Abstract

This article investigates the discursive practices of company stockholders in one financial cyberspace, the Berkshire Hathaway Board on The Commodity Stand ¹ website. After a review of relevant research on gender and investing in computer-mediated communication and the history of the site chosen for examination, I analyze how members of the site create and maintain identity and community through their discursive performances, with particular emphasis on aspects of gendered practices. This investigation found that participants performed roles as admirers, intelligent investors, and mentors. The discursive practices are reified and gendered masculine. Feminine forms of talk were subjugated overtly and through the homogeneity of the masculine form. This research is one step toward a communicative foundation for researching the gendered manifestation and perpetuation of economic discourses in everyday life.

Introduction

A number of integrated occurrences combined to start the raging bull market at the end of the last millennium. First, from the early 1990s forward, a growing number of people invested individually in companies listed on the stock market and in equity-holding mutual funds (Mahar, 2003). Second, the premier of 24-hour news networks and financial news networks like CNBC and CNNfn, and the inception of new business and financial magazines aimed at individual investors such as Business 2.0, Fast Company, and Red Herring, contributed to the availability of data related to financial markets (Cassidy, 2002; Mahar, 2003). In addition, the growth of the Internet in the 1990s added a new telecommunications outlet for financial information at sites like bankrate.com and myfico.com. The Internet allowed individual investors to research equities online and gave them the opportunity to trade those equities through online brokers.

Finally, the emergence of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the 1990s, combined with the ever-increasing number of individual computer users on the Internet, created a burgeoning number of online cyberspaces in which individuals could discuss a seemingly endless variety of topics (Jones, 1997). Given these developments, it is not surprising that a large number of online spaces arose that are committed to discussions centering on individual investing, corporate governance, and related financial topics. Many people have gotten caught up in these online financial communities, which can be compelling social spaces. Yet the communities and their social dynamics have not been the focus of much research thus far.

This study combines CMC and critical feminist organizational communication research to analyze the discursive practices of stockholders in one online financial community, the Berkshire Hathaway Board on The Commodity Stand website. Critical organizational scholarship examines communication as it pertains to the various stakeholders involved in and around organizations. This interest extends to communication among corporate stakeholders (Boyer, 2005; Deetz, 1992; Herrmann, 2004, 2007), the economic subjects of finance, investing, markets (McCloskey, 1998; Ruccio & Amariglio, 2003), and corporate scandals (Cassidy, 2002; Kuhn & Ashcraft, 2003; Lowenstein, 2004). Likewise, critical and feminist organizational scholarship examines gendered organizational discourses (Ashcraft, 2004; Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Martin, 2001; Mumby, 2001), the work-life dichotomy (Jorgenson, 1994), the role of emotion in the workplace (Sims, 2005; Tracy, 2003; Trethewey & Ashcraft, 2004), and entrepeneurship (Lewis, 2006), among other topics.

The article begins with a review of research on gender and investing in CMC, a history of The Commodity Stand website, and a brief discussion of Berkshire Hathaway. Using a combination of textual analysis and grounded theory, I then analyze discussion board texts in terms of how participants on the site create and maintain identity and community through their discursive performances, with particular emphasis on aspects of gendered practices. This investigation is one effort toward a more comprehensive communicative foundation for examining the gendered manifestation and perpetuation of everyday economics.

Literature Review

Community, Identity, and Gender in CMC Research

Community has long been an important area of investigation in CMC research (Bakardjieva, 2003; Ess & Sudweeks, 2005; Herring, 2004; Herring & Martinson, 2004; Preece & Maloney-Krichmar, 2005; Ward, 1999). Some researchers view CMC as a novel arena for communicative and social interaction based on common interests rather than geography (Turkle, 1995; Ward, 1999). In this view, CMC is considered a separate, isolated social world distinct from interaction in the real (read: offline) world. This suggests that the rules of offline communication are not necessarily applicable to CMC research. Other researchers maintain that online spaces constitute communities (Baym, 1995; Markham, 1998; Miller & Slater, 2000) and suggest that CMC reconnects the ontological relationship between community and communication, since users behave as if they are members of a community, albeit a virtual one (Preece & Maloney-Krichmar, 2005; Rheingold, 1993). Jones (1997) presented four conditions cyberspaces must meet in order to be considered a virtual community: (1) a variety of communicators sufficient to generate different opinions; (2) a minimum degree of interaction among participants; (3) a common public space for inhabitation and interaction; and (4) a minimum level of continuous membership.

A related issue in social cyberspaces is how identity is manifested online. While identity traditionally involves cultural and local understandings, as well as performances of the self (Goffman, 1959), CMC creates new possibilities for identity construction (Postmes, Spears, & Lea, 2000; Turkle, 1995). CMC creates the practical separation of the user's body as an identity "container" from communicative practices of identity as online symbolic performance. Since CMC is fairly anonymous, individuals can create new or multiple identities, and utilizing the protection of pseudonyms, avatars can experiment with different genders, races, and sexual orientations (Kendall, 2000; Turkle, 1995).

Early conceptions of gender revolved around the reification of male-female biological dichotomies (Stoller, 1968; Tiger & Fox, 1971). This evolved into the concept that men and women have different ways of communicating (Tannen, 1990). According to this view, women and men belong to different sociolinguistic subcultures, with men's internalized linguistic style more competitive and results oriented, and women's more relational and rapport oriented. However, a number of scholars (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Connell, 2005; McNay, 1992) have rejected the essentialist conception of gender difference, and are instead examining gender and identity as derived from Butler's (1990a) conceptualization of gender as a series of performances. Gender performance includes dress, gesture, movement, interaction, posture, and other activities (Butler, 1990b). By viewing gender not as a stable a priori quality but as a complexity that exists only as it is produced, one can represent the varied ways in which gender is practiced and revealed.

While gender performance was originally confined to feminist literature, researchers (Brickell, 2005; Garlick, 2003; Peterson, 2003) are now beginning to examine various constructed and performed masculinities. "Scholars have begun to examine men's lives and experiences, not simply as normative assumptions, but as gendered and socially and historically variable" (Kimmel, 1987, p. 7). Studies of the discursive activities of masculinity suggest that "men are not permanently committed to a particular pattern of masculinity" (Connell, 2005, p. xviii) but actually formulate particular discursive choices from a cultural inventory of masculine behavior. This research into masculinity has extended to the study of masculinities in online spaces (Kendall, 2000, 2002; Koch, Mueller, Kruse, & Zumbach, 2005).

In the early days of CMC research, utopian theories proposed that gender equality and democratization would arise through technological innovation (sHert, 1997; Rice & Love, 1987; Spears & Lea, 1994). Supposedly, through the elimination of social cues that indicate the class, ethnicity, and gender of participants, communication is equalized. According to this view, CMC "can serve to reduce social barriers to communication, and the impact of status differentials, resulting in greater equality of participation" (Spears & Lea, 1994, p. 428). This utopian view of CMC has not been supported by research on naturally occurring data, however. CMC is not a liberating panacea as originally claimed.

Women's CMC as performed tends to be cooperative, supportive, and reassuring (Herring, 1996; Koch, Mueller, Kruse & Zumbach, 2005). Herring (1993) found that online gender construction did not reduce male domination, but rather that small numbers of males led conversations. Subsequent research showed that men post more often than women (Savicki, Lingenfelter, & Kelley, 1996) and generate longer, more opinionated postings than do women (Herring, 1996; Soukup, 1999; Sussman & Tyson, 2000). Moreover, as Kendall (2000) noted, the culture of many online spaces draws from white heterosexual middle-class men. Aside from Kendall (2000) and Koch, Mueller, Kruse and Zumbach (2005), research on gender in CMC generally examines women in online spaces. In contrast, online masculinities have received little attention. Masculine forms of talk are often portrayed negatively in CMC research on argumentation, domination, flame wars, harassment, conflict, control and power issues, and other "masculine" forms of communication (Koch, Mueller, Kruse & Zumbach, 2005; Li, 2005; O'Sullivan & Flanagin, 2003; Sussman & Tyson, 2000).

Virtual environments present a fruitful location to analyze the performances of gender through communication (Herrmann, 2007; Kendall, 2000, 2002; Wiley, 1995). One of those sites is The Commodity Stand (TCS), a renowned investment website that not only survived but thrived before, during, and after the "tech bubble" of the late 1990s (Mahar, 2003).

Stockholders, "The Stand," and "The Oracle"

Stockholders are owners of corporations. Under conventional organizational structures, however, professional managers run corporations, rather than the stockholders (Deetz, 1992). Stockholders are organizational members and share common interests, but they are geographically separated. They often vote via proxy and gather at annual meetings, if at all. They are connected to the organization as owners but are simultaneously separate from the day-to-day management of the organization. As such, stockholders are loosely coupled with the rest of the organizational system (Orton & Weick, 1990). From the early 1990s forward, many people invested individually in stock market equities and mutual funds during the most recent bull market (Mahar, 2003). Simultaneously, the Internet developed as an outlet for financial information, presenting investors the opportunity to trade and research investments online and online spaces committed to discussions centering on individual investing. When Apple Computer advised us to "Think different," and Microsoft asked, "Where do you want to go today?," millions of people went online to discuss their investments.

Scholars are turning their attention to online investor communities. Schoenbachler, Gordon, and Aurand (2004) found that individual investors tend to buy brands from companies in which they hold stock, and investors are more likely to buy stock in a company because they have experience with the brand. Two important studies discovered that online investors' perceptions of high efficacy lead them to overestimate their investment acumen (Barber & Odean, 2000; Looney, Valacich, Todd, & Morris, 2006). Zwick (2006) examined Internet stock trading as edgework, the experience of risk-taking as an end in itself for investors who maintain a high level of personal agency. Online investors are also enmeshed in mediated intertextuality while gathering information about their stocks, and often resist organizational narratives about the companies in which they invest (Herrmann, 2006a, 2006b). Stockholders who populate online spaces are not passive recipients of financial knowledge, but use Weick's concept of the double-interact to "make sense of equivocal information" (Herrmann, 2007). While this research has been fruitful, the question of gender in the context of online investing has yet to be addressed.

Despite advances such as telephony, most CMC occurs in asynchronous text-based cyberspaces as "visually presented language" (Herring, 2001). One such online financial community resides at TCS, which according to its mission statement is dedicated to educating individual investors. TCS was selected as the research site because: (1) it is an established financial website; (2) individual investors populate the site; (3) asynchronous discussion boards allow for closer readings of participant postings; (4) the discussion boards are maintained regularly and are easily accessible; (5) the discussion boards can be arranged by date or subject thread; (6) participants are given the opportunity to endorse member posts by clicking the "Recommend it!" button; and (7) all the posts become property of TCS, which enabled me to get permission to study them from TCS, without needing to contact each participant individually. Finally, TCS is a respected financial site that has garnered accolades for insight, profundity, and effectiveness for assisting individual investors (Frank, 2000).

I chose the Berkshire Hathaway discussion board on TCS because Berkshire Hathaway is an exemplary corporation run by Warren E. Buffett. Buffett is currently worth over $30 billion and is the only U.S. billionaire to acquire his wealth through the stock market alone. Buffett's acumen is renowned, earning him the nicknames "The Oracle of Omaha," "Saint Warren," and "The Forrest Gump of Finance," even though his investing style is considered contrary to standard Wall Street techniques (Buffett, 1996; Hagstrom, 1994; Lowe, 1997).

Buffett dismisses many of the financial methods and standard theories according to which individuals pick stocks:

To invest successfully, you need not understand beta, efficient markets, modern portfolio theory, option pricing or emerging markets. You may, in fact, be better off knowing nothing of these. That, of course, is not the prevailing view at most business schools, whose finance curriculum tends to be dominated by such subjects. In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices. (Buffett, 1996, ¶ 90)

Buffett's fundamental analysis determines the intrinsic value of a company by looking at information contained solely in financial statements. Cash flow, profit margins, costs of goods, operating margins, earnings, etc. are used to determine the value of a company (Hagstom, 1994). Only if the determined value of a well-run company is below the actual stock price will Buffett consider purchasing the company (Cunningham, 2001b). This stands in stark contrast to momentum and technical investing, which states that a stock on the rise will continue to move upward and the best time to buy that stock is while the momentum is pushing the price up.

Similarly, Buffet believes a diversified portfolio consists of only five to ten well-selected stocks, and he criticizes other financial accounting techniques, including stock splits and the use of stocks to acquire other companies (Cunningham, 2001a). Buffett believes that generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) are inadequate. On the expensing of stock options, he noted:

A few years ago, we asked three questions to which we have not yet received an answer: "If options aren't a form of compensation, what are they? If compensation isn't an expense, what is it? And, if expenses shouldn't go into the calculation of earnings, where in the world should they go?" (Buffett, 1998, as quoted in Cunningham, 2001a, p. 215)

Despite his unconventional investment philosophy, Buffet's investing success is unparalleled (Hagstrom, 1994). Some of Berkshire's well-known subsidiaries include GEICO, Helzberg Diamond Shops, International Dairy Queen, The Pampered Chef, and Shaw Industries (Buffett, 2003). Berkshire's class A stock, listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as BRK.A, is expensive (at this writing, above $90,000 per share), and Berkshire's class B stock (NYSE: BRK.B) is approximately $4,000 at this writing. Given the high price of Berkshire stock, I suspected that discussion board participants would be individual investors and therefore owners of the corporation.

Similarly, I expected the majority of participants to be men, for a number of reasons. First, money is positively valued for men, rather than negatively valued as it has been claimed to be for women (Newcomb & Rabow, 1999). Second, men are more likely to be risk takers, including taking the risks inherent in individual investing (Bajtelsmit, Bernasek, & Jianakoplos, 1999; Olsen & Cox, 2001). Men are likely to earn more than women and are more likely to make large financial decisions, including decisions related to investing (Ferber & Nelson, 1993; Nelson, 1996; Ruccio & Amariglio, 2003). Research consistently finds that men have higher proportions of their financial assets in stocks and lower proportions in risk-free assets than do otherwise similar women (Hariharan, Chapman, & Domian, 2000; Lindamood & Hanna, 2005).

This study therefore seeks answers to a number of questions. Are the discussion board participants overwhelmingly male, as other research into online investing would suggest? What kinds of identities are performed on the discussion board? Is the communication in the discussion board gendered? If so, how do performances of gender influence identity and community in TCS's Berkshire Hathaway board?

Data Collection, Management, and Analysis

Data Collection

In order to understand how participants "do" community and identity in a financial discussion board, I gathered the texts of messages. Given that TCS's Berkshire Hathaway discussion board is archived back to 1999, with tens of thousands of posts, I needed to pare down the amount of possible data. I included posts from October 2001 though December 2003 using stratified random sampling (Frey, Botan, & Kreps, 2000). I stratified the population by the dates of financial quarters (October-December 2001, January-March 2002, April-June 2002, July-September 2002, October-December 2002, January-March 2003, April-June 2003, July-September 2003, October-December 2003). Within each stratum, I assigned numbers to each thread and randomly chose two discussion board threads to analyze from each stratum. In all, a total of 18 threads from the discussion board were analyzed (see Table 1).

A total of 96 individuals participated in these 18 threads. The threads included 143 posts, averaging 7.9 posts per thread, with a median of 9, a range of 34, and a standard deviation of 8.89. The median number of participants per thread is 6, within a range of 14, and a standard deviation of 4.01.

Data Management

I stored my running analysis as a separate computer file (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Online research has two built-in participant identity protections. First, online participants use screen names, not their real ones. Second, most personal identifiers (age, race, gender) are unknown. These inherent properties protect individual identity, but I have changed participants' screen names to provide extra protection.

Data Analysis

Generally scholars conceive of text as written language and discourse as spoken language (Lehtonen, 2000). CMC makes this distinction problematic: "Electronic communication, written on keyboards and read on computer screens, has many characteristics of both speaking and writing" (Davis & Brewer, 1997, p. 2). Discourse is understood here as language-in-use and language-in-context, the recursive processes through which people create meaning, identity, and gender, while simultaneously creating social texts (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Sunderland & Litosseliti, 2002; Taylor, 2005; van Dijk, 1997; Weick, 2005). Our use of language constructs and constitutes meaning, and discourse analysis attempts to discover what particular discourses in particular settings mean for, and do to, participants. In conducting the present analysis, I was particularly interested in the participants' understandings of their social conduct, roles, and identity in the discussion board. Communicating, discoursing, and gendering are contemporaneous, ongoing, recursive, and interdependent processes considered here as verbs, rather than as nouns (communication, discourse, gender) (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004).

In order to uncover how the participants engaged in "doing" the financial discussion board conversations, I examined how the participants themselves implicitly defined their activities and identities, by exploring participants' self-referential conversational statements on the discussion board. I wanted to see what comprehensive shared meanings participants created as members of this community. I examined major themes and uncovered veiled (to the participants) ways of making sense of Buffett, themselves, each other, and their place in the world. In coding messages related to Buffett, for example, I coded admiration through participant references to his personal charisma, genius sintellect, and general regard.

It should be noted that the examination of gender in CMC was not the original goal of this research, but rather it emerged from the data as I was examining Weickian sensemaking (Herrmann, 2007). I was surprised (happily) when I found myself coding, categorizing, and analyzing gendered forms of talk. I examined conversational attributes such as aggressiveness, analytic rationality, clarity, competition, control/power, humor/irony, independence, individuality, objectivity, reasoning, and self-assertion (Palomares, 2004; Putnam & Kolbe, 2000; Murphy, 2001). I maintained a running analysis of my interpretations of the discussion board threads, coding and categorizing using the practical application of grounded theory (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002; Tracy, 2001). I used open and axial coding to examine the sampled posts until each category reached theoretical saturation. I also kept a running analysis in journal form that included my own self-reflexive thoughts and interpretations about the research project.

Results

Community, Identity, and Socialization

Computer-mediated discourse, like other kinds of discourse, is a rich site for personal identity construction, reconstruction, and enactment. What identities are performed on the discussion board? My analysis revealed three main identities performed on the Berkshire discussion board: admirer, intelligent investor, and mentor. Participants cycle through these performed identities throughout the discussions.

Warren Buffett elicits awe among participants, and they express great admiration for him. Participants readily identity with Buffett. While they may debate about Alan Greenspan, efficient markets, etc., Buffett remains above the fray, as the following brief excerpts attest:

NiceVanillaCoke: "Part of Buffett's greatness is his ability and willingness to make himself irrelevant."

NoBearJustBull: "I would always be extremely cautious with assuming that Buffett published something incorrect or 'not quite right.'"

David2: "What separates the Warren Buffets and Peter Lynches from the rest of us—they are disciplined, focused, and patient."

In my sample of discussion board threads, all board participants show admiration for Buffett. Participants identify with Buffett and use his investing wisdom to further their own financial goals. This identification with Buffett can be seen as participants ally their identities as intelligent investors with him. Participants' conceptions of self seem to be tied directly to their identification with Buffett as the exemplar of the intelligent investor.

Through the topical categories and the percentage of posts dedicated to clarifying, elucidating, and imparting knowledge and information, board members clearly showed themselves as educated, intelligent, and rational. In this way, they performed intelligent investor identities. Participants assembled intricate arguments to make or defend a particular "Buffetological" concept. For example, Shake-Speer posits an intricate argument for the efficient market theory:

The best real-world, argument I ever heard in support of EMT (at least the moderate to weak variety), is that while there are millions of people invested in the Market, there are only a few thousand who really are the Market, and, like folk in a small town, they know an awful lot about each other's business. It's quite plausible. Between the institutionals - mutual funds, insurance companies, pension funds, -- and major individual shareholders (stock ownership, like the distribution of income is, while widespread, also highly asymmetric), the actual number of people who can affect valuation is rather small. As they generally have the same access to information, and perhaps, equally importantly, generally come from the same cultural gestalt, it not difficult to see that they often come to the same decisions.

Finally, discussion board participants performed mentor identities in relation to new members, through giving advice, explaining various theories, and recommending other board posts and literature. However, these identities flow and blend. Pesspi cycles through each as he answers a new member's question: "How do great investors decide which stocks to buy?"

Outstanding question!

If you take someone like Warren Buffett, he buys things for significantly less than they're worth [and holds onto them until the market realizes the value of them]. Despite everything people say about a financial security being worth only what someone will pay for it, the reality is there is an objective measure of what any given security is worth. It can be very difficult to determine what it is, but knowing that it's there makes it somewhat easier. The foundation on which value investing squarely sits is the assumption that (in roughly the words of the late Ben Graham), in the short term, the market is a voting machine; in the long term, it's a weighing machine. An investor can make money when the votes for a stock (near term stock price) don't match up to it's weight (underlying value).

Everything else is simply a matter of determining what the business is worth. There are lots of books on the subject, but a lot of them aren't very good in my opinion, I'd recommend reading the collected writings of Buffett to understand the common sense of value investing. I don't like books about Warren Buffett (except the biography), just the one book that contains stuff by Buffett.

The identities enacted in this post are those of admirer ("If you take someone like Warren Buffett, he buys things for significantly less than they're worth"), intelligent investor, ("Despite everything people say about a financial security being worth only what someone will pay for it, the reality is there is an objective measure of what any given security is worth"), and mentor ("I'd recommend reading the collected writings of Buffett to understand the common sense of value investing").

Socialization is the process by which individuals learn to become members of a group by internalizing the shared expectations of behavior, norms, and values of the group (Berger & Luckman, 1966). As Jablin (1987) noted, "The newcomer learns the requirements of his or her role and what the organization and its members consider to be 'normal' patterns of behavior and thought" (p. 695). Participants gave newcomers answers to their questions by imparting knowledge and including expert references. By using expert referents, participants steered newcomers toward investment philosophies that informed Buffett's strategies. Economic discourse, as all discourses, must be learned (McCloskey, 1998). These communicative behaviors function as components of the socialization process.

In summary, on the discussion board, participant conversation implicates particular aspects of identity as it is performed and as certain roles are enacted. I have documented three identities participants regularly perform—the admirer, the intelligent investor, and the mentor. These identities orient participants to each other, and facilitate newcomer socialization into the discussion board community. Concurrently, participants are performing gendered identities.

Self-Discipline and the Rational Investor

Gendered communication takes place on TCS's Berkshire Hathaway discussion board, and performances of gender influence identity and community. In the process of creating community through the socialization process, individuals are involved in discursive practices and performances that generate identities gendered as feminine and/or masculine (Butler, 1990a, 1990b; Hopper, 2003). According to normative constructs of gender, feminine values are associated with acceptance, community, contextualization, cooperation, emotionality, expressiveness, intuition, and subjectivity. Masculine attributes include action, clarity, competition, control, independence, individuality, objectivity, rationality, reasoning, and self-assertion (Mumby, 2000). As Putnam and Kolbe (2000) explain, "Debate, the type of discourse that typifies the traditional mode, consists of pro and con arguments and rebuttals aimed at reinforcing one's own position and refuting the opponent's claims" (p. 99). These are the same modes of discourse that Herring (1993) found to be characteristic of masculine style in an analysis of academic discussion lists.

However, rather than being a fixed variable with fixed consequences, gendering is akin to organizing and sensemaking, a constant process of sustenance and transformation via communicative interaction (Ashcraft, 2004; Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Sunderland & Litosseliti, 2002; Weick, 1979, 2005). Discursive activity is recursive, simultaneously organizing and creating organization and context in which communicating occurs, and thereby manifesting and producing gendered texts and sites (Ashcraft 2004, 2005; Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Taylor, 2001).

Similar to individuals in the academic, accounting, economic, engineering, and medical professions (Bochner, 1997; Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, & Samuel, 1998; Hodgson, 2005; Jorgenson, 2002; Reybold, 2003; Roberts, 2005), the financial investment discussion board participants consistently reference self-discipline—the power one enforces on the self—in order to be excellent investors. Investing is a rational, logical, objective process of decision-making. For board members, investing is neither emotional nor instinctual—two attributes that lead investors to make poor decisions. The following posts offer two examples of the necessity to discipline the self in order to invest like Buffett.

SnackingYak: People get emotional about their money, and emotional people make irrational decisions about their investments. This is not a strange concept to anyone who follows Warren Buffett. Ben Graham's Mister Market was nothing if he was not irrational. For those who wonder why the rest of the world doesn't just adopt his method of investing, a lot has to do with deeply ingrained human instincts. It goes against many of your instincts to buy something when everyone else is dumping it and running away. It's also difficult to sell when everyone is so enthusiastic about it and buying it en masse. Value investing requires remaining focused on the business and not allowing changes in the stock price to guide you.

In this post, the emotional and instinctual are deemed to lead to errors in investing. The irrational investor grounds investing approaches in illogical, irrational thoughts and behaviors. He or she has developed an unthinking herd mentality. Likewise, because people acting on their instinct and emotion drive the market, it functions in an irrational manner. The rational investor can take advantage of these weaknesses by disciplining the self and renouncing instinctual action while maintaining an objective focus on intelligent decision making.

Mekanic: It doesn't matter how much information is available if people don't use it or know how to analyze it. Even if they know how to analyze the information, it doesn't do them any good if they can't control their fear or greed. There is an excellent book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion which covers about 6 or 7 categories of irrationality that seem to be wired into human beings. One of these categories is people's need to be consistent, even when the basis for that consistency is no longer rational. People do this because they like to believe they're never wrong. (Ha!)

Mekanic articulates how emotions and instincts hinder the way individuals invest. Like other members of this community, he places information, rationality, and reason as the highest ideals. For these participants, self-control is paramount in order to analyze and make investment decisions objectively.

Disciplining the Unmasculine Other

The reification of discipline, control, and rationality is not only self-directed, but directed toward other participants. Social control/power as originally conceived followed the assumption that certain individuals or groups held power because they controlled an outcome desired by another (Mumby, 2001; Trethewey, 2000). However, as Mumby (2001) notes, power is the "production and reproduction of, resistance to, or transformation of relatively fixed (sedimented) structures of communication and meaning that support the interests (symbolic, political, and economic) of some organization members or groups over others" (p. 587). For Foucault (1970), society imposes both discursive and nondiscursive discipline on individual members. Foucault (1990) and Butler (1990a) included gender and sexuality as arenas of identity disciplined by dominant masculine discourses of control, knowledge, power, and rationality. In the discussion board, processes of overt control occur, supporting the predominant masculine discourse and subjugating feminine forms of expression. One member, TechSpec, posted a demonstrative appraisal of the new economy:

Welcome to the new economy. The rules have changed around here. The economic infrastructure is in a state of dynamic flux unlike any time in our history. The changes are progressive and will continue to proliferate. To survive, companies will need vision and focused direction. The ability to adapt is paramount. The new air is fresh and alive. Who wants to live in the new economy? Who wants to change and adapt and survive? Who wants to thrive? The choice will be made by all enterprises. There is life in the new economy, yet there is death in the old. Do you follow the leader or do you choose to follow the follower? Look at the companies taking hold in the new era. They have much to offer to us here in the new life. As a result, they will thrive and grow. Nothing will stop them. They are the leaders. Follow them. Invest in it! New ideas. New colors. New products. New! New! New! New! There is life in the new economy. Invest in it!

As did many investors during the boom of the new economy of the late 1990s, TechSpech envisages electrifying possibilities for investors. This post is filled with exclamations and demonstrative and effusive language, not the style of the rational, value-driven intelligent investor. As Waseleski (2006) noted," exclamation points do more than function as markers of excitability; they can also function as markers of friendliness" (¶ 31), two identifications of a more feminine form of speech.

Despite TechSpech's enthusiasm, discussion board participants confront him, as the following three replies attest:

EleventhCardo: New economy blah, blah, blah (to use your own words). You must be really young, or else you would know that there was a 'new economy' in the 1920's, the 1960's, and the 1990's already. The more things change the more they stay the same.

NoBearJustBull: You've joined a long tradition of those who see a new economy... Personally, I'll be concentrating on good products or services, profitability produced and sold, before considering any "new" paradigm as I invest.

SnackingYak: There is a saying. I don't know who said it. Maybe Ben Franklin, maybe Churchill. It goes like this, "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." I'll let you in on a little secret. YOUR investment philosophy does not control the market. You say 'invest in new economy companies of today,' surely you mean 'invest in new economy companies of tomorrow.' A guru such as yourself should be able to see these a mile off.

These participants utilized an adversarial discourse style employing criticism, ridicule, and sarcasm directed toward TechSpech. This adversarial style—which includes put-downs, strong claims, lengthy and/or frequent postings, one-upmanship, and sarcasm—is considered normatively masculine (Coates, 2003; Herring, 1993). Through sarcasm a person can be made to appear comical, and therefore inferior and inadequate according to a set of agreed-upon group or societal criteria. Participants who do not conform to the discussion board's expectations of hetero-normative performance are reprimanded and/or silenced. Exhibitions of non-masculine emotion in the board are rare, and when they occur, they are quickly disallowed.

"Doing the masculine" in the board supposedly identifies with some of our culture's highest reified values: "control, reason, strength, industry, courage, decisiveness, dominance, emotional control, intellectual and artistic genius, even God" (Johnson, 1997, p. 167). However, Butler (1990a) suggests that the performances and speech acts we participate in enact reality. Through everyday performances we make practiced conventions seem innate and essential. The power of hegemonic gender performances is created and sustained through our continual performances of everyday activities, including the communicative (Butler, 1990a, 1990b).

Although the discussion board participants act predominantly male, a number of discussion board participants perform more feminine types of talk, including such common devices as tag questions, varied hedges, boosters and amplifiers, and conventional forms of politeness (Coates, 1996; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2003; Herring, 1993). The following excerpts exemplify these occurrences:

Milktoast4: I'm far, far from a seasoned participant in EMT discussions and am less informed than I probably should be, but I wonder about all these buyers and sellers who DO have access to the most or all of the information they need, but just don't make use of it, do the lack of time, laziness, lack of sophistication, etc. Also, how much information is 'enough' information to make optimal choices? Wouldn't you ideally want or need to know almost EVERYTHING, or at least much more than you can get from company filings and analyst reports? Things such as employee morale, details on customer usage patterns and customer satisfaction, materials composition of products and competitor products, and things like that? Just some perhaps ill-formed musings on this…

In this post, Milktoast4 uses multiple hedges ("I'm far, far from a seasoned participant;" I'm probably;" "Just some perhaps ill-formed musings") and amplifiers (though the use of all capital letters "DO" and "EVERYTHING").

SinciW: Any Fed[eral Reserve Bank] chair can only do so much, not raising rates and cutting short the Irrational ExubeRR!!, I will call an error on his part, but what does anyone expect? A Fed that makes it easy to know when to buy and sell? TO and from whom?

In this relatively short post, SinciW uses amplifiers ("Irrational ExubeRR!!" "TO"), similar to how she writes in the following post, where she also uses a hedge ("I may be misunderstanding…").

SinciW: "Which is why I believe Buffett is still sort of talking down the stock market." I may be misunderstanding you but I don't think WB trys anything to anything of the like. The FED has thrown everything at the economy, if it can't respond, the implication is there is too much capital/production, and capital will destroy itself until profatability is restored. GDP may not grow at 5% forever, we may choose to consume less rather than more endlessly. Not that it will happen again, look at valuations of General Foods or Interpublic Group in 1979. How many bargains are there out there today? few and considering remaining economic risks, very few.

Radical: SinciW this ius howl tok thisss:

:- )

SinciW is subjected to overt control in the discussion board, and although she uses supposedly masculine discourse, she becomes the object of ridicule as Radical mocks her spelling/typing acumen ("trys anything to anything"). SinciW never posts again in this thread, and her voice is effectively silenced. This discovery reinforces previous findings on silencing in CMC (Herring, 1993, 1995, 1999; Kendall, 2000; Nowak, 2003). In the discussion board, speech can be subjugated or silenced and the offending participants who do not conform to the discussion board style of discourse are often disconfirmed and their opinions discounted and devalued (Buber, 1965).

There are a few overtly masculine heterosexual posts. These are generally derogatory and sexualized in nature.

PennyRolls: Well I see that the financial sodomization of shareholders continues over at CSCO….let'ss see... you can just imagine the thought process... "Hmmmmmm... my options will expire soon and we've got all this cash the business is generating... so I can announce a share buy-back and sneak out with mine through the back door...dumbass shareholders won't know the difference! It's brilliant!!!" I'll never understand how the shareholding public can put up with this by owning shares in a company which continually fights tooth and nail to continue screwing them.

In the instances where men are the objects in this post, they are demeaned and victimized. Shareholders of Cisco Systems "are getting screwed" by Chambers in the "Financial Sodomization CSCO Style" thread. A second post revolves around the person of disavowed and repudiated former Internet stock analyst Jack Grubman. He becomes the object of derision. "[Grubman] should be forced into eternal employment as a mop boy at a 25 cent booth."

Finally, the third individual mentioned through overt sexual language in the discussion board is Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC financial reporter. "I do not work for CNBC, but as I have stated in prior posts, I remain long on Maria." "I think CNBC would be more valuable, at least to male viewers, if Maria Bartiromo was allowed to report the news in a bubble bath!" Ms. Bartiromo is constructed under the auspices of the masculine gaze. "Masculine domination … constitutes women as symbolic objects whose being (esse) is a being-perceived (percipi)...they exist first through and for the gaze of others, that is, as welcoming, attractive, and available objects" (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 66).

The dominant discourse and the processes that compel participant communicative practices toward conformity led me inexorably to the concept of muted group theory (Kramarae, 1981). As participants attempt to conform to gendered communicative practices, different ways of voicing and understanding are impeded and silenced (Kramarae, 1981; Orbe, 1998). Ways of understanding remain unspoken as participants perform and take on the mantle of masculine gendered talk demanded by the dominant system of discursive expression in the discussion board community. Milktoast4, SinciW, and TechSpec each go silent in their respective discussion board threads.

Conclusion: Socializing, Gendering, Performing

Organizational identity is the intersection between individual values and the values of the organization (Jablin, 1987; Weick, 2005). Through communicative processes such as sensemaking and socialization, organizational members internalize company principles and values. As such, organizations become part of the member as the member becomes part of the organization. Although participants at TCS are investors geographically separated from Berkshire Hathaway, internalization appears to occur on the discussion board, reinforcing the concept of organizational identification (Eisenberg, Goodall, & Trethewey, 2007). Discussion board members create shared meanings that provide the foundation for collective understanding. Socialization and sensemaking processes enhance new members' identification with both the community of practice on the discussion board and as "loosely coupled" organizational members (Weick, 1979).

There is an interesting irony here, as ways of being, communicating, and understanding are silenced in a discussion board that stands in opposition to dominant investing philosophies. Conventional economic wisdom holds steadfastly to diversification, EMT, momentum and technical analysis, and stock option utilization (Hagstrom, 1994), while board members, following the investment philosophy of Warren Buffett, hold opinions that go against the mainstream. Viewed through the lens of standpoint theory (Deetz & Simpson, 2004; Orbe, 1998), the Berkshire Hathaway discussion board itself is a virtual community of resistance, positioned as "outsider-within" the norms of conventional investment strategies. Orbe (1998) defines the "outsider-within" as the individual or group that is a part of the larger group or organization (within) yet simultaneously peripheral to the dominant group (outside). Accordingly, the Berkshire Hathaway board as a discursive community, by rejecting the formation of a common bond with the conventional wisdom of investing experts, falls into Orbe's (1998) Aggressive Separation Orientation (ASO).

Ironically, while Buffett-style investors have an unheard voice within the larger investing community, they maintain specific communicative practices that reproduce and reify masculine engendered discourse—and silence those voices that are gendered feminine. Members of the board are socialized into these hegemonic practices, reinforcing the discursive norm on the site, and more generally in the discourses of economics and finance (McCloskey, 1998, 2006; Nelson, 1993; Ruccio & Amariglio, 2003). In a site created by communicative processes and a site where gender identities are performed, feminine forms of voice are censored through the discursive practices on the discussion board. This stands in contrast to the utopian hope that CMC will foster gender democratization. Through repeated performances, CMC in the TCS Berkshire Hathaway discussion board produces and reproduces a masculine economic community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2003).

While there are multiple masculinities, the participants on the Berkshire Hathaway discussion board perform white, middle class, university-educated masculinity, similar to Kendall's "nerds" (2000, 2002). Rather than a community of "masculine identity congruent with related forms of masculinity found in computing and engineering fields" (Kendall, 2000, p. 271), however, TCS participants perform masculine identities compatible with the financial and economic fields. As economist Nelson (1993) clearly articulates:

Neoclassical economics, and the criteria for "goodness" in mainstream economic research, have been defined in a heavily gendered way. The mainstream of the discipline of economics can be characterized as "masculine" not only by the (continuing) predominance of men among its practitioners, or by its relative neglect of so-called "women's issues," but in the very underlying criteria that determine what is seen as acceptable economic knowledge. (p. 291)

Despite the masculine reification of economic and financial discourses, feminist and postmodern scholars continue to delve into the earnings gap, the feminization of poverty, the glass ceiling, occupational segregation, sexual discrimination, harassment, and other areas in need of examination (Nelson, 1996; Ruccio & Amariglio, 2003).

Economic discourses are one arena in need of thorough study from a communicative perspective (Benton, 1990). Yet as Ruccio and Amariglio (2003) note, there are two economic discourses. The first is academic, which is scientific, stylized, and mathematical. The second is the discourse of everyday economics, based on stories and tales of morality that include real people and situations. Both of the discourses are "forms of conversation and storytelling; where they differ is on the specific metaphors that are used to produce their respective knowledges" (Ruccio & Amariglio, 2003, p. 266). On the Berkshire Hathaway discussion board, everyday economics tells a simple tale: Investors relying on emotion and instinct (i.e., the irrational) will inevitably make—and pay for—poor investment decisions.

Gendered identities, meanings, and structures are communicatively constituted, transformed, and resisted in everyday interaction within the greater social environment (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004). This gendering occurs both at the macrolevel of economic discourse and in the everyday performances of economic communication. On the TCS Berkshire Hathaway discussion board—and in Western culture in general—economics is gendered masculine because it was and continues to be discursively constituted as such in communicative practices and performances. This examination is thus one step toward a broader, more comprehensive communicative foundation for examining the gendered manifestation and perpetuation of everyday economics.

Note

1. I have changed all names in this article, including the name of the site and discussion board participants, replacing participant names with names that retain some of the original flavor.

Acknowledgments

Research is never done in a vacuum. Therefore, I would like to thank the following for their insights and contributions to this article: Dr. Paige Turner, Dr. Bob Krizek, Dr. Rob Anderson, Dr. Eric Eisenberg, Dr. Susan Herring, and the anonymous reviewers at JCMC. A previous version of this article was presented at the 92nd National Communication Association Convention in Austin, TX, in November 2006.

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About the Author

Andrew F. Herrmann, a former information technology professional, is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. His research interests include organizational sensemaking and socialization, gender in organizations, CMC, economic discourses, and Kierkegaardian approaches to interpersonal and organizational communication.
Address: University of South Florida, Department of Communication, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, CIS 1040, Tampa, FL 33620 USA