The Illusion of Reform: Corporate Discourse and Agenda Denial in the 2002 "Corporate Meltdown"

Political scientists long have argued that public policymaking is a complex and boundedly rational process, one that can aptly be described as a system of punctuated equilibrium. Recently, much of that work has focused on the ways in which various interest groups frustrate public policy reform, by keeping topics off of the public policy agenda and/or seeing that so-called reformist measures do not lead to fundamental social or political change. In this essay I examine the rhetorical processes through which organizational rhetors and pro-corporatist public policymakers successfully undercut pressures for meaningful reform in the wake of the Enron-initiated "meltdown."