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The Discursive Management of Financial Risk Scandals: The Case of Wall Street Journal Commentaries on LTCM and Enron

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Abstract

Scholars of financial risk culture have repeatedly identified its reliance upon popular confidence in the possibility and value of “risk-management.” The past two decades, however, have seen repeated outbreaks of scandalous financial failures involving some of the most idealized risk-management experts. Examining Wall Street Journal commentaries published in the aftermath of the “Long-Term Capital Management” and “Enron” debacles, the paper uncovers the discursive strategies involved in making sense of these financial scandals. It calls attention to the considerable retrospective interpretive space that the risk discourse enjoys, illustrating the degree to which it relies upon after-the-fact reconstructions of “risk” and “risk-taking.” Despite probabilistic rhetoric, commentaries moralize bad outcomes by working backwards in time, retrospectively linking the outcomes to narratives of earlier and irresponsible transgressions of supposedly obvious risk calculi. The paper discusses the implications of its findings for a variety of theoretical accounts of contemporary financial risk culture.

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Notes

  1. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations report, published in http://abcas3.accessabc.com/ecirc/newstitlesearchus.asp, retrieved 4/19/011; referred to by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal, retrieved 4/19/11. Concerns circulation average for the six months ending in 9/30/2010.

  2. For other accounts of the post-Enron preoccupation with questions of blame and reform see Boje and Rosile 2002; Williams 2008; Ailon 2011.

  3. This finding might be of relevance to a growing literature on preemption and precaution in the governing of terrorism through risk (Aradau and Van Munster 2007). While this literature is beyond the scope of the paper, a similar paradox between indeterminacy and hyper-responsibilization seems to underline the logic of precaution.

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Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper and Qualitative Sociology’s Editor-in-Chief, David Smilde, for their important suggestions and contributions. I also thank Nadav Gabay and Gideon Kunda for their helpful comments. This research was supported by The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 568/08).

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  1. Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Galit Ailon

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Ailon, G. The Discursive Management of Financial Risk Scandals: The Case of Wall Street Journal Commentaries on LTCM and Enron. Qual Sociol 35, 251–270 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-012-9217-5

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