ABSTRACT
Analyses of organizational email corpora have demonstrated that language patterns in email reflect employees’ identities in an organization (Oberlander & Gill, 2006), their relationships with peers, superiors, and subordinates (McArthur & Bruza, 2003), and their sensitivity to organizational change (Carley & Reminga, 2004). These analyses have focused chiefly on explicit, intentional communication between employees. However, implicit and nonstrategic word use patterns in email may also reflect organizational dynamics (e.g., Keila & Skillicorn, 2005; Kessler, 2010). In this chapter, we describe the study exploring a documented nonconscious word use pattern-grammatical agency assignment in temporal language (McGlone & Pfiester, 2009; Chen, McGlone, & Bell, 2015)—in the Enron email corpus released by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2002 (and refined by Klimt & Yang, 2004). Our study demonstrates the diagnostic value of analyzing temporal agency to gauge changes in the affective tenor of organizational discourse. In a span of roughly fifteen years, the Enron Corporation (“Enron” hereafter)
grew from a merger of two local gas supply companies into the seventh-largest business organization by revenue in the United States. By 2001, the company employed 21,000 people in over forty countries (Fusaro and Miller, 2002). From Enron’s inception, CEO Kenneth Lay and other senior management aggressively sought growth and profit by selling off key petrochemical assets, taking on silent partners, and rebranding the company to take advantage of the burgeoning deregulated energy market. After constructing the first nationwide natural gas pipeline in the United States, Enron promptly transformed the company’s core
business into global commodity and options trading. They deftly created a successful global financial powerhouse from very simple beginnings. By taking this course, Enron quickly became beloved to its devoted employees, its unswerving stakeholders, and the broader stock market community. Enron’s soaring success came crashing down late in 2001 when the mammoth
organization suddenly found itself insolvent, causing senior management to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Financial tragedy, public outcry, and scandal quickly followed. Under heavy stakeholder uproar and political pressure, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (SEC Spotlight on Enron) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) (FERCWestern Energy Markets-Enron Investigation) conducted simultaneous independent inquiries into the sudden collapse. In May 2002, FERC publicly released a corpus of actual emails from 158 employees-including those produced by top executives such as the company’s very public CEOs, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. The FERC took this unusual step in order to improve the public’s understanding of the various reasons for their investigation of Enron. The full corpus represents a large collection (~500,000 emails) and temporal record of email conversations over a period of 3.5 years. For researchers focusing on social networks and organizational behavior, the
Enron corpus is alluring because it enables the examination of communication and social processes in a real-world organization over a long period of time. It provides researchers a rare, authentic glimpse into the social network of an actual business organization. The Enron corpus also contains a large amount of raw data on organizational discourse during a crisis. We believe that scientific analysis of this data can provide insight into the communicative relationship within and among the social and formal networks in this particular organization. Our focus here is on the communicative patterns Enron executives used in
their correspondence to describe the passage of time. Although the language people use to describe temporal passage is typically idiomatic and composed with little deliberation, research suggests that time language can reflect one’s emotional and attitudinal orientation toward events that are not always apparent from more deliberate and considered word choices (McGlone & Pfiester, 2009; McGlone & Giles, 2011). In the next section, we describe this research on the “affective embodiment” of time language and discuss how it might be tracked in employee communication to gauge changes in organizational climate. In the following section, we apply an analytic scheme based on this research to samples of correspondence in the Enron email database. In the final section, we draw conclusions regarding the utility of this analysis and delineate its implications for future research on time language patterns in organizational correspondence.
