{"id":888,"date":"2007-03-06T22:41:53","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T02:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=888"},"modified":"2007-03-06T22:41:53","modified_gmt":"2007-03-07T02:41:53","slug":"enron-and-the-social-meaning-of-cheating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=888","title":{"rendered":"Enron and the social meaning of cheating"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kevin Carey&#8217;s&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.quickanded.com\/2007\/03\/accountability-responsibility-and-enron.html\">entry today at The Quick and the Ed<\/a> references <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/000838.html\">a comment I made<\/a> yesterday to Enron and Worldcom, in a discussion about test preparation. I&#8217;m not sure if he realized he was taking my reference out of context, but he makes an important argument, even if it&#8217;s only half of the picture.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<hr width=\"25%\">\n<ul>\n<li><em>Taking my comment out of context<\/em>: This is a relatively minor point: I was arguing that not all judgments are amenable to representative data collection or require such data before being concerned about something (in this, test prep; in 2001, corporate fraud). Carey took my mention of Enron and Worldcom and went off in a different direction&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><em>An important argument<\/em> that Carey makes is that the popular demand after the corporate accounting scandals a half decade ago was to insist on more accountability. That&#8217;s true. However,&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><em>It&#8217;s only half of the picture<\/em>: The &#8220;corporate accountability&#8221; rhetoric since 2001 has not been about making corporations <em>more<\/em> in tune with short-term investor demands but address the gaming-the-system issue. Sarbanes-Oxley <em>does not change the requirement <\/em>that corporations have to report revenues and other financial information truthfully and transparently, but it adds additional teeth.&nbsp; Sarbanes-Oxley also <em>does not intensify any of the investor-corporation dynamics that Enron and Worldcom were responding to<\/em>. So while the rhetoric was more accountability, it didn&#8217;t change the larger picture and wasn&#8217;t the same type as what we think of in education. (For the record, I&#8217;m all in favor of accuracy and transparency in whatever data is made available publicly.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As far as I&#8217;m aware, apart from the different argument I made, the only reference to Enron and Worldcom fitting Carey&#8217;s description is in <em>Collateral Damage<\/em>, and it&#8217;s in a passage where Nichols and Berliner are discussing the difference between acknowledging a social phenomenon and excusing it. A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=enron+worldcom+%22high-stakes+accountability%22&amp;start=0&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official\">Google search<\/a> on several terms brings up exactly two pages, though maybe different keyword configurations might bring up others.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>And without the detritus of the trope, the question remains: apart from investigating specific incidents, what is the social meaning of cheating and gaming the system?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kevin Carey&#8217;s&nbsp;entry today at The Quick and the Ed references a comment I made yesterday to Enron and Worldcom, in a discussion about test preparation. I&#8217;m not sure if he realized he was taking my reference out of context, but he makes an important argument, even if it&#8217;s only half of the picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-ek","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}