Seminar I Trading trust verbal manipulation in the Enron Tapes

Seminars / Lectures / Workshops

Add to Calendar

Date

17 Mar 2025
Organiser

Department of English and Communication
Time

17:00 - 18:00
Venue

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Dr Matteo Fuoli

Summary

Trust is essential for a thriving society, yet paradoxically, it also facilitates various forms of crime, from corporate fraud and bribery to romance scams and online grooming. While trust is built largely through verbal communication, the linguistic mechanisms underlying this process remain underexplored. In this talk, I will present a new framework for examining how trust is built and manipulated in discourse and illustrate its use through the analysis of one of the most notorious cases of corporate misconduct in history: the Enron fraud. Using the Enron Trader Tapes Corpus, a set of 505 phone conversation transcripts involving Enron employees during the 2000-2002 California energy crisis, I analyze how Enron traders discursively managed trust both internally and externally while manipulating California’s energy markets. The findings not only provide novel insights into the Enron case but also advance our understanding of the linguistic and pragmatic foundations of trust and the relationship between discourse, trust, and corporate corruption.

Keynote Speaker

Dr Matteo Fuoli

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Matteo Fuoli is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham (UK). His research draws on an interdisciplinary mix of corpus, experimental and data science methods with discourse analysis to study the linguistic mechanisms at the heart of important social phenomena and issues. Dr. Fuoli has been at the forefront of the linguistic study of ‘trust’, bridging the gap between linguistics and psychology to understand how linguistic choices influence our trust in others. He has developed the first systematic account of the linguistic features involved in ‘discursive trust repair’ (Fuoli & Paradis 2014) and has conducted a series of experimental studies to test how these strategies affect people’s trust in companies and politicians (Hart & Fuoli 2020, Fuoli & Hart 2018, Fuoli et al 2017).

Previous Event Next Event