Queen's University School of Business

Kingston, Ontario, Canada Research Paper No. 02-09

Bourdieu's Logic of Practice Theory: Possibilities for Research on Management Accounting and Control

Clinton Free
Queen's University - School of Business

Norman B. Macintosh
Queen's University

Bourdieus logic of practice theory: Possibilities for research on management accounting and control Clinton Free and Norman Macintosh Queens University, Canada, K7l 3N6

Corresponding author: norman.macintosh@queensu.ca

The authors gratefully acknowledge the partial support for this research from the Canadian Academic Accounting Associations CMA/CAAA research program. The second author also gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Canada for this research.

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential for expanding the domain of sociological-based studies in management accounting and control systems by drawing on Bourdieus theory of the practical logic of everyday action especially its central habitus concept that he saw as the basic indispensable concept for understanding social action. However, as Emirbayer and Johnson [2005] observe in criticizing the use of his theory in organizational theory, The almost complete inattention to habitus, the third of Bourdieus major concepts, without which the concepts of field and capital make no sense, further attests to the misappropriation of his ideas and the lack of appreciation of their potential usefulness [thus] the full significance of his relational mode of thought has yet to be apprehended [p. 1]. This criticism seems equally applicable to the extant body of accounting studies drawing on some of Bourdieus ideas but which have pretty much ignored both the habitus concept and the importance of his relational perspective whereby the various concepts in his theory are somewhat vacuous on their own. Given these lacunae, this paper presents a detailed exegesis Bourdieus logic of social practice theory and mobilizes it to illuminate the collapse of Enrons management control and governance system and practices. The analysis indicates that Enron experienced a radical shift in its habitus from the Lay/Kinder era [1986-1996] to that of the Lay/Skilling era [1996-2001] and that the former was coherent with Enrons business model and its management control systems, while the latter vitiated the companys control mechanisms rendering them ineffective and playing a major role in Enrons demise. The paper concludes that Bourdieus theory complements and supplements previous research mobilizing structuration theory and actor-network theory.

Key words: Bourdieu, Giddens, habitus, field, capital, illusio, doxa, symbolic violence, bodily hexis, relational perspective, Enron, management governance and control systems, actor network theory, structuration theory

Bourdieus logic of practice theory: Possibilities for research on management accounting and control

Introduction This paper investigates the potential for expanding the domain of sociological-based management accounting and control systems research by drawing on Bourdieus [1977, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1998] theory of the practical logic of everyday action with its central habitus concept. Bourdieu [1998, p. 85] identified habitus, field, illusio, and symbolic capital [in that order] as the basic concepts which I see as indispensable [emphasis added] for thinking about reasonable action.1 Yet, as Emirbayer and Johnson [2008] argue in criticizing the use of his theory in organizational theory, The almost complete inattention to habitus without which the concepts of field and capital [at least as he deployed them] make no sense [emphasis added], further attests to the misappropriation of his ideas and the lack of appreciation of their potential usefulness [thus] the full significance of his relational mode of thought has yet to be apprehended [p. 1]. Swartz [2008] concurs, While elements of Pierre Bourdieus sociology are increasingly employed in American sociology, it is rare to find all three of Bourdieus master concepts habitus, capital and field incorporated into a single study [p. 45]. And, as Ozbilgin &Tatli [2005, p. 855] observe, Despite his many influential writings, a literature search in the three Academy of Management journals generates only very few citations of his work. They argue that his works can contribute to organization and management studies in substantial ways, in organizational science, we would enjoy an understanding of organizational reality, which allows for a reading of the interplay among individual choice, capacity, and strategies with structural conditions in a way that is true to organizational realitys relational and dynamic properties [p. 867-868]. Recently several authors have stressed the importance of Bourdieus relational approach and its neglect by many researchers as they approached his concepts individually. Bourdieu see his master concepts as inked relationally [however] these concepts are seldom deployed within a relational perspective that was fundamental to Bourdieus thinking [Swartz, 2008, p. 45]. Similarly, in his critique of American organizational theorists, Dobbin [2008, p. 53] observes that they have pursued Bourdieus theory piecemeal and so, the potential of the theory has not been realized in American practice even if some of the parts have been embraced the whole of his theory is more than the sum of its parts[p.53] [moreover] For years Americans eschewed Bourdieus focus on power relations [p. 55]. Thus, there is a need for studies which engage fully Bourdieus relational analysis in empirical work [Vaughan,
1

As Powell and DiMaggio [1991. p. 26] observed, The habitus construct is the cornerstone of Bourdieus theory of practice[p. 26].

2008, p. 65]. A relational approach refers to the need to understand that the concepts of his theory of practice lose much of their explanatory power when mobilized on their own. Analogously, the hands on a watch have no meaning on their own without their relation to the numbers on the face of the watch. Similarly, the field concept is meaningless without the concept of competition for the fields capital. And the concept habitus is vacuous without the field, doxa, and illusio concepts. It takes both habitus and field and capital to connect micro and macro levels of analysis that should concern all organizational research [Swartz, 2008, p. 47]. While incorporating Bourdieus theory for understanding the realities of management accounting and control systems holds much potential, the above criticisms seem equally applicable to the extant body of accounting and control studies drawing on some of Bourdieus ideas. Most have drawn on his concepts piece meal, almost none have articulated a comprehensive mobilization nor have they made habitus a centerpiece, this in spite of the recent amount of interest in this central concept in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and organizational theory. As a result, much of its explanatory power is lost and the richness of a full-blown analysis drawing on his theory has been under achieved.2 Lee [1995] and Lee & Williams [1999] for example, appropriated Bourdieus notion of stratified, elitist hierarchies of power positions in a critique of the shaping of the US academic accounting research profession but ignored the habitus concept. Kurunmki [1999] used only the field and capital concepts to illuminate her study of the transition from professional planning and control to market based control in the Finnish health care sector. Oakes, Townley & Cooper [1998] in reporting their field study of Albertas restructuring of its museum facilities in the 1990s, supplemented their institutional theory based analysis with Bourdieus field, capital, and symbolic violence concepts, but mentioned habitus only in a footno te. Neu, Cooper, & Everetts [2001] reflections on the role of the intellectual accountant drew on a collage of ideas from the likes of Gramsci, Foucault, Hall, Said, Marx, and Bourdieu including the latters cultural capital concept but, while they included six references to his work, they too ignored the habitus notion.3 Similarly, Cooper, Everett & Nue [2005] in their analysis of North American accounting academics reactions to the recent wave of accounting scandals [p. 373], referred only in a cursory way to the illusio and symbolic and cultural capital ideas and they neglected habitus. Everett, Green & Nue [2005], in their genealogical critic of the Canadian CA professions appropriation of the discourse of independence and objectivity to colonize its discursive space, refered to Bourdieu only in passing and did not utilize the habitus concept. And Rahaman, Everett & Neu [2006] useed a mixture of Foucaults idea of an ensemble of institutions, calculations and tactics with Bourdieus notions of symboli c, cultural and economic capital to explain how government officials in Ghana enlisted accounting as symbolic capital as a tactic for promoting the privatization of its water industry, but they neglect the central habitus concept.
2 3

This is not to demean these studies by any means; they have contributed to accounting literature in their own right. Elsewhere Everett [2002] provided a lengthy and valuable exegesis of the whole range of Bourdieus theory of cultural practice including habitus.

A recent exception to the above is Baxter & Chua [2008] who mobilized the habitus concept in their field study of the CFO of OzRetail. They did not, however, take the relational [holistic] perspective so fundamental to Bourdieus thinking [as stressed above]. Rather they focused narrowly on the CFO habitus job position. In consequence, their paper neglects the central idea that agents in a particular field compete for the fields capital [economic, cultural, and symbolic] and use their stocks of capital to dominate the field or to challenge the dominant agents, such as competition amongst the top executives at OzRetail [including the CEO, finance, marketing, information systems, and human relations executives]. Instead their paper seems merely to describe Smiths what seems like normal actions and attitudes of most corporate CFOs. In order to mobilize a full-blown Bourdieuian set of concepts would entail including the competition amongst the top executives in the OzRetail managerial field. Their micro approach [focusing on only one executive] thus misses the potential explanatory power of drawing on his more macro [meta] theory of social practice. Nevertheless, their research added to the extant body of literature regarding images and actions of CFOs. Overall, then, Emirbayer and Johnsons [2008] criticism of the inattention in organization and management studies to Bourdieus relational perspective and his central concepts of habitus, doxa and illusio seems equally applicable to the existing Bourdieu informed accounting studies.4 Given these lacunae, this paper demonstrates this potential by presenting a comprehensive application of Bourdieus logic of social practice to illuminate the collapse of Enrons management control and governance system and practices, that played a vital role in its ultimate demise. It draws on the vast archive of papers, books, newspaper accounts, congressional investigative committees, and sundry others documenting Enrons rise and fall with a focus on the failure of the companys governance and control mechanisms. This vast body of material about Enron provides a rich empirical database for this purpose. Whereas the bulk of scholarly research and popular media publications have focused on Enrons executives audacious and aggressive financial accounting practices that stretched GAAP accounting to its limits, and sometimes beyond, relatively little attention has been given to the breakdown in Enrons internal governance and management control systems. The major thesis to emerge from this investigation holds that Enron experienced a radical shift in its habitus from the Lay/Kinder era [1986-1996] to the regime that emerged during the Lay/Skilling era [1997-2001]. The analysis indicates that the Lay/Kinder habitus was coherent with Enrons business model and its management control systems, while the habitus that emerged during the Lay/Skilling era [1996-2001] vitiated the companys governance and control mechanisms rendering them ineffective thus playing a major role in Enrons demise. This paper, then, aims to make an important theoretical contribution by demonstrating the potential explanatory power of an analysis that mobilizes Bourdieus full array of concepts in developing insights into organizational governance and contro systems and it
4

This criticism is by no means to demean these studies. Each makes a valuable contribution to the acounting lterature in its own right.

offers important lessons for management control systems researchers and practitioners. Next we present a detailed description of Bourdieus theory, followed by its application to Enrons two major habituss during its short existence. Bourdieus Logic of Social Practice Bourdieu believes depicting any social system first and foremost as a field of power relations, where the agents [the fields inhabitants] compete for power resources in the form of cultural, social, symbolic, and economic capital as a valuable way to understand the fields "logic of practice" including its opus operatum of social structures and its agents modus operandi for social action. Following Durkheim and Weber, he adopts the dualist agency/structure relationship as central to the flow of social action and incorporates both into his comprehensive conceptual schema.5 This depiction is reminiscent of classical political economy, a kind of generalized materialism a la Weber [but contra Marxs reductionist, economic materialism] in that each field operates a market for various kinds of capital which agents draw on for power. Importantly, The terms used by Bourdieu to describe fields and their properties market, capital, profit, etc. are terms borrowed from the language of economics, but they are adapted for the analysis of fields which are not economic in the narrow sense [Thompson, J. 1991, pp. 14 -15]. Thus, Bourdieu avoids the economic reductionism of neo-classical economics to the exchange of material commodities, but retains the logic of market exchanges for understanding the workings of social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Field, illusio, and capital Bourdieu conceives of any particular social/cultural arena as a contested field [ champs] of power relations. The individual agents in the field compete for, accumulate, exchange, and exploit the kinds of capital [discussed later] valued and therefore scarce in their field. They invest their time and energies in developing the skills, abilities and aptitudes to compete in the fields capital economy. And they draw on their accumulated capital in the struggle to dominate the field from their particular power positions [postes]. Thusly Bourdieu applies economic theory concepts to areas of social life, abandoned by neoclassical economics when it narrowed its theoretical net to the production and exchange of material commodities, thusly emphasizing the relations of power in the field of interest.6 In a striking example of such broadening, Bourdieu refers to Webers, Magnificent formul ation [of the] Church as the holder of the monopoly of the manipulation of the goods of salvation. He opens the way for a radical materialism that seeks the economic determinants [in the broadest sense] in areas where the ideology of 'disinterestedness' prevails [Bourdieu, 1995, p. 12]. The Church, from its position of the legitimate holder of Gods will and wisdom, could exchange salvation for material indulgences [land and

This conception parallels Giddenss [1984] duality of structure concept whereby the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices they recursively organize [p. 25]. 6 Bourdieus writings are sprinkled with economic theory constructs including exchange rates, monopolies, economies, competition, self-interest, and the laws of exchange.

coin] of the rich. While for the poor, their loyalty to the Church and its teachings could be exchanged for the forgiving of sins and the possibility of having their souls saved. Unearthing the objective truth about such structures of power, camouflaged by the surface appearances of disinterestedness, and how the dominant agents mobilize their accumulated capital in order to rule the field, is for Bourdieu, the proper job of scientific sociology. Field Bourdieu likens a cultural field to a game played on a sports field or on a board. Such games have a set of rules, a designated space, and a delimited time. The players voluntarily enter into a quasi-contract [often only implicitly] with the fields inhabitants to play the game fairly. A field defines itself by [among other things] defining specific stakes and interests, which are irreducible to the stakes and interests specific to other fields [Ibid. p. 72]. And if the stakes are high enough, the game may be monitored by a referee of sorts thus assuring that the players play by the prevailing rules.7 While a social cultural field is a lot like that, it is also different in one important way. It can be a whole way of life. For example, the inhabitants might be born into the game, or they may take it up later in life as a vocation, or they may be physically coerced into it as in mandatory military service, or incarcerated in it as a prisoner. They develop a feel for the game, Having a feel for the game is having the game under the skin; it is to master in a practical way the future of the game; it is to have a sense of the history of the ga me [Bourdieu, 1998. p. 80]. Thusly, individuals [often unaware that the game is an arbitrary, socially constructed artifact and not a thing of nature] invest in the game, get caught up in it, take it seriously, and believe it is worth playing. Bourdieu calls such a belief illusio. Illusio Illusio, an inherent part of belonging to a field, is the ingrained idea in the mind of agents in a particular field that the game is worth playing. Bourdieu illustrates illusio by referring to the sculpture in the Auch cathedral in the Gers, depicting two monks fighting each other for possession of the priors staff. The staffs value exists only for the two monks who are caught up in the game of the monastic field [see Bourdieu, 1998, p. 78]. Even adversaries in a field, who seem at odds over many matters, have a tacit, hidden agreement that it is worth the effort to struggle over the fields capital. Illusio is at once both the result of the functioning of the field and the condition of its game. As Bourdieu [1998] explains: Social games are games that are forgotten qua games, and the illusio is the enchanted relation to a game that is the product of a relation of ontological complicity between mental structures and the objective structures of social space games which matter to you are important and interesting because they have been imposed and introduced to your mind, in your body, in a form called the feel for the game Illusio is thus the opposite of ataraxia8; it is the fact of being invested, of investing in the stakes of existing in a certain game, through the effect of competition, and which
7

The US SEC can be thought of as such a referee for the field of financial capitalism. Ataraxia is a state of serene calmness.

only exist for people who, being caught up in that game and possessing the dispositions to recognize the stakes at play, are ready to 'die' for the stakes which, conversely, are devoid of interest for those not tied to that game and which leave them indifferent [pp. 77-78]. Moreover, What is experienced as obvious in illusio appears as an illusion to those who do not participate in the game [Ibid. p. 79]. For them, as the adage goes, The game is not worth the candle. In contrast, Agents well-adjusted to the game are possessed by the game and doubtless all the more so the better they master it [Ibid. p. 79]. They agree that the stakes of the game - its capital - are worth competing for. And in playing the game they make moves in anticipation of where the payoffs will be. Illusio, however, can cause agents to suffer from what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. Symbolic violence Symbolic violence comes into being when the holders of unequal stores of capital use them as power resources to alter and control those agents with less capital. It occurs when subordinate agents internalize the discourses of the dominant agents and come to perceive the conditions of their existence as selfevident, inevitable, and natural, regardless of how intolerable they are. Symbolic violence is the violence which exhorts submission, which is not perceived as such, based on collective expectations or socially inculcated beliefs [Bourdieu, 1998, p. 103]. It occurs when subordinate agents take on board and submit to the doxic attitudes of the dominant agent[s] and without hesitation or thought instantiate the injunctions of the later. It goes without saying that this or that is the right thin g to do. Symbolic violence occurs when the disadvantaged themselves internalize this discourse.9 Such dispositions become lodged in these agents durable principles of judgment and practice so that they treat the discourse as natural and self evident. They do not challenge it but rather embody it as being just. Bourdieus research on the enforced bachelorhood of eldest sons in some traditional French rural societies is a striking example of symbolic violence on the body and mind. The prohibition on women voting in Victorian England because of their unsuitability for politics when most women accepted this doxic attitude is another prime example. Thusly power relations are naturalized and what is historically, culturally, and linguistically contingent gets dehistorized and universalized. Bourdieu sees symbolic violence as an underappreciated but important supplement to the Marxist emphasis on economic violence and unequal power relations of capitalism with its overt coercion and physical violence. Capital Bourdieu employs the term capital for those properties, attributes, capacities, skills, knowledge, etc. that agents recognize and deem to be of value in a particular field and in which they invest their labour to acquire. In order for a field to function, there have to be stakes and people prepared to play the game, endowed with the habitus that implies knowledge and recognition of the eminent laws of the field, the stakes, and so on [Bourdieu, 1995, p. 72]. Agents in a field are situated in a particul ar position [poste]

The symbolic violence notion has its roots in the Marxian false consciousness idea.

from which they compete for the fields capital.10 Individuals not invested in the game often see it as irrational, and its stakes and capital as absurb. Capital comes in several forms including economic capital [money, property], cultural capital [family upbringing, education], social capital [networks of friends and colleagues], and symbolic capital [ceremonial exchange of gifts, honorific awards]. Such properties are deemed to be valuable, because they are in short supply. So agents compete for, accumulate, and exchange their stocks of capital. They mobilize them as power resources and draw on them order to dominant the field or change it to their way of thinking. When competing for and using their capital, however, agents follow the l ogic of disinterested-interestedness.11 This self-interested impulse must be clothed in the veil of disinterestedness. The idea of economic capital is relatively straightforward; money can buy power positions and people, as well as material goods and services. And it is easy to visualize how it can be mobilized in attempts by agents to rule in their own interests. The notion of cultural capital is also readily grasped. It consists of expertise in activities that are highly valued in a particular field and which some members' skills and abilities make them stand out from the crowd. Examples, can include the professional athletes prowess in his sport, the church ministers grasp of religious texts, the philosophers understanding of the classical works, the painters exceptional artistic ability, the musicians virtuosity with the violin. Often these exceptional individuals began very early in life developing their unique talents with the encouragement of their parents.12 Cultural capital, importantly, can be exchanged for economic capital. Symbolic capital is more subtle and comes in many different forms. The French Legion of Honour and the British Knighthood, for example, bestow prestige and honour on the recipients. The routine practice by friends of exchanging small gifts on birthday occasions is another example. The important aspect of the accumulation and exchange of symbolic capital, Bourdieu explains, is that is must be earned and exchanged under the guise of disinterestedness and without showing the intent of reciprocity. In the case of the Legion of Honour and the Knighthood, the agents perform duties for the "good of the nation often with significant personal sacrifice. In the case of friends exchanging gifts, the money value must be carefully calculated so as not to be too much, otherwise it puts a heavy burden on the friend who must reciprocate [but only after a suitable time lapse]. In the economy for symbolic capital, there is a taboo against making the terms and conditions, such as the exchange rate, explicit. Symbolic capital differs from cultural capital in one important way. Whereas the latter accrues to agents
10

This idea is similar to Giddenss [1984, p. 83] idea that social systems, organized as regularized social practices, sustain ed in encounters dispersed across time-space. The actors whose conduct constitutes such practices are positioned living along what Hgerstand calls their time-space paths, and they are positioned relationally A social position involves the specification of a definite identity within a network of social relations. 11 This is reminiscent of Nietzsches unconscious will to power idea, as Bourdieu acknowledges in The Logic of Practice.
12

Amadeus Mozart in music, Pele in football/soccer, Tiger Woods in golf, Wayne Grretzky in ice hockey, and Roger Federer in tennis are examples.

in virtue of their hard earned intrinsic skills, attributes, and upbringing, symbolic capital is constituted outside of any person. It is a mark of distinction attributed to agents by the other agents in the field. For example, the first student to sport trendy clothes in an elementary school is deemed to be cool by the majority of the other students. And the prestige and social status rendered to members of the UK Royal family [as a striking case in point] stems not necessarily from any sterling qualities of, say, the heirs to the throne. In both cases its source is exogenous to the individual. Nevertheless, it functions as capital for the individual involved. Bourdieu also observes that cultural and symbolic capital usually circulate only within restricted markets. A gifted scholars exceptional academic skills and academic awards attract no cultural or symbolic capital in the field of professional football or in the field of the classical musician. Symbolic, cultural, and economic capital can be exchanged for other forms. For example, in the UK premier football [soccer] league, a strikers goal scoring skill [cultural capital] and the number of selections Englands international football matches are scarce resources that can be converted into economic capital in the form of, say, a highly lucrative long-term salary contract, as well as receiving large sums of money for endorsements of sporting equipment and consumer commodities.13 The English footballer David Beckham, who signed in 2007 a $150 million contract with the USA Los Angeles Galaxy professional soccer team, is a prime example. Similarly in the field of literature, a skilled novelist who wins, say, the UK Man Brooker award acquires considerable symbolic capital, which can be converted into economic capital in the form of a lucrative contract from a leading publishing house for her next novel. Conversely, a wealthy businessperson who donates large sums of money [economic capital] to a university often receives an honorary doctorate degree [symbolic capital] from a university. Symbolic and cultural capital can be exchanged for economic capital and vice-versa. In addition to its unique mix of capital, every field also has a unique habitus, doxa, and hexis. Habitus, doxa, and bodily hexis Habitus Habitus is the hallmark concept in Bourdieus theory of social practice.14 It consists of the general dispositions, inclinations, attitudes, and values of any particular field that are embodied by the fields inhabitants [i.e., agents]. As Bourdieu [1995] puts it, The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of more or less permanent dispositions. As such, it is a form of innate capital that encompasses the logic of the fields social practices [p. 86]. Elsewhere Bourdieu [1997] defines habitus as systems of durable, transportable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals
13

Professional athletes during media interviews often state that, Its not the money but the love of the game that inspires and motivates them. 14 Habitus, as Bourdieu [1995, p. 86] explains, has its roots in Aristotelian and Scholastic thought and has been mobilized more recently by Durkheim and Mauss as part of their general schemes of ethos and eidos. Bourdieu, in contrast, gives it a decisive role to play [Ibid. p. 86].

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without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them [p. 72]. Bourdieu was also particularly concerned to introduce the idea of agency into structuralist analysis without recourse to volunteerism or existentialism. The individual agents in any field of cultural production acquire the dispositions of its habitus by implicit or explicit learning which functions as a system of generative schemes, generates strategies which can be objectively consistent with the objectives interests of their authors without having been expressly designed to that end [Ibid. p. 76]. Agents absorb the fields dispositions, inclinations, attitudes, and propensities in much the same way that children learn to speak and think in the language of their mother tongue [Bourdieu, 1990, p. 67]. For example, when a novitiate nun dons her Orders habit and puts on the ring signifying a spiritual marriage with Jesus, it is tantamount to embodying the dispositions, inclinations, beliefs and bodily hexis [defined below] of that Christian Order. Similarly, doctoral students not infrequently take on the habitus and bodily hexis of their supervisory professor. The habitus is powerfully generative of agents daily practices [Bourdieu, 1995, p. 87]. While the habitus is the product of conditioning, it is more than mere habits. The latter are the mechanical, automatic, unreflective responses for actions in social interactions. In contrast, the habitus is the product of conditionings which tends to reproduce the objective logic of those conditionings while transforming it. It is a kind of transforming machine that leads us to reproduce the social conditions of our own practices, but in a relatively unpredictable way, in such a way that one cannot move simply and mechanically from knowledge of the conditions of production to knowledge of the products [Bourdieu, 1995, p. 87]. Agents, however, are not merely robots rigidly programmed by the habitus. Rather, these inclinations and predispositions can be personally stylized, but usually only as improvisations on the dispositions of the fields habitus.15 While the habitus provides the general templates for social action, it does not dictate how agents put them into practice. The way they instantiate the habitus takes on unique, personal characteristics. Habitus are generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices [Bourdieu, 1998, p. 8]. Either way, on Bourdieus view, the idea of the individual as a unique, existentialistic, volunteristic social subject dissolves in the scattering of habitus across any particular field. Bourdieu also observes that agents/actors instantiate the habitus in their daily practices pretty much without thought. [This conception is similar to Giddenss [1984] notion of practical consciousness which involves recall to which the agent has access in the dure of action without being able to express

15

Elsewhere Bourdieu [1990, p. 56] writes, The habitus - embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history - is the active presence of the whole past of what it is the product. As such it gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present the habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will. And i n Outline of a Theory of Practice [1977, p. 95] he defines habitus, As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others. This paradoxical product is difficult to conceive, even inconceivable, only as long as one remains locked in the dilemma of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity.

11

what he or she knows [p. 49].] For example, actors think in, rather tha n with, their language. Such predispositions are absorbed and carried by the agents of a field who mobilize them in their practical social actions and relationships.16 Importantly, Bourdieu is not proposing a grand universal theory of any kind. Instead, he sees the habitus as collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor [Bourdieu, 1977, p.72]. So, contra universal theories, the logic of daily social practice unfolds without, say, the guiding hand of some theoretically omnipotent supernatural being, or the emancipation of the working class, or the invisible hand of the market place, or the dialectic of a universal spirit, or the ideological steering mechanisms of the elite. Nevertheless, the habitus is a unified system or set of dispositions and convictions, unique to a particular field, but not under the governance of some transcendental meta-narrative or logos that exists outside the field. It is the local habitus that shapes the daily social practices of the fields inhabitants.17 This process is a system of circular relations that unite structures and practices to produce structured subjective dispositions that produce structured actions which in turn, tend to reproduce objective structures [Bourdieu and P asseron, 1997, p. 203]. In sum, habitus is reflected in the daily habituated, practical, tacit, dispositional actions of a particular fields habitants. A habitus also includes a unique doxa. Doxa A doxa is the fields correct, right, dominant vision, and orthodoxy that appear as self-evident and exist beneath consciousness. It consists of a set of core beliefs, fundamental principles and acquired skills, techniques, tastes, and references that are unique to a particular field. Bourdieu [1998, p. 57] defines it this way [in reference to the State], Doxa is a particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view, the point of view of those who dominate by dominating the State and who have constituted their point of view as universal by constituting the State Adopting the doxic attitude means mental submission to the established order and its conditions which are historically contingent and arbitrary but appear to the agents as natural. Doxic submission ties agents, usually unconsciously, to a symbolic, immaterial form of domination. Doxa also influences an agents bodily hexis. Bodily hexis Bodily hexis refers to the particular physical attitudes and dispositions that get adopted by agents. The process of internalization of the habituss objective structures is a corporeal process as well as a mental one, and is incorporated in bodily form as well as in cognitive dispositions. Bourdieu [1990, pp. 69-70]

16

Bourdieu [1998, p. 8] provides an example of distinctive practices, What the worker eats, and especially the way he [sic] ea ts it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinions and the way he expresses them are systematically different from the industrial owners corresponding activities. 17 See Bourdieu [1995, p.127]. This stance seems like a decidedly postmodern position, not unlike Lyotards notion that the postmodern scientific field consists of an array of incommensurable ruling mini language games [micro narratives] rather under the sway of some grand metanarrative. Lyotard [1984, pp. 65-66] speaks of hetermorphos language games in which the rules and the moves playable within any language game must be local and agreed on by its present players.

12

defines it this way, Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby feeling and thinking. A trivial example is the way a person holds and uses his cutlery during a meal. And, individuals who have spent a lot of time in a military institution have a recognizable posture and bearing. They stand tall and straight, shoulders back, chest out, stomach in, and march more than walk. A more vivid, even shocking, example is the degrading experience of prisoners in WWII Dachau and Buchenwald prison camps where old prisoners aped the activities of their captors, not only to curry favour with them but also, as Bettelheim suggests, because of an introjection of the normative values of the SS [Gidden s, 1984, p. 53]. [One also wonders how normal German citizens who were recruited into the SS could behave in the dehumanizing way they did. Habitus can be a powerful force.] Bodily hexis is highly charged with social meanings and values. Bourdieus theory of the logic of social practice is attractive in that it can be operationalized in a valuable way at two levels. First, his concepts provide [as with Giddenss structuration framework and the actor network theory of Latour and Calon] with sensitivity to specific characteristics of the social properties and practices of the particular field under investigation. This would include the specific mix of stakes [the capitals] that are deemed to be precious, highly valued and worth struggling for, as well as the power relationships peculiar to the field. Such sensitivity provides a focus for the researchers ethnographic narrative about the field. The researchers ultimate aim, Bourdieu asserts, is to reveal and mount a critique of that fields power dynamics. Second, his theory also works at the universal level. Every field includes secondary variables or generic mechanisms that are present in all fields, such as the struggle between the established dominant actors and their challengers. We know that in every field we shall find a struggle, the specific forms of which have to be looked for each time, between the newcomer who tries to break through the entry barrier and the dominant agent who will try to defend the monopoly and keep out competition [Bourdieu, 199 5, p. 72]. Each field also has its unique mix of the various types of capital which are used as power resources. For Bourdieu, pushing forward on the knowledge of the universal mechanisms of all fields should be the longer run goal of sociologists and anthropologists. Next we illustrate Bourdieus theory of social practice drawing on the vast archival database regarding Enrons rise and fall. Organizational fields such as Enron, however, constitute multi -layered social spaces and are themselves embedded in a larger system of fields to ignore the relations between the organizational field and this larger semi-autonomous field in which it is situated is to miss an important dynamic [Vaughan, 2008, p. 68]. For this reason Appendix A provides some background regarding the gas industry and Enrons appearance and early struggle to survive thus helping put the following analysis into the perspective of its broader institutional field and habitus.

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Lay/Kinder Habitus [1996-2006] During its first ten years Enron operated with a traditional business-like management control system administered by Richard Kinder. He joined Enron in 1986 bringing with him a large store of cultural capital regarding the gas business. During this era, Lay was Mr. Outside focusing on institutional and big picture matters. He worked the corridors of power in Washington and Houston [Enron at one time had over 100 employees in its Washington lobbying office] and was personal friends many powerful politicians including the Bush family. Lay enjoyed a large store of social capital which he used over the years to influence the the deregulation of the gas industry. Kinder, who joined Enron in 1986, was Mr. Inside. He came with a large store of cultural capital in the gas industry. He mastered the details of every business, from trading to natural gas liquids, and his knowledge fostered truth inside and outside the company [Bryce, 2002, p. 114]. He immediately took on responsibility for Enrons financial affairs, including a cost-reduction program in the face of Enrons heavy debt position and shortage of cash resources. He was known as Enrons master money man and personally dealt with bankers, investment analysts and dealers, and credit rating agencies. His cultural capital includeda detailed knowledge and vast experience in financail matters. Cash management was so important to him that he gave all business group managers a budget target for cash flows to which part of their bonuses were tied. He personally reviewed and questioned all new business proposals demanding that they have growth potential and were a natural fit with Enrons existing businesses. Enrons stock rose from $28 in 1991 to $50 in 1993 and when he was asked by analysts about Enrons ability to sustain its earnings growth, he replied, Blood will flow in the streets of Houston before we miss our numbers [Ibid. p.116]. Kinder focused hawk-like on the numbers. Kinder was known as Doctor Discipline throughout the company. He met with the business unit managers every Monday morning in the boardroom to review and grill them on their updated numbers, plans, and strategies. Every unit leader at Enron, from pipelines to power plants, was expected to show up, ready for a grilling. Lay was usually there but it was Kinders meeting [Ibid. p. 111]. He was intimately familiar with the details of every Enron business from its gas fields, pipelines, and trading operations and he held each business unit to exacting standards. As one former manager recalled, He didnt care if you had a good story, he wanted to know if there were growth areas, it had to be thought out and have good reasons behind it [Ibid. p. 114]. He had a talent for recalling facts and figures from previous years and current budgets and strategies were routinely challenged and debated. One former executive recalled, Kinder would sit in that room with his yellow pad and he knew every god -damned thing happening in that company.18 He closely monitored cash flows, expenses, and employee levels. In 1990 Enron employed nearly 7,000 people and reported $200 million in earnings and $5.3 billion in revenues. By 1996, it reported over $600 million in earnings, $13.4 billion in revenue but had added only 500 more employees.
18

Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2002.

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While Kinders control style was tough-minded and dynamic, nevertheless, he was well liked and respected throughout the company. He was well known for maintaining a collegial atmosphere and going out of his way to show respect for and loyalty to employees [Ibid. p. 114]. And he commanded respect in the [gas] industry and on Wall Street [Fox, 2002, p. 99] - symbolic capital in Bourdieus terms. Lay and Kinder, then, proved to be an ideal top management team. Together they fostered and nurtured a businesslike, family-atmosphere habitus. As one former executive commented, Lay had the ability to take prima donnas and get them hover around a common theme While Lay was inspiring the troops, Kinder kept the egos - and the budgets - in balance Kinder drove the numbers side, Lay acted as the inspirational leader [Ibid. p. 117]. In sum, Enrons habitus featured a tough-minded, business-oriented habitus tempered with a family-like, collegial atmoshphere. The business managers readily absorbed its predispositions, inclinations, and doxic attitude regarding business and management. They readily took on board the illusio that Kinders game was worth playing. Kinders cultural and symbolic capital at the time, however, was attuned to a hard assets business model. As Bourdieu alerts us there are always competitors seeking to overturn or to maintain the dominant position of the status quo, as illustrated in the struggle between the three Enron top executives. Competing for Capital In the early 1990s, Enrons upper echelon level was a contested field of power relations with Richard Kinder, Rebecca Mark and Jeffrey Skilling as the main combatants. Each had large stores of cultural and symbolic capital and each believed firmly that getting the top job under Lay was very much worth pursuing. The stakes were high, especially in economic capital but also in symbolic capital associated with becoming president when Lay planned to relinquish it to become CEO. The fields game mattered greatly to each of them. That they were caught up in it is a prime example of Bourdieus illusio concept. When Kinder joined Enrons executive team in 1986 he brought with him a large supply of cultural capital in the form of years of business experience in the gas industry. His previous positions included finance, accounting, law, administration, human resources, management information systems, corporate development, and corporate affairs. He was the consummate upper level executive. With a well-earned reputation [symbolic capital] for understanding operations and saving money, he oversaw Enrons various operations and drove employees at all levels to meet quarterly financial performance targets. Kinders job was making sure Enron worked, and he was good at it [Fox, 2003 p. 20]. He consistently paid attention to, and measured, financial performance and demanded that business unit leaders meet their earnings targets. Kinder was a master at making the trains run on time [Ibid. p. 112]. With his well earned reputation as the best operations man in the entire energy business [Bryc e, 2002, p. 118], he had a large stock of cultural and symbolic capital in competing for the top job. Mark proved to be a powerful competitor. She had a goodly store of cultural capital including a masters degree from Baylor University and she was by all accounts charming, sophisticated, and likable [social

15

capital], but not arrogant. She came to Enron in 1985 as part of Continental Resources that was folded into Enron in the 1984 merger. At Continental she was involved in investigating power plant acquisition deals thus accumulating valuable cultural capital. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Enron Power [Enrons international division] had grown substantially under John Wing. When he left in 1991 to start his own company Mark, his protg, became CEO of Enron Power, later Enron Development Corporation [EDC]. In 1990, she went to the Harvard Business School for a MBA degree thus adding to her store of symbolic and cultural capital. And in 1998 and 1999, she was listed in Forbes as one of the top 25 most powerful women in the USA [symbolic capital]. Moreover, she was very good looking, charismatic, and insisted on being feminine she wore short skirts and high heels, and liked to flirt [Ibid. p. 49]. She was not shy about her ambition; and earned the name Mark the Shark [Ibid. p. 49]. Her reputation as a hard-driving dealmaker was known to heads of state and corporate CEOs around the world. Relying on her large store of cultural and symbolic capital, under Marks leadership EDC devoted its resources to developing very large power project consortiums around the world, espousing a mantra of privatization and free markets as the key to economic progress. Her doxa featured massive energy infrastructures concomitant with deregulation of energy markets. Examples of such projects included the North Sea J-Block gas contract, the UK Teeside power plant, and the massive but eventually highly controversial and politically nasty Dabhol power plant project in India, her largest and most important initiative. Such projects, however, involved very large sums of money, intricate financing, and long years of difficult negotiations and litigation. And some, such as the $4 billion plant for making LNG from Persian Gulf gas, never got beyond the letter of intent stage. By the mid-1990s, however, many of these projects were in trouble. Undaunted, she continued wheeling and dealing for power plants and pipelines in the Philippines, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Poland, and Turkey; and in the late 1990s rashly jumped into acquiring water plants in the UK, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada. These projects were extremely complex and difficult for anyone not close to the scene to understand.19 By the mid-1990s, many of them proved to be huge cash flow drains with little in the way of profits to report.20 These events diminished her reserve of symbolic capital. These projects involved extremely complex and difficult for anyone not close to the scene to understand. Nearly all turned out to be huge cash flow drains with little in the way of profits to report. This did not auger well for Marx and her stock of symbolic capital declined.21 Meanwhile, Skillings star was rising. Skilling came on board with a substantial store of cultural and symbolic capital to draw on in the competition for the CEO position. He held a reputation in high school as a scholarly, high achieving student but with a penchant for somewhat dangerous activities, a characteristic that resurfaced later at
19 20

See Bryce [2002] and Fox [2003] for detailed investigative reports of Marks projects and prospects. Many of these were sold to SPE partnerships, which meant that their debt loads and losses could be shipped off Enrons balance sheets and income statements. 21 Ironically, when Mark left Enron in August, 2000, according to careful estimates, she had over her career grossed nearly $100 million in salaries, bonuses, no-payback loans including stock options proceeds of $83 million; while in 2007, Skilling was found guilty in 2007 on many charges and received a 24 year jail sentence.

16

Enron. Turning down Princeton for his undergraduate education, he went to Southern Methodist University where he earned an applied science and business degree and then took a job at the First City National bank. But finding it boring, after two years he went to the Harvard Business School where he excelled as a top scholar, thriving on the highly competitive, tough-minded, give-and-take of the classroom case method discussions. Upon graduation in 1979 he joined the McKinsey & Company consulting firm in Houston, where his intellect and tenacity impressed many clients, including Ken Lay. Skilling was to have a large influence on the evolution of Enrons business model. In contrast to Marks asset heavy approach, he pushed for an asset light strategy concentrating on the trading of sophisticated energy financial instruments. While working in the 1980s as a consultant in the gas industry, he noticed a paradox in the gas market. Although the demand for gas was strong and gas reserves were plentiful, the short term demand and supply situation was chronically out of balance. He proposed forming what he called a Gas Bank which was simply a trading ledger that facilitated buy and sell orders for gas contracts. The idea was for Enron to enter into sundry contracts of varying time periods with gas producers which would often include a prepayment from Enron for future gas delivery. As well, Enron would acquire a working interest in the gas property. The contracts were posted in the Gas Bank ledger. [The Gas Bank existed only figuratively not in the form of physical gas.] Drawing on this pool of contracts, Enron traders entered into contracts to supply gas to wholesale users such as utilities and to industrial plants. In doing so they could rely on the proprietary information in the Gas Bank ledger for deals with both suppliers and users. They could also dip into Enrons own gas producing properties to fulfil supplies if needed. [Just as banks pool deposits for loans to customers, Enron pooled supply contracts for meeting contracts with users.] Users were willing to pay a premium over spot-market prices in order to ensure a supply at a fixed price thus enabling them to make long term plans for capital expenditures. Similarly, producers would have a guaranteed market for their gas enabling them to carry on with their exploration and development projects. Enron profited by arbitraging the spread between its portfolio of long-term supply contracts and its portfolio of consumer contracts. Lay liked the idea and in 1989 Enron launched the Gas Bank. It proved an instant success, adding to Skillings store of symbolic capital. Lay hired Skilling to head it up as president of Enron Gas Services [EGS]. Soon EGS had signed contracts with 35 producers and 50 large gas customers. EGS was selling gas for average price of $3.50 per 1,000 cubic feet and buying it for $1.20. The Gas Bank also made loans for new facilities to gas-fired plants. This resulted in an overall industry wide increase in the consumption of gas, which also brought more business to Enrons pipeline and trading operations. Enron was also making Volumetric Production Payments [VPP] deals, which were common for banks. They involved loaning money to small oil and gas exploration and production companies to finance their drilling programs in proven reserve hydrocarbon fields. [At the time banks were wary of loaning to these companies due to the high volatility prevailing in gas prices and they were recovering from the Savings

17

and Loan crisis.] Enrons loans were to be repaid in gas, not money. Each VPP was p ut into a separate Special Purpose Enterprise [SPE] where the specific asset was the physical gas in that particular field. This was Enrons first venturing into SPEs, a practice which later would be exploited to the maximum. The Gas Bank success, along with the 1990 launching by the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) of a gas futures exchange and the VPP deals proved to be a turning point in Enrons business model. Enrons physical assets [pipelines, gas storage facilities, gas properties, and gas proc essing plants] were seen as giving it a large insider information advantage over other traders in investment banks and other Wall Street firms. Thus, by the early 1990s Enron was moving towards a strategy of leveraging physical assets by building up a complementary financial instruments business around them. The company was beginning to look much more like a financial firm than a pipeline one moving towards a strategy of leveraging physical assets by building a complementary financial business around them. Skillings cultural capital in the financial business and his symbolic capital as a leader in producing earnings gave him a large lead in the pursuit of the top job of CEO and president. With the rise to dominance of the financial instruments trading busi ness at the heart of Enrons business, Skillings store of cultural and symbolic capital had increased substantially and he was to draw on it, as we shall see below, to effect a radical change in Enrons habitus, doxa, and illusio. Enrons trading operations would morph into a full-scale Texas-style, Wall Street-like financial engineering shop. As with Kinder and Mark, Skilling had large stores of capital for competing in the Enron upper echelon field. The three contestants used their large shares of cultural and symbolic capital to compete, not always without wile, for the CEO job. All three firmly believed the game was worth playing. In 1996, when Lay picked Skilling to replace him as president, Enrons habitus would experience a radical rupture and reformulation. Lay choose Skilling instead of Kinder who then left Enron. This, according as one insider later observed, proved to to be the single worst mistake Ken Lay made in his careerhe lost the person who may have been the best operations man in the entire energy business.22

Lay/Skilling Habitus [1996-2001] In 1996 Enron had a typical array of governance and management control systems in place. These included: quarterly business unit profit budgets, a risk assessment and control department, a performance review committee, an elaborate Code of Ethics, the usual audit and compensation committees, and an eminent board of directors at the apex. As time progressed, however, these were given only lip service and were skirted or corrupted. As one senior finance person summed it up, Kinder made everyone accountable for every penny when Skilling came inn, there were no budgets [Bryce, 2002, p. 133]. As one former executive observed, Once Kinder left, there wasnt any attention given to the day-to-day activities of the businesses. There wasnt the discipline associated with the aggressivenes. It became unbridled aggression [Ibid. p. 119]. Enrons habitus was to shift from a business -like, tempered with a
22

Bryce, 2002, p. 119.

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family atmosphere to a Wall Street like mercenary traders one featuring ruthlessness, callousness, arrogance, deception, and false pride. This mercenary habitus ran roughshod over the controls virtually nullifying their efficacy. In 1976, Enron had 7,500 employees. This increased to 15,500 by 2000 as Skilling went on a hiring campaign recruiting the best and the brightest. He hired numbers of younger but seasoned Wall Street traders, investment bankers, and information and computer experts who were put through his associates program He also hired hundreds of top of their class MBAs [many of whom had a couple of years experience in Wall Street firms and investment banks] from prestigious business schools as well as physics, mathematics and engineering undergraduates from top tier universities. These recruits were put through his analysts program and were paid more than the going market rate. Hirees were rotated through different business areas [e.g., acquisitions, risk management, trading, marketing, logistics, sales, and information technology]. They then had to find a position somewhere in the company - if they did not they were dismissed. Skilling also flattened the management hierarchy from 13 layers to 4 in order to empower employees to come up with new ideas. He also set up a performance review committee [discussed below] whereby all employees had their performance reviewed twice a year and those coming in the bottom were dismissed. He described Enron as a very aggressive, very urgent organization and since intellectual value -added was required to make profits, to get the most out of people you had to weed out the dead wood [Fox, 2002, p. 86]. As one former employee recalled, You had to run fast to keep up [the thinking was] bring them in young, bring them in smart, drain them, and drop them [Ibid. p. 86]. Nevertheless, Enrons field of social practice was fast paced and exiting as employees competed vigorously for its symbolic and economic capital. Whereas Enrons core competence previously was gas transmission, now it was trading, logistics, and risk management [Ibid. p. 88]. Skilling wanted Enron to be a free market of people where survival of the fittest was the order of the day and where every employee was instilled with a competitive streak, especially in the deal making and trading businesses. On any given day top traders booked a profit [or loss] of $2 or $3 million, some even booking profits in the $26 million range, and the next day losses of $13 million. A former manager described the emerging habitus as a Wall Street traders culture, With traders its rape, pillage, and plunder all the time traders are mercenaries. Their job is to kill. And mercenaries, by definition, dont have any loyalty [Bryce. 2002, p. 124-125]. Another former executive described it as a pit of vipers [Ibid. p. 129]. The nature of Enrons doxic attitude was like a religious tract from a New Age megachurch (Swartz and Watkins, 2003, p. 103). Cruver (2003, p. 37) reports that the prevailing climate of visible conformity extended to dress and appearance [bodily hexis], The first thing I noticed about Enron traders is that they all looked very similar: A goatee was fairly common; otherwise they maintained a clean-cut yet outdoorsy look; and if they didnt wear some version of a blue shirt every day, then it was like they werent on the

19

team. Swartz and Watkins (2003, p. 193) note that this also extended to language: No one at Enron would ever build consensus, they would come to shore, as in We have to come to shore on this ... Everyone [used] the term metrics and anyone who used the term numbers or calculations was a loser, the most popular Enron label of all. Making a very big and profitable deal was called swinging a big Dick and cashing out of a los deal was called puking. This socializati on process was referred to Enronizing with people who didnt fit in called losers, damaged goods or shipwrecks (Roberts and Thomas, 2002). These behaviors reflect Bourdieus bodily hexis concept. The logic of social practices that emerged during the Lay/Skilling era would prove to nullify and pervert Enrons governance and control systems, including the performance evaluation review committee. Peer Review Committee [PRC] A key element in Enrons logic of practice was the PRC. All employees received a formal performance review every six months. Each employee selected five coworkers, superiors, or subordinates who would provide an evaluation to the PRC, along with the persons boss, as well as anyone else who wanted to. Categories included revenue generation, innovation, product knowledge, client relationships, intellectual curiosity, dependability, communication, and loyalty. These data [as well as a photo of the evaluatee] went into a web site used by the PRC members who assigned a mark of 1 to 5 to each evaluatee. The ratings were arrayed on a bell curve and the bottom fifteen percent, regardless of how good, of each department or unit were automatically assigned to a special department [known as Siberia] and given two weeks to find a position somewhere in the company. If not, and most did not, they were dismissed. PRC became known thought Enron as Rank and Yank. Managers and employees alike quickly learned how to game the PRC. For example, they cut deals with other employees whereby they gave each other the highest score possible. Managers who wanted to keep all their employees would make deals with mangers that wanted to get rid of more than fifteen percent of their employees. And traders, who had to calculate the long term forward price curves for long term contracts, would change the projections just before the contract was signed in order to favour their short term trades and to get most of the credit for PRC purposes at the expense of the contract originators. And in some cases a trader might sabotage or even steal another traders deal when the latter took a coffee or toilet break. The Rank and Yank PRC led to an environment where employees were afraid to express their opinions or to question unethical and potentially illegal business practices [Fusaro & Millar, 2003, p. 52]. PRC also had a large negative effect on Enrons Risk Assessment Control Process. While PRC did help weed out underperforming employees, It also spawned a gangrene-like rot that allowed Enron to cannibalize itself [Bryce, 2002, p. 127]. Rick Assessment Control department [RAC] RAC was designed to play a crucial role in Enrons governance and control at the operational level. It was responsible for approving all trading deals and contracts and for managing the companys risk mangement. All deals were required to be presented in a Deal Approval Sheet [DASH] which included a

20

detailed description of the proposed deal, its economic data, a cash flow model, the deals value, its internal rate of return, a risk component, its net present value, a Financial Approval Sheet [FASH], and an Authorization page requiring signatures from legal, accounting, finance, and, depending on the size, top management and even in some case the Board of Directors. By 1999, Enron had been transformed into full-fledged financial instruments hedge fund trading in over 800 different commodities, not just gas and electricity where it had a distinctive competitive advantage due to its vast network of gas pipelines and electrical transmission lines, but also in businesses like coal, oil, refined products, forest products plastics, petrochemicals, clean air credits, weather derivatives - almost anything that had a risky cash flow. During 2000, Enron had executed nearly 1,000,000 financial contract deals, a five-fold increase over the 1996 level. At its peak in 2000, Enron was making 1,200 types of trades every day worth billions of dollars in notional value. A major factor in this was the EnronOnline computerized trading platform that came on stream in November 1999. It was the most sophisticated in the world and allowed traders to make deals in only a few minutes. At the same time, Enron needed ever more volume of deals in order to report quarterly increases in revenue and profits that would support its stock market price. However, by 1999 the margins on its trades had shrunk as other companies copied Enron and as Enron traders entered markets other than energy where they did not have a distinctive advantage and which were mature with narrow margins. In consequence, top management, especially Skilling, vigorously pressured the business units to push through deals as fast as possible. Risk management experts who tried to stop dubious deals were transferred out of RAC by Skilling. The doxic attitude became Volume, Volume, Volume. The business units eagerly responded pushing through deals as fast as they could. Their individual volume of trades could mean large bonuses and pay increases. [Enron was well known for its high salaries and large bonuses.] Deals, however, were valued in terms of mark-to-mark accounting, which in most cases meant a great deal of subjectivity and involved sophisticated Black and Scholes modeling, especially in unregulated markets and where deals were one-offs. In consequence it was very difficult for RAC members to verify the DASH details. Moreover, rejecting deals meant making enemies in the business units as the latter would lose their bonuses and take revenge during the PEC proceedings and rate RAC personnel low and would also bring the wrath of Skilling on their heads. As a result of these factors, the RAC controls were systematically rendered futile, useless, and perverted. The Board of Directors was similarly tainted. Board of Directors At the time of its collapse in 2001, Enron could boast of the high quality of the nineteen outside board members, most of whom were hand picked by Lay. They held degrees from prestigious universities and collectively they had a wealth of business, commercial, and financial experience and knowledge. Most also sat on the boards of other companies, as well as on the boards of public sector hospitals, universities, and charitable organization. Outside directors also sat on and chaired Enron key governance committees such as audit, finance, compensation, and nomination. All directors received a generous fee and several

21

directors also received substantial sums for extra services and several had business dealings with Enron related entities. As an added perquisite, board and committee meetings were often held in exotic locations and directors were flown to meetings on Enrons private jets. As well, directors were granted stock options and some bought Enron stock. Between 1997 and 2001, outside directors sold 2,784,645 Enron shares [of these 2,106,114 were stock option shares] the gross proceeds of which totaled $195,207,127.23 Not surprisingly, then, the Board failed in many instances to exercise its governance duties. For example, the board audit committee had been informed in 1999 by Enrons auditors that its accounting practices were high risk, pushing the limits, and at the edge of acceptable practice. Yet none of the directors [including Stanford accounting professor Robert Jaedicke] objected to the procedures described by the auditors, none requested a second opinion on these practices, and none asked for more prudent accounting. The board members were also aware of Enrons dubious use of SPEs to hide debt and to artificially create revenue by parking unproductive assets in SPEs. The board also approved very large compensation packages for top executives. In 2000, for example, the board compensation committee approved $750 million in cash bonuses to Enron executives when the company reported net income of $975 million. The board also approved a credit line for CEO Lay and allowed him to repay it with stock instead of cash., a highly dubiuos practice. But perhaps the most telling neglect of duty involved the Boards approval of the highly publicized LJM, Raptors, and Rhythms SPE scandal that proved to bring Enron down. In 1999, the board approved that an Enron top executive [CFO Andrew Fastow] could do business with Enron as manager of a putatively independent entity [LJM] of which Enron was the major owner. The concept was presented to the boards finance committee on June 28, 1999 and was described in a note to the companys financial statements in its Annual Report for both 1999 and 2000 to which board members had easy access. The LJM arrangements were a clear violation of Enrons Code of Ethics. However, the board approved a suspension of that part of the Code for these transactions. In regards to this matter, the Powers et al. Report24 later concluded that, The Enron Board approved Fastows participation in the LJM partnership with full knowledge and discussion of the obvious conflict of interest that would result [p. 9]. Along similar lines, the Batson Report25 concluded that the Outside Directors breached their fiduciary duty of good faith under applicable law in approving the LJM1 Rhythms Hedging Transaction and certain of the LJM2/Raptors Hedging Transactions because there is evidence that they were in possession of facts necessary to conclude that these transactions lacked any rational business purpose [pp. 11 -12]. The Report also concluded that, There is sufficient evidence for a fact-finder to conclude that Lay and Skilling and the Outside Directors [italics added] who were members of the Board in June 1999 breached
23

Urquhart, for example, garnered nearly $5,000, 000 from Enron in the 1990s in consulting fees and also netted $575,000 by exercising Enron stock options [Bryce. 2002, p. 165]. 24 Report of Investigation by the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Enron Corp. William C. Powers Jr., Chair, Raymond S, Troubh, and Herbert S Winokur, Jr., Counsel Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, February 1, 2002. 25 Final Report of Neal Batson, Court-Appointed Examiner, United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, November 4,2003.

22

their fiduciary duty of good faith by authorizing Enron to enter into the Rhythms hed ging transaction [p. 155]. The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that the Enron board breached its fiduciary duties, was embroiled in clear conflicts of interest, regularly approved excessive compensation for company executives and failed to monitor the effect of such on the company, and lacked independence due to financial ties between the company and several board members. The Subcommittee also found that the board knowingly allowed Enron to enter into billions of dollars of undisclosed, offthe-books transactions to make its financial condition appear better than it was.26 In his testimony before the Committee on Financial Services, United States House of Representatives, William Powers [Chairman of the Special Investigative Committee of the Board of Enron Corporation] concluded, The Board of Directors failed in its duty to provide leadership and oversight [p. 5]. Enrons bankruptcy filings in 2002 elicited a series of investigations and class action suits against Enrons board of directors alleging, amongst other misdemeanors, securities fraud. In January 2005, ten former outside directors agreed to a $168 million settlement, without pleading guilty. The directors themselves paid only $13 million, the rest coming from insurance proceeds.27 None of these directors then or since have admitted to any wrongdoing. What is particularly disturbing about these events and the actions of the outside directors is not so much the amounts of money involved, nor that the directors got off nearly Scot free, but more so that such pillars of the corporate world would respond this way in carrying out their duties. It would seem that the board members were not immune from the pejorative Enron habitus, nor was Enrons code of Ethics, another important governance and control mechanism. Code of Ethics Enrons highly touted code of Ethics, which every employee had to sign every year, stated in part, Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance do not belong here. We work with customers and prospects openly honestly, and sincerely Every employee is expected to conduct business with other employees, partners, contractors, suppliers, vendors and customers keeping in mind respect, integrity, communication and excellence relations with the Companys many publics customers, stockholders, governments, employees, suppliers, press, and bankers will be conducted in honesty, candor, and fairness [Excepts from Enrons Code of Ethics]. The predispositions, inclinations and propensities of the Lay/Skilling era habitus, however, ran counter to these moral injunctions on many fronts. As one former manager commented, The contrast between Enrons moral mantra [as stated in the Code of Ethics] and the behavior of some of its executives is bone chilling [Cruver, 2003, p. xii]. The same could be said for the rank and file.

26 27

Reported in a speech by SEC director Linda Thompson, May 12, 2008, Los Angeles, California. The investment firms involved in the LJM partnerships also agreed to settlements without pleading guilty. J. P. Morgan Chase, for example, agreed to a $2.2 billion payment that did not include any admission of wrongdoing. And the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce agreed similarly to a $2.3 billion settlement.

23

Egregiosu activities and callous trash talk During 1999 and 2000 Enron electricity traders in California engaged in a litany of egregious activities. These included round tripping [artificially running prices up by selling the same electricity back and forth with other Enron traders], congesting transmission lines by overloading them and deliberately shutting them and power plants down thus artificially boosting demand and driving prices up, and falsifying information regarding standby power plant generation capacities. Trash talk by these traders, recorded on taped transcripts, include statements like, We just f----- California to the tune of a million or two bucks a day. In another conversation Enron traders gloated, Yeah, now Gandma Millie wants her f----- money back for all the power you charged right up, jammed right up her ass for a f------ $250 a mega what hour. Another conversation went this way, If you took the steamer down, how long woul d it take to get it back up. The response, "Oh, its not something you want to just be turning off and on every hour. Lets put it that way. And the reply, Well, why dont you go ahead and shut her down. Insiders gave these initiatives names such as Death Star and Get Shorty. These traders, some of whom later were found guilty of criminal fraud, contributed in no small way to the California electricity blackouts in 1999 and 2000. Such behaviour clearly violated the Code of Ethics. Enron executives and managers engaged in a litany of actions that violated the Code of Ethics. Some examples are the following. It was widely speculated that Enron officials were involved in bribery and corruption schemes in many of their overseas operations. There were widespread suspicions and accusations that Enron officials engaged in bribery and corruption in its overseas operations, including money laundering by means of its nearly 900 SPEs and subsidiaries in sundry tax havens.28 On many occasions accounting officers collaborating with investor relations department managers manipulated quarterly earnings reports to meet analysts estimates. Enrons dubious accounting practices are legendary with several accounting officers pleading guilty to accounting fraud. And vesting periods for executive and board members stock options were altered so the holders could cash in earlier. Enrons habitus also included flagrant sexist dispositions and inclinations. Many top executives were involved in widely-know extra marital affairs with other company employees. The sexual misconduct at the executive apex set the tone for the rest of the company and became an important part of Enrons habitus. You couldnt get away from it. It was like a humidifier. It was in the air.29 At lower levels many employees followed suit hooking up for romantic adventures with fellow employees. Enron also had a well earned reputation for the hundreds of women [employees] who looked like super models scattered around its two buildings who could easily be on the cover of Vogue or Cosmo; hundreds of others were more the Dancing around the pole type.30

28

A US Justice Department investigation of whether Enrons overseas divisions bribed foreign government officials to win contracts for pipeline, power and water projects, and acquired assets below market rates around the globe was suspended when the company went bankrupt. 29 Ibid. p. 145. 30 Cruver, 2002, p. 38.

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The general attitude regarding women is illustrated by the trading floors imaginary Women of Enron Calendar consisting of the twelve sexiest Babes working at Enron. The selection was determined by much debate, argument, and negotiation by the men on the floor. During the day, one trader would yell out a month, say August, signaling that Miss August had just appeared for all to ogle. [Some of these women didnt seem to mind and even flaunted it.]. Women were viewed, as commodities that could be bought and sold just like gas, electricity; or any other products Enron was trading.31 As Fox [2002, p. 93] summed it up, Enron had within it a boys club typical of trading rooms that reveled in rowdy times involving members of the other sex and strippers sexual hi-jinks resulted in rumored sexual harassment complaints from some female employees. Even married traders and executives boasted of womanizing. Male chauvinism and sexists attitudes permeated Enrons habitus. This was a far cry from the code of ethics mantra that, every employee is expected to conduct business with other employees, [italics added] partners, contractors, suppliers, vendors and customers keeping in mind respect, integrity, communication and excellence. As one former manager put it, The contrast between Enrons moral mantra and the behavior of some of Enrons executive is bone chilling [Cruver, 2003, p. xii]. Another matter that had a profound effect on Enrons habitus was the move, at Skillings insistence [and with the approval of the SEC] to switch its corporate accounting from traditional historical cost to markto-market accounting, a method that was already in widespread use throughout the banking and finance industries. Skilling also demanded a bonus scheme for himself based on reported profits [measured with mark-to-mark accounting] of Enron Finance Corporation (later the Enron Gas Services Group). This meant that profits would be reported at the time deals were made rather than during the terms of the deals. As well, in the second half of the 1990s, Enron would rely heavily on mark-to-market accounting to massage its reported quarterly and annual earnings up or down as need be in order to meet analysts earnings expectations. While mark-to-market accounting provided better asset values for its contracts, more importantly, it permitted recording profits from long-term deals immediately rather than, as for traditional accounting, at the culmination of the contract. This meant that profits got recorded in the quarter in which the deals were signed, even for 20-year contracts. This had the effect of emphasizing short-term results since Enrons financial traders now had to start each quarter with a blank trading book and a new profit target. For Enron to continue to increase reported earnings at its current rate, an ever-greater volume of deals was necessary. This put even more pressure on the traders for short-term output. In the words of one Enron executive, you put yourself in a position where you had to kill to eat [Fox 2003, 42]. By mid-2000, Jeff Skilling had achieved his goal: Almost all the vestiges of the old Enron were gone. In its place, Enron had become a trading company. And with that change came a rock-em, sock-em, fast paced trading culture in which deals and deal flow became the driving force behind everything Enron did [Bryce
31

After Enrons fall in 2001,Playboy Magazines August issue featured The Girls of Enron selected from the fifty ex-Enron women who answered a call for a photo shoot. And, several executives were known to have their own harems [Fox, 20 03, p. 146].

25

2002, 215]. Between October 1998 and November 2001, Skilling sold 1,307,678 Enron shares with a gross proceeds value of $70,687,199. Recapitulation In sum, during the Lay/Skilling era Enrons habitus had experienced a radical shift from a tough -minded business-like ethos tempered by a collegial-family disposition to a mercenary one. Under Kinder, Enron had customers but under Skilling they became counterparties. For the traders all that mattered was to rig the prices that made a deal work and do the deal right away. Strategy, shareholders, and co-workers didnt matter. One former executive summed it up as with traders it's rape, pillage, and plunder all the time [Bryce, 2002, p. 125]. Another said, competition, not cooperation, between traders was intense" [Ibid. 124]. The slow growing pipeline based company of the 1980s that transported and sold gas and generated some electricity was no more. Enrons logic of social practice had morphed into a Wall Street like habitus in which deals and deal flows became paramount. Enrons habitus spawned a gangrene -rot that allowed Enron to cannibalize itself [Ibid. p. 127]. Enron was a pit of vipers. You cant believe how brutal the process could be. You had people attacking other peoples integrity, morality, and values. It wasnt about supporting up, it was about tearing down [Ibid. p. 1129]. By the late 1990s Enrons mercenary habitus had solidified. Under Skillings direction Enron began to take on all the characteristics of a Wall Street, dog-eat-dog atmosphere. As one executive later reported, Traders are mercenaries. Their job is to kill. And mercenaries, by definition, dont have any loyalties With traders, its rape, pillage, and plunder all the time. They dont care about the shareholders or the business strategy or the long-term interests of the company. They just wanted to make deals and get their bonuses [Bryce, 2002, p, 124-125]. The trading floor was said to mirror Skillings personality extremely arrogant, ultra competitive, highly individualistic, completely amoral in transacting business, and high in tolerance for risk. Enrons enacted Code of Ethics, its doxic attitude in Bourdieus terminology, could be paraphrased as, Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance belong here. We treat customers and prospects with deception and insincerity Every employee is expected to conduct business with other employees, contractors, suppliers, vendors and customers by ignoring respect, integrity, communication, and excellence relations with the Companys many publics will be conducted with deceit, secretiveness, and unfairly to the extent possible.Enrons governance and control systems were neutralized and perverted under the lay/Skillings habitus. Discussion The above exposition of the social practices that ensued at Enron during its sixteen-year existence vividly informs Bourdieus distinctive theoretical approach and illustrates his unique set of concepts. It demonstrates how Enrons habitus [his central concept] underwent a radical shift from the earlier Lay/Kinder eras collegial, family-oriented tough minded business-like habitus to the Lay/Kinder mercenary, dog-eat-dog, unetthical habitus as Enron employees, managers and executives, as well as the

26

board of directors, took on its predispositions, inclinations, and doxa. At Enron we saw how habitus can be so powerful that it inclined managers and executives across the organization to act in ways that negated, thwarted, skirted, and corrupted the corporations comprehensive set of management controls, governance systems, and code of ethics. As Bourdieu [1995] always insisted, The Habitus is powerfully generative [p. 87]. The doxic attitude held that what was vitally important was to compete for and accumulate the corporations stock of economic, symbolic, and cultural capital, as witnessed by the Mark, Kinder, Skilling competition, and how these executives used their stocks of capital to strive to dominate the other competitors in the Enron field. [The associates and analysts program was another case in point.] Habitus, as embodied predisposition, invested the participants with a practical sense of how to get on at Enron. What stands out, however, is the fact that board members, executives and managers alike consisting mostly of stalwart, educated, upstanding citizens of a purportedly democratic and humanist community of citizens, yet somehow they reverted to a litany of nefarious, repugnant, and even criminal social practices. This is a striking example of Bourdieus symbolic violence concept. CFO Andrew Fastow, for example, engaged in and encouraged such activities and even involved his wife and sons in his schemes. Later he admitted to perpetrating criminal conspiratorial schemes to defraud the company. At his trial the judge reported that he seemed truly repentant and contrite. Fastow testified that, I believe I was extremel y greedy and that I lost my moral compass and Ive done terrible things that I very much regret. But, he stressed, there was a culture of corruption within Enron and somehow I got caught up in it. Another executive, David Delainey, former head of two of Enrons most important business divisions, pleaded guilty to insider trading and gave evidence regarding top managements various fraudulent schemes to hide Enrons debt, inflate revenues and earnings, back date documents, and hide losses of Enrons wholesale energy division. He testified, as a central witness against Lay and Skilling, That was the worst conduct I had ever been a part of and everybody knew exactly what was going on. It was as brazen as it got [Washington Post, September, 19, 2006]. He also reported that, Enrons mercenary culture was always very fast and loose with the rules and that his compensation and frequent promotions blurred the line between right and wrong [New York Times, March 3, 2006, C3]. Regarding the hiding of losses, he testified that he had told executives that this lacked integrity but that they did not reject the plan. He also repentantly said, I wish on my kids lives I would have stepped up and walked away from the table that day [Ibid. C3]. And another top executive, Clifford Baxter who had retired from Enron at the age of 45 with a $45 million fortune from Enron stock options, an ideal family life and a new 75 foot yacht on order, and who had been subpoenaed a Congressional Enron investigation committee, apparently killed himself. His short suicide note to his wife read, I feel I cant go on. I have always tried to do the right thing but where there was great pride now all is gone I just cant be any good to you or myself. The pain is overwhelming. Before he left Enron, he had vigorously challenged, especially to Skilling, Enrons questionable

27

accounting practices but to no avail. Some speculated that he was deeply depressed about testifying regarding the role his colleagues had played in the Enron collapse.32 These three executives, along with most of the other dozen or so high level executives who also pleaded guilty, later admitted that they did not know why they did the things they did. Symbolic violence can prove extremely powerful. In the Enron case, Fastow, Delainey and others were able to break out of this recursive cycle only when charged as criminals, what Giddens [1984, p. 61] calls a critical situation or crisis event. 33 Enron executives are not alone in this. Scott Sullivan, CFO at WorldCom, for example, testified that he sanctioned illegal accounting adjustments because CEO Bernie Ebbers instructed him to hit the numbers [Wall Streets earnings targets]. I knew it was wrong and I knew it was against the law, but I thought we would make it through It had been that way since I was chief financial officer of the company.34 And at Cedant Corporation, financial executives kept an annual accounting opportunities schedule [called a cheat sheet] listing ways available to inflate operating income that could be used in coming periods and the amounts that might be needed from each opportunity. CFO Cosmo Corigliano testified, regarding Cedants fraudulent reporting that, It was ingrained in all of us, ingrained in us by our superiors over a long period of time that [accounting irregularities] was what we did.35 These are but two examples of earnings manipulation practices that were wide spread in recent decades. The Enron history gives witness to the potential power of a fields habitus, with its doxic attitude, illusio, and symbolic violence, can have on the minds, bodies, and actions of agents in any particular field. These executives for the most part were highly educated and held professional designations, whose professions set out the standards for their ethical behavior when conducting their professional actions and duties. They were also upstanding members of their communities. [Most were involved in voluntary civic and community work, attended church, coached little-league sports teams, and supported various charities] Yet their social practices and conduct at Enron negated and subverted their previous upbringings, professional training, and deontological conditioning. Whilst we can attribute such behavior to the habitus notion, it seems to lack a measure of explanatory power regarding why such otherwise upstanding members of their community can come to embody and instantiate Enrons pejorative and repugnant habitus. In this regard, concepts from actor-network theory [ANT] can be helpful. ANT as a supplement to the habitus concept ANT is vitally concerned with power relations depicting them as the effect of actions in the network of actants [combinations of human and non human things]. It uses the central concept of translation to describe the dynamic process of how the intentions, ideas and values of an ANT get inscribed in its actors. Translation takes place in four successive stages problematiztion, interessment, enrollment, and
32

The curious police reports and strange circumstances and surrounding his death, however, led some Enron followers to believe that suicide was not the cause of his death. 33 Fastows epiphanic transformation in his daily social practices inclu ded teaching Hebrew Sunday school, coaching little league baseball, and exercising at the Rice University field track. 34 Source: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050218/ebbers.sullivan.6html. 35 Source: The Times, Standards called to account over Cedant, 14 August 1998.

28

mobilization. During the problematization stage the initiating actors, [such as Lay, Kinder, Skilling and Fastow] using their stores of cultural, economic and symbolic capital as power resources defined the identities and interests of the other actors in a way that was consistent with their own interests, thus positioning themselves as indispensable resources in managing the network and in solving problems that arise as projects proceeded through space and time. Thusly they established role identities for the other actants in the Enron network. Then during the interessment stage these initiating actors convinced the other Enron actors that their interests were consistent with their own. Interessment confirmed the validity of the initial problematization. Next, the enrollment stage involved actions to convince other actors to internalize the underlying ideas of the expanding actor-network and to become an active and integral part of it. Skillings analysts and associates training programs served well to enroll new employees. Finally, mobilization occurred as the initiators drew on various methods to ensure that the enrolled actors behave in accordance with the formers interests [as confirmed in the interessment stage] thus institutionalizing them as noncontroversial and stabilizing the Enron actor-network. For example, the large and excessive salaries and bonuses at Enron and the associates and analysts program served the mobilization stage purpose. This is not to say, however, that translation proceeds without friction, resistance, and power struggles. In fact, ANTs are fragile and can even be rife with conflicts over the defining of the dominant values and intentions for its programs. Not infrequently they become the turf for engaging contestants to join them and to contest the emerging dominant actants as witnessed by the Mark, Kinder Skilling rivalry. How such contests get set aside later as a stabilizing organizing modus operandi emerges is explained in ANT by means of the black box metaphor. Just as scientific facts come to be taken -for-granted and their agonistic and combatitive historical journey comes to be forgotten and set aside [i.e., black-boxed] for practical purposes. Similarly, the contests and struggles which take place during the four translation stages get black-boxed. This allows actors to pragmatically ignore or forget these contests, take them for granted, and, using the current state of the network as a resource, get on with their daily projects. While black boxes are handy in this respect, they also serve to naturalize the curren t status quo. At Enron we saw how the Lay/Kinder habitus came to be black-boxed as Skilling enrolled employees and then mobilized his capital resources to ensure that employees behavior conformed to the dispositions of the trading habitus. Such analysis combines ANT concepts with Bourdieus to supplement and enrich the research narrative without conflating their uniqueness. Limitations Bourdieus logic of social practice, as with all theoretical schemes, has limitations. Two major ones are noteworthy. First, it lacks epistemological theoretical leverage on how society as a whole functions. Bourdieus focus is on how a particular habituss mechanisms of domination are produced and reproduced in specific fields, each of which has its unique habitus. In this regard, society as a whole is seen to be made up of sundry pretty much incommensurable habitus dominated fields. Thus, it would

29

seem, to put it in postmodernistic terms, there is no master habitus, no grand transcendental historical discourse operating as the hub of the various disparate fields. [This stance is similar to Lyotards [1984, p xxiv] contention that the postmodern condition is characterized by a heterogenaiety of local elements that exist without any master or meta narrative governing them all.] So what counts as goods and noxients in each field can be as disparate as say the social democratic, humanitarian communitarian habitus of say the Netherlands or Finland in contrast to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is not to imply that one habitus is better than any other since that would rightly bring on charges of ethnocentrism. Nor is it relativism [i.e., what are goods and noxients are relative to each particular community] but rather it is to say that without some sort of master discursive habitus [such as say Rortys ironic, liberal pragmatism, Marxs dialectic historical materialism, or Hegels universal spirit] it is difficult to sustain a convincing critique or defense of any specific field, except to revert to repetitive emotivism of ones final position [see MacIntyre, 1981, pp. 22-34] or ones final vocabulary [See Rorty, 1989, ch. 4.] A second concern is an ontological one. Bourdieu puts a great deal of stress on the unconscious incorporation of the objective historical structures of the habitus in the agents subjective daily practices thus responding automatically and without thinking to its historical objective structures.36 In fact Bourdieus [1977. p. 95] statement that, As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others [italics added], seems to excessively forefront structure and downplay agency. This also seems to leave little room for conscious action to break out of the recursive circular relationship of the objective and subjective structures of the habitus. Bourdieu, however, qualifies this by depicting actors as able to instantiate the habitus in innovative and ideosyncratic ways. Reflections and Conclusions Bourdieus large corpus of works is noted for being formidable, challenging and often seemingly arcane. For example, his central notion of habitus is illusive in that while he implies its habitants embody a fields habitus, he also implies that the field has a history and so exists as a social structure in virtual time/space. Similarly, the field notion is slippery as Bourdieus own definition of it indicates, Fields present themselves synchronically as structured spaces of positions [postes] whose properties depend on their position within these spaces and which can be analysed independently of the characteristics of their occupants [Bourdieu, 1995, p. 72]. In the Enron case, we found it difficult to decide the boundaries of the field of interest just the trading operation, or include the physical asset part of Enron, or consider the field as that of the wider financial capitalist institution of which Enron was an important part. The boundaries between fields are often blurred, not sharply drawn, and so it is up to the researcher to define the limits of the field of interest. Sjoberg, [2004, p. 481], for example, identified the Wall Street field as

36

This is similar to Giddenss [1984] notion of the agents practical consciounce.

30

the financial markets of America, especially the financial district of lower Manhattan, as the field for her study. Thus, our interpretations of the concepts and their mobilization must of necessity be ideosyncratic. Bourdieus [1995, p, 78] caveat is helpful in this regard, he warns us against the tendency to fetishize concepts. One needs to take concepts seriously, [but] keep a check on them, and above all make them work under supervision, under control, in research. In the event, we need to recognize explicitly that we are doing sociology. And in doing so, we often mobilize concepts and theories from sociology, such as the more recent ones of Bourdieu, Latour and Callon, and Giddens, and recognizing that the classic works of sociologists like Durkheim, Marx and Weber are still valuable and can still be mobilized to advantage. This, for us, brings to the surface the understanding that as researchers we are not uncovering and determining the truth of the particular fields of interest to us. Rather, we are merely c reating meanings about them in the form of linguistic discursive formations using the language and concepts of our choice of theoretical lens. Nevertheless, we hope our narratives yield insights that might not emerge from simply reporting case studies. However, we sometimes forget that we are producing a narrative about an empirical territory by looking at it through the perspective of a particular theoretical apparatus, and although there is much agency involved in this, the particular theory chosen influences to a significant extent the narrative we produce. We sometimes forget that the story we weave can be in large part a function of that choice. So we tend to think that we are truth tellers of a sort, not storytellers, or at least we tend at least implicitly to assume that our narrative says something closer to the truth about the phenomenon of interest than would be other narratives or just common sense might be. We forget that the meaning we give to it is produced in a specific academic language game and that truth, as Nietzsche famously wrote, is made - not found. 37In a sense, our analysis of Enrons controls is Bourdieu speaking but with a great deal of our own agency involved in interpreting and mobilizing it structuring structures and structured structuring as Bourdieu puts it. Nevertheless, we hope that our narrative drawing on his concepts illuminates important aspects of the situation that might otherwise go unnoticed. These concepts sensitize us to particular phenomena that otherwise we might overlook. In our case, it is recognizing the importance of habitus for the functioning of governance and control systems. And we hope our theoretically informed narrative might be valuable for prediction, explanation and, depending on our personal political inclinations, critique of the status quo. In any event, our narrative about Enron drawing on Bourdieus key concept of the habitus and its related concepts seemed helpful for us to go beyond the conventional explanation that it was agency motivated by the individuals involved personal greed, a psychological state of mind that seems to have been with us throughout the history of humankind.
37

truth is therefore not something there, that must be found or discovered but something that must be created [Nietzsche, 1968, p. 301].

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References Baxter, J. & Chua, W.-F. [2008] Becoming the chief financial officer of an organization: Experimenting with Bourdieus practice theory. Management Accounting Research, 19:2, 212-239. Bourdieu, P. [1977]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. [1990]. The Logic of Practice. Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. [1991]. Language & Symbolic Power. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. Bordieu, P. [1995]. Sociology in Question. London, UK: Sage Publications. Bourdieu, P. [1998]. Practical Reason. Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-C. [1977]. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London; Sage. Bryce, R. [2002]. Pipe dreams: Greed,Ego, and the Death of Enron. New York: Public Affairs. Cooper, D., Everett, J. and Nue, D. [2005]. Financial scandals, accounting change and the role of accounting academics: a perspective from North America. European Accounting Review, 14:2, 373-382. Cruver, B. [2003]. Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth from an Enron Insider. London: Arrow. Dobbin, F. [2008]. The poverty of organizational theory: Comment on Bourdieu and organizaional analysis . Theory and Society, 37[1], 53-63. Elmirbayer, M. & Johnson, V. [2008]. Bourdieu and organizational analysis, Theory and Society, 37:1, 144. Everett, J. [2002]. Organizational research and the praxeology of Pierre Bourdieu. Organizational Research Methods. 5:1, 56-80. Everett, J., Green, D. and Nue, D. [2005]. Independence, objectivity and the Canadian CA profession. Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 16:4, 415-440. Fox, L. [2003]. Enron: Th Rise and Fall. Hoboken NJ: Wiley. Fusaro, P. & Miller, R. [2003]. What went wrong at Enron: Everyones guide to the largest bankruptcy in Lewis, M. [1990] Liars Poker. New York: Penguin Books. Giddens, A. [1984]. The Constitution of Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Karunmki, L. 1999. Making an accounting entity: the case of the hospital in Finnish health care reforms. European Accounting Review. 8:2, 219-238. Lee, T. 1995. Shaping the U.S. academic accounting research profession: the American Accounting Association and the social construction of an elite. Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 6:2, 241-261. Lee, T. & Williams, J. 1999. Acounting from the inside:legitimating the accounting academic elite. Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 10:6, 867-895.

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Lyotard, J. - F. [1984] The Postmoderrn Condition: a Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. MacIntyre, A. [1981]. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Neu, D., Cooper, D. & Everett, J. [2001]. Critical accounting interventions. Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 12:6, 735-762. Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books. Oaks, L., Townley, B., & Cooper, D. [1998]. Business planning as pedagogy, language and control in a changing institutional field. Administrative Science Quarterly. 43:2, 257-292. Ozbilgin, M. & Tatli, A. [2005]. Understanding Bourdieus contribution to organizational and management studies. Academy of Management Review. 30 :4, 855-869.
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate. (2002) The Role of the Board of Directors in Enrons Collapse. Report 107-70, July 8.

Powell, W. & DiMaggigo, P. [1991]. The New Institutional Theory in Organizational analysis. Chicago, ILL: University of Chicao Press. Rahaman, A., Everett J. & Nue D. [2006]. Accounting and the move to privatize water services in Africa. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 20 :5: 637-670. Rolfe, J. and Troob, P. [2000]. Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle. New York: Warner Business Books. Rorty, R. [1989]. Contingenyc, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridege, UK: Cambridege Univerity Press. Sjoberg, K. [2004]. The wall street culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 7:4: 481-499. Streitfeld, D. & Romney, L. [2002] One cosy bunch, Los Angeles Times, January 27, Part A1, 1-8. Swartz, D. [2008] Bringing Bourdieus master concepts into organizational analysis. Theory and Society, 37: 45-52. Swartz, M. & Watkins, S. [2003]. Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron. New York: Doubleday. Thompson, J. [1991] Editors Introduction in Bourdieu [1991], pp. 14-15. Vaughan, D. [2008]. Bourdieu and or organizations: the empirical challenge. Theory and Culture, 37; 6581.

Appendix A Gas industry background and transformation

Between 1978 and 1986, the US gas industry underwent a series of momentous changes. In the 1970s the industry was highly regulated including government rules which stipulated the wellhead price of gas sold

33

to pipelines.38 The pipelines shipped gas at regulated prices and sold it to utilities and others again at government set rates. The unintended result proved to be a shortage of gas. Producers had little incentive to explore for gas or to increase production from proven reserves. So pipelines, in order to ensure a supply, entered into long term take-or-pay contracts with producers, often for as much as 70 percent of a gas field [if they didnt take the gas they had to pay the producers the contract price as well as a penalty]. In 1978, the wellhead price regulation was lifted and by 1980, production soared incurring a glut of gas. Wellhead prices dropped by nearly half and pipeline companies holding take-or-pay contracts found themselves with expensive gas that they tried to sell at above market rates. To make matters worse, at the same time many utilities and industrial customers were switching to oil. These were not easy times for gas pipelines. By the early 1980s, pipeline companies were selling much of their gas at market prices below the take-orpay prices rather than at regulated prices. At Transco, where Lay was then president, the company fostered the practice of selling their excess gas in once a month allotments in a spot-market. The hard times precipitated a merger of companies and a shakeout of smaller pipelines. Lay had moved to Houston Natural Gas [HNG] as Chairman and CEO where he led the push for a spot market industry. HNG had fought off two greenmail attacks and Lay believed that HNG had to be bigger to survive. In 1984, HNG bought TransWestern Pipeline and Florida Gas Transmission for a total of $1.2 billion and sold off many peripheral businesses such as coalmines, petrochemical plants, and barge and tugboat operations to raise cash for the new debt load. In 1985, a new government order drasticaly changed the gas industry. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [FERC] issued Order 436 that allowed utilities and other users to buy gas directly from producers and pay the pipelines government approved fees for transporting it. It meant that for pipelines gas transportation operations became separated from gas sales operations. The result was that gas traders now negotiated freely [and frenetically] over the phone for gas that would be transported between pipelines at centralized gas hubs. In order to take advantage of his change HNG, Transco, and four other pipeline companies, the investment bank Morgan Stanley, and a prestigious law firm created the Natural Gas Clearing House [NGCH] that supported a natural gas spot-market. NGCH proved so successful that Morgan Stanley took majority control and turned it into a gas-trading firm. The gas industry was slowly but surely being transformed from a closely government regulated industry into loosely regulated, freemarket business. Enrons appearance and survival In the wake of these developments, the consolidation and merger trend increased. In order for HNG to survive as a separate company, Lay negotiated a merger with InterNorth, a much larger pipeline with

38

At the time gas was seen as an essential strategic commodity for the nation.

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headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. InterNorth paid $2.3 billion for HNG.39 The new company, renamed Enron, owned 36,000 miles of pipelines across North America and, as a result of some financial maneuvering, InterNorths CEO Irwin Jacobss shares were bought out and Lay emerged as CEO and Chairman. The new company emerged in 1985 with $12.1 billion in assets, 15,000 employees, the nations second largest pipeline network, and a towering amount of debt. It reported a first year loss of $14 million. The next two years were precarious ones for Enron as it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. In spite of a hostile greenmail takeover attempt by Irwin Jacobs and a Moodys Investment Service debt rating of highly speculative, Enron survived and in 1987 reported $5.9 billion in revenue and a $53.7 million profit from on-going operations. At the time Enron was a typical natural gas firm owning mainly hard assets including pipelines, refining equipment, and gas producing properties in Texas, Oklahoma, California, Florida, the Rocky Mountains, and Western Canada. It had all the traditional trappings of a highly leveraged, old economy firm competing in the regulated energy economy. This business model did not excite the stock market. However, this would change rapidly in the next few years. The hard assets proved to be the platform for building a revolutionary kind of energy company. Lays strategic vision entailed transforming Enron into an exciting energy trading company, innovating in new ways of servicing the rapidly expanding energy market, not only in the USA but also eventually worldwide. With his extensive experience and background as a senior executive in the gas business, expert knowledge of economics, energy technology and regulation, and a mastery of energy business politics (both local and in Washington), Lay was ideally suited to lead Enron into the new energy markets era. Enron evolves In the late 1980s, Enron got involved in trading gas derivatives in addition to its physical gas trading. This reduced the risks associated with future gas prices embedded in physical trades. While some of Enrons financial instruments at the time were standardized contracts traded on an exchange, many were not. In fact, Enron was also trading customized derivative contracts [options, hedges, swaps, collars, and other sophisticated financial instruments using Black & Shoals type modelling] in unregulated markets. This business grew so rapidly that in 1989 Enron entered into a joint venture with the Wall Street firm Bankers Trust [BT] that had derivative expertise to open a financial trading desk in Houston. BT designed custom derivatives that allowed gas producers and consumers to hedge their bets on prices using financial means rather actual physical gas.40

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This was a fifty percent premium over HNGs stock market price and some observers suspected that wheeling dealing Texas style was involved. As one corporate raider, T. Bone Pickens had put it, I can make more money drilling on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than drilling in Texas. 40 For example, Enron financial engineers wrote financial contracts whereby Enron and a gas consumer customer swapped floating prices for a fixed price. Enron made profits on the fixed prices it was receiving and the floating prices it was paying. In another example, BT experts assigned to Enron also identified options embedded in Enron contracts and sold the flexibility as a call option to cover the extra cubic feet of gas per day and to use the money to help pay for the gas purchase contracted.

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BT proved highly profitable and in1991 Enron dissolved the joint venture, set up its own trading operation, and hired an experienced expert from the Wall Street Chemical Bank firm as head. Enron had the advantage that it could draw on its large store of proprietary information regarding gas supply and demand prices from its vast pipeline. This allowed its traders, for example, to hedge risk by buying gas from a producer and at the same time sell gas to a consumer at a higher price. Enrons financial trading came on the heels of the 1990 opening of a regulated gas futures trading exchange by the New York Mercantile Exchange [NYMEX]. This meant that traders who didnt own or want physical gas could buy and sell gas contracts [only money, not gas, changed hands]. The unregulated, over-the-counter business also increased since participants could rely on the current NYMEX prices for unregulated trades. 1991 also saw the introduction of Enrons Gas Bank [discussed above], a development that would cement Enrons position as the leading company in this new market for gas financial instruments. Electricity trading With such success in the gas business, it seemed natural and logical to expand its financial instruments business into the electricity industry. Enron already owned, operated, or held an interest in some gas fired electrical power plants and also sold gas to power utilities and others. These plants were becoming more popular since gas produced much less pollution than did coal or oil. Moreover, the federal government was promoting a policy of reducing the countrys dependence on foreign oil and in 1990 Congress passed The Clean Air Act. The institutional arrangements in the electricity business, however, differed in several important respects from the gas industry. Local electrical utilities had a monopoly on sales in their territories. As well, each State closely regulated the delivery of power to homes and businesses and determined how much profit utilities could earn. Meanwhile in Washington, as with the gas industry a decade ago, federal powers were introducing measures to deregulate the electricity industry. In 1992, the Bush administration introduce the Energy Policy Act, one part of which created a new exempt wholesale independent class of power generators that were free to sell electricity to anyone. The new law also stipulated that utilities free up their transmission systems for use by any electrical producer or merchant thus mirroring the way gas pipelines had been required to transport gas for any supplier. These two provisions moved the power industry in the direction of the gas business. While the gas industrys vibrant wholesale market was supported by t he NYMEX gas futures contracts, there was no counterpart in the electricity business The retail side of the electricity market was still regulated by each state which meant that deregulation had to be done on a state-by-state basis. Nevertheless, a crude form of a financial contracts market for electricity was emerging. For example, in the western USA a Power Pool system came into existence that permitted local utilities to post daily buy and sell bids for electricity on a computer network originally set up for bond trading. Enron executives sensed a large market, almost three times the wholesale gas market, one that seemed a natural complement to their success and expertise in the gas trading business. In 1993, Enron obtained one of the first power market licenses issued by the FERC to foster a wholesale power market.

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Electricity trading, like gas, involved sophisticated risk management techniques requiring basis risk management expertise regarding the fluctuating differences, due to weather and supply patterns, between energy prices in different areas of the country. In this regard, the electricity wholesale trading business offered higher profit potential than gas due to its greater volatility. Whereas gas prices in any year were fluctuating by forty percent, electricity prices fluctuated by nearly eighty percent, thus presenting the possibility of very large profits, but with attendant greater risk, and more complications such as the fact that electricity, unlike gas, cannot be stored, once generated it has to be moved somewhere. Nevertheless, Enrons success in gas trading led Lay and Skilling to believe that they could be just as successful in electricity trading. In June 1994, Enron North American [ENA] staffed by a separate team of power traders, executed its first electricity trade. The idea of remaking Enron into a gas and electricity company led to its acquisition of a large electricity utility company, Portland General in 1996.41 Enron was the first gas pipeline company to acquire an electricity utility and the acquisition made Enron the seventh largest seller of electricity in the USA. It combined its gas and electricity trading into ENA. And in April 1996 the NYMEX introduced electricity contracts for delivery at the California/Oregon border. As well, a year earlier, California had deregulated the electricity business, the first state to do so. Meanwhile, Enron, led by Lay and his Washington lobbying office [100 strong] had been working hard for a form of deregulation that would split the industry [along lines similar to the gas industry] into three separate businesses electricity generating plants, distribution systems for homes and businesses, and long-distant transmission lines. This, as with the gas industry in the previous decade, led to a frenetic merger and acquisition period in the electricity industry. By the mid 1990s Enron controlled nearly 25 percent of the US electricity market. Expanding beyond energy trading In addition to gas and electricity trading, Enron Capital & Trade [ETC], the successor to EGS, with Skilling as president was diversifying into other investment banking businesses. For example, in 1996 ETC invested in Hanover Compressor, a private company that rented compressors to pipelines, buying $20 million of its common stock and $10 million preferred shares and took a $450,000 fee for managing the transactions. Hanover went public in 1997 and ETC earned a 20 percent return on its investment. As well during the last half of the 1990s Enron in the USA and Europe expanded its trading into a variety of fields including mining, forest products, chemicals, weather, stocks and bonds, and bandwidth fibre optic networks. Enrons bandwidth idea was to move data around these networks just as gas and electricity moved around in pipelines and electric lines. The networks could be built along Enrons gas and electricity companies right-of-ways. In 1997 Enron already had entered into a joint venture to build a fibre optic network linking Portland with Los Angeles as well as servicing Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Enron proposed
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Enron paid $2.1 billion and assumed $1.1 billion of Portland Generals debt. The acquisition, however, was not a success as i t enmeshed Enron in a web of battles with regulators in Oregon and local customers and Enron sold it in 1999 to Sierra Pacific Resources. Nevertheless, it had gained entry into the electricity trading business that was three times larger than for gas.

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trading small chunks of bandwidth to customers as needed [rather than the current costlier practice in the industry of multiyear contracts] just as in the energy derivatives and options business. The Enron Communications division [EC] had plans to build networks from Los Angeles to New York and from Washington to San Francisco.42 The plan also included developing joint venture switching and interconnecting hubs where prices could be set, again just like the gas and electricity hubs. EC planned to have a 14,000 miles nation wide bandwidth network operating by 2001. In 2000, EC brokered over 300 bandwidth trades. Enron applied its highly sophisticated financial engineering expertise to this market. It bought and sold bandwidth options, swaps and hedges, and advised companies on how to manage their bandwidth risks, price changes, and availability of capacity. Although still not profitable, Enron executives announced to the capital market that its broadband services business would be worth $29 billion by the mid-2000s [at the time Enrons market capitalization was $50 billion]. Bandwidth trading, however, proved to be small, growing only slowly, very competitive, and new to Enron. During the 1990s another phenomenon occurred that would impact on Enron in important ways. This was the appearance of the Internet business in general and on-line stockbrokers in particular. A few firms had already launched neutral exchanges for Internet energy trades, charging clients a fee for using their exchanges. Enron units in Europe were already trading on the Internet, while their counterparts in Houston still used the phone. By 1999, however, the online stockbroker business had caught on in a big way and Enron executives realized Enron had to follow suit. A task force began designing EnronOnline, which enabled Enron to take one side of any trade rather than merely charging a user fee for traders. The task involved a great number of highly technical, legal, and safety complications. Nevertheless, EnronOnline went live on November 29, 1999 offering 20 different contracts for gas. By January 29, 2000 Enron Online had completed over 10,000 transactions and was trading contracts worth $100 million a day. Over the next few months Enron gradually added or products such as coal, metals, pulp and paper, and bandwidth. Enron also used the system for its retail business, to operate its pipelines, to develop and manage overseas projects, and to structure more complex financial deals that were unsuitable for regular Internet use. Publicity about EnronOnline also gave the companys stock added cache. Thus, with Skilling leading the way, Enrons business model shifted over the 1990s from a gas trading and pipeline company to become a full-scale sophisticated financial engineering trading platform. In 1996 (the year Kinder departed Enron), trading operations (wholesale and retail) already accounted for 91 percent of reported revenues, 54 percent of income before tax and 62 percent of identifiable assets. By 2000, trading operations accounted for 99 percent of income, 88 percent of income before tax and 80 percent of identifiable assets, while reported revenue increased from $12 billion in 1996 to nearly $100 billion in 2000. A number of different groups were involved in trading operation. The Physical Trading
42

Already in 1997, a San Francisco firm started an exchange for online and telephone bandwidth trading, and in 2000 a bandwidth commodity price index was established.

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Desk dealt mainly in real gas contracts by working the spread between buy and sell orders. The Financial Trading Desk dealt in options, futures, and swaps of financial contracts (but not in physical gas trades) often capitalizing on the Physical Trading Desks proprietary knowledge of pricing spreads. And in 1992, Skilling created the Internal Research Group (including PhDs in math and physics) who built highly sophisticated mathematical models to support the Financial Trading Desks complex deals, and staffed it with experienced traders from Wall Street firms. While dealing in options, futures, swaps and derivatives was common on Wall Street, Enron was the first to bring these skills into the energy markets where it already had extensive experience and knowledge, particularly by leveraging the trading operation on its proprietary information from its vast gas pipeline operation. Much later, a Senate Subcommittee report investigating Enrons demise characterized this asset light strategy as aimed at shedding, or increasing immediate returns on, the companys capital -intensive energy projects like power plants that had traditionally been associated with low returns and persistent debt. The goal was either to sell these assets outright or to sell interests in them to investors, and record the income as earnings which top Enron officials called monetizing or syndicating the assets (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 2002, p. 7). Enron was also intimately involved with the Wall Street field with its range of mercenary financial malfeasance and manipulations. For a while, Enron was at or near the center of the [Wall Street financial] web [Portnoy, 2003, p. 351]. Portnoy reports how Enron conducted dubious deals with a host of Wall Street investment banks [including Citigroup, J. P. MorganChase, Merrill Lynch, Bankers Trust, Barclays Bank, and Goldman Sacks amongst others]. The barbarous financial manipulations and mercenary [often illegal but highly difficult to prove in court] social practices of these firms have been documented in detail by insiders [see for example Portnoy [1997, 2003], Rolfe & Troob [2000], and Lewis [1989]. Enrons habitus came to mirror that of these financial institutions. This Appendix describes the wider energy and regulatory field in which Enron was embedded. The habitus of this wider field influenced in no small way the development and changing nature of the Enron habitus as described in the body of this paper.

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