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Copyright by Gavin Giles Benke 2012 Copyright by Gavin Giles Benke 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Gavin Giles Benke Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Electronic Bits and Ten Gallon Hats: Enron, American Culture and the Postindustrial Political Economy Committee: Jeffrey L. Meikle, Co-Supervisor Steven D. Hoelscher, Co-Supervisor Mark C. Smith Brian A. Bremen Erika M. Bsumek Electronic Bits and Ten Gallon Hats: Enron, American Culture and the Postindustrial Political Economy by Gavin Giles Benke, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2012 Dedication In memory of Albert Benke. Acknowledgements Like any large project, this dissertation would not have been completed without the help and input of many people. First, I must thank my wonderful and patient dissertation committee. As co-chair, Jeffrey Meikle was an invaluable resource and encouraging voice throughout the process. He endured countless hours spent listening to me work through some of the thornier problems that appeared while researching and writing. Even before starting the dissertation, his work on industrial design provided an invaluable model for studying the intersections of corporations and cultural production. Steve Hoelscher, my other co-chair, has played a large part in changing the way that I approach scholarship. Along with his graduate seminar on cultural geography and a geography field exam, our many conversations opened up a whole new way of thinking about culture for me. From an early point, when he grabbed a pad of Enron letterhead that he had chanced across and gave it to me, Mark Smith proved to be an enthusiastic and supportive reader. Brian Bremen’s membership on the dissertation committee was essential and his advice and guidance forced me to develop closer and more nuanced interpretations of the many texts that I read for this project. Erika Bsumek’s insights as a historian helped me keep my study grounded in a larger historical context. Beyond my dissertation committee, there are many others at the University of Texas at Austin to whom I owe much. First, Sally Clarke in the Department of History was indispensable in introducing me to business history as a field. Through classes, v reading lists and conversations with her, I gained a larger sense of how to situate this project within that field’s scholarly conversation. In the Department of American Studies, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Nhi Lieu, Shirley Thompson Marshall, Janet Davis, Julia Mickenberg, Randy Lewis, Steven Marshall, and Cary Cardova all contributed to a wonderfully open, friendly and intellectually stimulating environment. Cynthia Frese, Stephanie Kaufman and Valeri Nichols-Keller in the Department of American Studies were unbelievably helpful in both teaching and studying at UT. Ella Schwartz has been both a friend and help throughout the dissertation process. Throughout the past several years, there have been key moments when Ella’s expertise in navigating large bureaucracies saved this project from becoming stalled in its tracks. Beyond Texas, Dr. Mark Rose at Florida Atlantic University has offered a good measure of advice and encouragement from afar. Eric Lott at the University of Virginia also deserves thanks for introducing me to American Studies as a field in the first place. The graduate students in the Department of American Studies are all part of a wonderfully open and supportive community. Though I am grateful to all of them, there are several in particular to whom I owe a particular debt. The great friends in my dissertation writing group, Stephanie Kolberg, Rebecca Onion and Becky D'Orsogna, were thoughtful readers who consistently asked critical questions that forced me to clarify arguments, reword sentences, and look at new sources. There is no doubt my dissertation is far better that it would ever have been without their help and friendship. It was also a privilege to read their own work and I enjoyed numerous evenings discussing all of our dissertations over dinner and wine at Mandola's. Since 2006, my incoming cohort, Irene vi Garza, Marsha Abraham, Dave Croke, Andi Gustavson, Eric Covey, and Josh Holland, have all become good friends. Likewise, Andrew Busch, Andrew Jones, Katie Feo Kelly, and Tracy Wuster have become good friends. My time in Austin would have been far less enjoyable without them. I am also grateful to Regan Boxwell. Though our time together has come to an end, she was a supportive and sympathetic ear throughout much of the research and the writing for the dissertation. One of my oldest friends, Stephen Hoban, has always been a great conversationalist and I have always left our talks mulling over some point he had made – even when the conversation turned to my dissertation. My family has always been supportive of my decision to enter graduate school and have supported and encouraged my every step since then. At critical moments throughout my time at UT, my parents, George and Deborah Benke, offered the sort of advice that can only come from somebody’s father and mother. My brothers, Erik and Brendan, as well as their wives, Terrell and Sunny, have all been enthusiastic supporters while I was researching and writing for this project. Finally, I must again thank Stephanie Kolberg, not only for her invaluable feedback on the dissertation, but for all times when neither one of our dissertations ever comes up. It seems odd that I can write hundreds of pages for this dissertation but stumble over expressing how much she means to me. Words simply fail. vii Electronic Bits and Ten Gallon Hats: Enron, American Culture and the Postindustrial Political Economy Gavin Giles Benke, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisosr: Jeffrey Meikle, Steven Hoelscher This dissertation uses the Enron Corporation as a case study to examine the ways in which large-scale corporations become cultural actors in pursuit of establishing favorable regulatory environments, and how Enron's collapse in 2001 allowed United States citizens to protest and express anxiety over a national and international economic shift towards postindustrialism that began in the early 1970s. Through a consideration of materials such as marketing literature, correspondence between Enron executives and state and federal government officials, and the entire run of Enron Business, the employee magazine, as well as popular cultural texts, including, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as film and book-length narrative accounts of the company, this study contributes to an understanding of the cultural work that must be performed in order to establish and maintain political economic systems, as well as the ways in which cultural production is used to make sense of economic change. viii In many ways, Enron manifested a number of prominent political economic changes during the late twentieth century that have been identified by scholars such as David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. From the 1980s onward, the company increasing eschewed large-scale industrial operations in favor of information-based businesses that mirrored industries such as finance. Enron’s concomitant rhetorical shift to an emphasis on information technologies worked to mask and render culturally palatable the spatial, economic and political implications of this change. Because Enron was a company that engaged in cultural production, and because its transformation from a pipeline operator to a derivatives trading house was so dramatic, the company became an ideal site for Americans to express cultural anxieties about the move away from Fordist, material production and towards an emphasis on working with complicated pieces of information. However, despite the company's symbolic value, no coherent criticism of the economic features Enron embodied emerged in the public outcry, suggesting that the cultural materials needed to advance a sustained critique of late capitalism had not yet developed. ix Table of Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................1 American Studies and Business History.........................................................4 Background on Enron .....................................................................................8 Definition of Terms.......................................................................................15 The Corporation as Cultural Actant..............................................................19 Chapter Outline.............................................................................................21 Chapter One: "This is Not a Simple Concept to Get Across" - The Move Towards Immateriality in Enron's Rhetoric and Practice ............................................26 Pipelines and Hardhats..................................................................................28 Environmentalism and the Material World...................................................30 Banking Culture Comes to Enron.................................................................41 Change in Language and Focus ....................................................................49 Symbolic Analysts ........................................................................................56 The New Economy, Culture and the Celebration of Instability....................62 Derivatives and the Abstraction of
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