become cultural actors in pursuit of establishing favorable regulatory environments, and how Enron's collapse in 2001 allowed United States citizens to protest and express anxiety over a national and international economic shift towards postindustrialism that began in the early 1970s. Through a consideration of materials such as marketing literature, correspondence between Enron executives and state and federal government officials, and the entire run of Enron Business, the employee magazine, as well as popular cultural texts, including, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as film and book-length narrative accounts of the company, this study contributes to an understanding of the cultural work that must be performed in order to establish and maintain political economic systems, as well as the ways in which cultural production is used to make sense of economic change. In many ways, Enron manifested a number of prominent political economic changes during the late twentieth century that have been identified by scholars such as David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. From the 1980s onward, the company increasing eschewed large-scale industrial operations in favor of information-based businesses that mirrored industries such as finance. Enron’s concomitant rhetorical shift to an emphasis on information technologies worked to mask and render culturally palatable the spatial, economic and political implications of this change. Because Enron was a company that engaged in cultural production, and because its transformation from a pipeline operator to a derivatives trading house was so dramatic, the company became an ideal site for Americans to express cultural anxieties about the move away from Fordist, material production and towards an emphasis on working with complicated pieces of information. However, despite the company's symbolic value, no coherent criticism of the economic features Enron embodied emerged in the public outcry, suggesting that the cultural materials needed to advance a sustained critique of late capitalism had not yet developed.American Studie

Place, information technology and legal ethics

This thesis addresses the impact that technology has on lawyers’ ethics. It first establishes a case for place, drawing on the works of Martin Heidegger and his disciples. By analysing legal theory, ethical theory, continental philosophy and technology theory, three key elements of place emerge – location, community and history. This Heideggerian framework underpins the thesis and addresses the issues lawyers face with increased technology use. Lawyers are currently confronted by technology that has evolved as a result of globalisation. Their ethical obligations in relation to communication, confidentiality, conflicts of interest and litigation are challenged. Place affects lawyers’ ethics to a significant extent. A place based ethical perspective fills the gap within community theories of lawyers’ ethics and bridges the gap between ethical theories and technology philosophy. By recognising and preserving place, lawyers will maintain a stronger connection with their professional duties

Approval of George W. Bush: Economic and media impacts

George W. Bush\u27s approval rate had its shares of ups and downs. In this time series study I analyze the empirical evidence of the media\u27s and economy\u27s impact on his approval rate from 2001-2009. People tend to hold the president responsible for the country\u27s economic performance and the media influences people\u27s opinions of the president through agenda setting and priming. I operationalize the media influence on people into an independent variable. My economic independent variables are the monthly percent change in inflation rate, unemployment rate, and personal income. The dependent variable is the president\u27s approval rate. This study seeks to understand the relationship between the economy, media, and George W. Bush\u27s approval rate and add insight to the body of approval research

The dynamics of upward communication in organisations.

This study has researched the dynamics of upward communication within organisations through the rubric of ingratiation theory (Jones, 1964) and impression management (Goffman, 1955). Upward communication was explored via in-depth case studies, in a hundred and five semi-structured interviews across four organisations in Scotland. A qualitative, interpretive methodology was used. The interviews probed how upward communication was transmitted and investigated how ingratiation theory and impression management dynamics could impact on it by exploring the story telling (Gabriel, 200) and sense making approaches (Weick, 1995) employed by interviewees. The data was then tabulated on Excel sheets, using the Framework Analysis (Swallow et al., 2002), thus establishing an easily referenced, perfectly structured database. Finally, the data was sifted, perused, distilled and analysed interpretively. It was found that upward communication was shaped by processes such as downsizing, management and leadership styles, the power dynamics of the organisation, issues of publicness, and the perceived physical and psychological distance of the superior from the subordinate. Finally, the components of opinion conformity (a factor common to ingratiation theory and impression management), employee silence (Morrison and Milliken, 2000, Milliken, 2003), and cynicism (Fleming and Spicer, 2002; Naus, 2004, 2007) were identified as the most significant syndromes that impacted on the levels of upward communication within the four organisations. Hence, a Conformity/Silence/Cynicism model of upward communication (the CSC model) was devised as a means of illustrating the significance of the most important stimuli of upward communication that the study revealed. The issues raised in this study are fundamental to the theory and practice of management. Openness in the search for solutions to organisational problems is central to organisational learning. The creation of an organisational environment in which this is possible is therefore vital. This is the dominant context of this research