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What Enron Means For The Management And Control Of The Modern Business Corporation: Some Initial Reflections, Jeffrey N. Gordon
What Enron Means For The Management And Control Of The Modern Business Corporation: Some Initial Reflections, Jeffrey N. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
The Enron case plays on many different dimensions, but its prominence is not merely part of popular culture's obsession with scandal du jour. Rather, the Enron situation challenges some of the core beliefs and practices that have underpinned the academic analysis of corporate law and governance, including mergers and acquisitions, since the 1980s. These amount to an interlocking set of institutions that constitute "shareholder capitalism," American-style, 2001, that we have been aggressively promoting throughout the world. We have come to rely on a particular set of assumptions about the connection between stock market prices and underlying economic realities; the reliability …
Understanding Enron: "It's About Gatekeepers, Stupid", John C. Coffee Jr.
Understanding Enron: "It's About Gatekeepers, Stupid", John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
What do we know after Enron's implosion that we did not know before it? The conventional wisdom is that the Enron debacle reveals basic weaknesses in our contemporary system of corporate governance. Perhaps, this is so, but where is the weakness located? Under what circumstances will critical systems fail? Major debacles of historical dimensions – and Enron is surely that – tend to produce an excess of explanations. In Enron's case, the firm's strange failure is becoming a virtual Rorschach test in which each commentator can see evidence confirming what he or she already believed.