Ignorance at Risk: Interaction at the Epistemic Boundary of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme
Tóm tắt
Most long-lived organizational deceptions require the cooperation of outsiders who are close enough to the deception to suspect it, yet deliberately limit their knowledge so as to maintain plausible deniability. The interaction of such “proximate outsiders” with insiders—those who are fully “in the know”—can be a delicate affair, yet its careful management is essential to the survival of the deception. I analyze a phone conversation between Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff and executives at Fairfield Greenwich, the investment firm that funneled him the most money, in which they discussed an impending SEC examination. First I examine Madoff’s attempts to cajole the executives into affirming (to Madoff and eventually to the SEC) that their hands-off approach to his operation was unremarkable. Next I consider two instances in which Madoff floundered in his explanations, repeatedly aborting and restarting sentences as he attempted to explain the inexplicable and reconcile the irreconcilable. Finally, I analyze Madoff’s handling of two of the executives’ more intrusive questions, and the part that each side played in the resulting non-answer. The three parts of the analysis illustrate what I argue are recurring and generalizable challenges of interaction at the epistemic boundary, associated with coaching, reconciling, and answering.
Tài liệu tham khảo
Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: Norton.
Arvedlund, Erin E. 2001. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Barron’s. May 7: 26.
Baker, Wayne E., and Robert R. Faulkner. 1993. The social organization of conspiracy: Illegal networks in the heavy electrical equipment industry. American Sociological Review 58(6): 837–860.
Bok, Sissela. 1989a. Lying: Moral choice in public and private life. New York: Vintage.
Bok, Sissela. 1989b. Secrets: On the ethics of concealment and revelation. New York: Vintage.
Calarco, Jessica McCrory. 2011. “I need help!” Social class and children’s help-seeking in elementary school. American Sociological Review 76(6): 862–882.
Clayman, Steven E. 2001. Answers and evasions. Language in Society 30(3): 403–442.
Cowan, Sarah K. 2014. Secrets and misperceptions: The creation of self-fulfilling illusions. Sociological Science 1: 466–492.
Ekman, Paul. 2009. Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage, 4th edn. New York: Norton.
Erickson, Bonnie H. 1981. Secret societies and social structure. Social Forces 60(1): 188–210.
Frankel, Tamar. 2012. The Ponzi scheme puzzle: A history and analysis of con artists and victims. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gibson, David R. 2000. Seizing the moment: The problem of conversational agency. Sociological Theory 18(3): 369–382.
Gibson, David R. 2005. Opportunistic interruptions: Interactional vulnerabilities deriving from linearization. Social Psychology Quarterly 68(4): 316–337.
Gibson, David R. 2011. Avoiding catastrophe: The interactional production of possibility during the Cuban missile crisis. American Journal of Sociology 117(2): 361–419.
Gibson, David R. 2012. Talk at the brink: Deliberation and decision during the Cuban missile crisis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gibson, David R. 2014. Enduring illusions: The social organization of secrecy and deception. Sociological Theory 32(4): 283–306.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1969. Strategic interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Goffman, Erving. 1986. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Harris, Sam. 2013. Lying. Los Angeles: Four Elephants Press.
Henriques, Diana B. 2011. The wizard of lies: Bernie Madoff and the death of trust. New York: Times Books.
Heritage, John. 2012. Espistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(1): 1–29.
Heritage, John, and Geoffrey Raymond. 2005. The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 68(1): 15–38.
Heritage, J.C., and D.R. Watson. 1979. Formulations as conversational objects. In Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, ed. George Psathas, 123–162. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Katz, Jack. 1977. Cover-up and collective integrity: On the natural antagonisms of authority internal and external to organizations. Social Problems 25(1): 3–17.
Katz, Jack. 1979. Concerted ignorance: The social construction of the cover-up. Urban Life 8(3): 295–316.
Kay, David A. 1995. Denial and deception practices of WMD proliferators: Iraq and beyond. The Washington Quarterly 18(1): 83–105.
Kirtzman, Andrew. 2010. Betrayal: The life and lies of Bernie Madoff. New York: Harper.
Lewis, Lionel S. 2013. The confidence game: Madoff and the 17th floor ensemble. Society 50(5): 493–502.
Markopolos, Harry. 2010. No one would listen. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Maynard, Douglas W. 1991. Interaction and asymmetry in clinical discourse. American Journal of Sociology 97(2): 448–495.
Morrill, Calvin. 1995. The executive way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Newman, Katherine S., Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth. 2005. Rampage: The social roots of school shootings. New York: Basic.
Nippert-Eng, Christena E. 2010. Islands of privacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Palmer, Donald, and Michael W. Maher. 2006. Developing the process model of collective corruption. Journal of Management Inquiry 15(4): 363–370.
Palmer, Donald, and Christopher B. Yenkey. 2015. Drugs, sweat, and gears: An organizational analysis of performance-enhancing drug use in the 2010 Tour de France. Social Forces 94(2): 891–922.
Raymond, Geoffrey T. 2003. Grammar and social organization: Yes/no type interrogatives and the structure of responding. American Sociological Review 68(6): 939–967.
Sacks, Harvey. 1984. Notes on methodology. In Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis, eds. J. Maxwell Atkinson, and John Heritage, 21–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sacks, Harvey. 1987. On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in sequences in conversation. In Talk and social organisation, eds. Graham Button and John R.E. Lee, 54–69. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4): 696–735.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1982. Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of ‘‘uh huh’’ and other things that come between sentences. In Georgetown University roundtable on language and linguistics, ed. Deborah Tannen, 71–93. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1987a. Analyzing single episodes of interaction: An exercise in conversation analysis. Social Psychology Quarterly 50(2): 101–114.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1987b. Between micro and macro: Contexts and other connections. In The micro-macro link, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Munch, and Neil J. Smelser, 207–234. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1992a. On talk and its institutional occasions. In Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings, eds. Paul Drew and John Heritage, 101–134. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1992b. Repair after next turn: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology 97(5): 1295–1345.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. Confirming allusions: Toward an empirical account of action. American Journal of Sociology 102(1): 161–216.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2002. The surfacing of the suppressed. In Studies in language and social interaction: In honor of Robert Hopper, eds. Phillip Glenn, Curtis D. LeBaron, and Jenny Mandelbaum, 204–223. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SEC. 2009. Invesigation of failure of the SEC to uncover Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Office of Inspector General: Washington D.C.
Simmel, Georg. 1950. The sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press.
Vaughan, Diane. 1983. Controlling unlawful organizational behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Whyte, William Foote. 1943. Street corner society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2006. The elephant in the room: Silence and denial in everyday life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, Don H., and Candace West. 1975. Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation. In Language and sex: Difference and dominance, eds. Berrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, 105–129. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.