Spivs, Shonks and Sharks: The HIH Collapse as a Moral Tale of Corporate Capitalism

This is the story of an ageing fitness fanatic and the financial sharks who circled his empire before destroying it. Peter Gosnell, The Daily Telegraph 17/4/2003:29. In 2001, Australian company HIH Insurance was placed into liquidation, with severe financial losses and devastating consequences for its employees and policyholders. Dubbed as ‘Australia’s biggest corporate collapse’ (Westfield 2003:241), the HIH case attracted a great deal of attention, not only because of its adverse economic and social impacts but also because it reads like a moral tale in which senior executives of a major business corporation infringe ethical principles and are chastised in the end for their greed, hubris and lack of social responsibility. An examination of media texts published as the case unfolded reveals a strong sense of moral indignation with the social consequences of the HIH collapse, reflected in particular in representations of the shamed executives as greedy, dishonest, arrogant and ruthless. This paper examines the discursive processes that generate representations of HIH senior executives in such dysfunctional terms. Its main contention is that these negative representations can be linked to the growing influence of discourses such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), conceptualised here as a counter‐hegemonic discourse that emerges in an era of increased reflexivity to challenge the legitimacy of dominant discourses of global capitalism. The structuring effects of these discourses are explored in this paper through a methodological framework that borrows from discourse analysis and narrative analysis. This framework reveals links between texts, discourses and macro‐systemic context ‐ or ‐ to borrow from Schegloff (1992) ‐ between proximate and distal contexts The first section of the paper discusses the methodological framework used in the study; the second section provides a brief overview of the broad social context within which the HIH narrative unfolds, and the third part examines the textual construction of the HIH narrative as a moral tale of advanced capitalism, paying particular attention to the portrayal of its key protagonists.