Trust, Discourse, and Corporate Corruption: The Case of Enron

In this Element, the authors propose a new framework for studying how trust is built and manipulated in discourse and apply it to one of the most notorious cases of corporate misconduct in history: the Enron fraud. The framework outlines the discursive strategies speakers commonly use to manage trust, providing a tool for examining how language shapes relationships and enables wrongdoing in both physical and digital environments. The analysis, which focuses on a previously unexplored corpus...