In this chapter, we examine the law relating to corporate finance, focusing on how companies raise capital by issues shares or taking on debt. We examine the nature of share finance (including different types of shares), the different forms of debt finance (including debentures), and the nature of security interests. We consider share capital transactions including dividends, alterations and reduction of capital, share buy-backs and financial assistance transactions. This area of corporate law uses specific terminology. We define these terms in the text, noting that other sources, such as legal and business glossaries, may also assist.

Chapter 1 establishes the primary intrigue surrounding professional speechwriters and other sorts of invisibilized language workers: namely, the complication of an author who is never animator nor principal of their labor (Goffman 1981). Here Mapes also lays out the theoretical cornerstones of her research: language in institutional and professional contexts; language work and wordsmiths; metadiscourse; and reflexivity and semiotic ideologies. This framework serves to address not only the ways in which workplace communication both establishes and contests particular communities of practice but also how larger issues related to metalinguistic awareness and political economy are implicated in these processes. Next, Mapes briefly maps the history of speechwriting as well as the relatively scant scholarly engagement with practitioners. She then turns to the specifics of her project, documenting the details of her data collection, method, and analytical process. The chapter concludes with an overview of the rest of the book, as well as an explanation of the three primary rhetorical strategies (invisibility, craft, and virtue) which arise in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work.

Marx’s early theory of labour and alienation originates from idealist concepts of spontaneity and formativity. His ideas of socialism and emancipation in the 1840s reprise aspects of Kantian autonomy and heteronomy and follow Fichte in linking labour with spontaneity. Marx formulates the dialectic of the will in a way favourable to the moment of particularity as membership in a social class, and sees one particular class as simultaneously a vehicle of universal interest and revolutionary transformation. Quantitative change is insufficient though necessary: a merely distributive socialism might enhance the living conditions of the workers, but would leave intact structures of exploitation which deprive workers of their agency as well as their happiness. His theory of history and emancipation, recently described as a self-actualisation account, can be more precisely identified as a variant of post-Kantian perfectionism, which, like Feuerbach’s, contains a strong admixture of pre-Kantian elements. This blending of heterogeneous elements has profound theoretical and practical consequences, notably in the absence of a developed concept of right.

Chapter 2 introduces readers to the three interconnected concepts which are key to speechwriters’ practices: 1) frontstage and backstage; 2) participation framework; and 3) production format (Goffman 1959, 1981). Next, Mapes maps the profession of speechwriting, using descriptive analysis to document practitioners’ education and career trajectories, production of deliverables, and day-to-day practices. This is followed by a second analytical section which outlines the rhetorical strategies of invisibility, craft, and virtue. First, Mapes uses interview data to unpack the specifics of invisibility as a point of professional pride and skill, demonstrating how speechwriters understand and even embrace the erasure of their authorship. Second, she documents the constructions of expertise and skill which characterize speechwriters’ craft, and which allow them to claim status as “creatives.” Lastly, Mapes details how virtue features across the dataset, arguing that it is necessarily tied to the cultural indexicalities associated with “impact.” In sum, this chapter sets the groundwork for understanding how speechwriters engage in the status competition characteristic of contemporary capitalism.

Chapter 5 examines how speechwriters’ claims to transgressive agency are a source for “affective binding” (see Comer 2022) and status production, contributing to the “virtuous outlaw” identity of the speechwriter community. Mapes’ focus here is rooted in affect studies (e.g. Ahmed 2004) and notions of emotional labor (e.g. Hochschild 2012), as well as the rather prolific scholarship concerning professional/personal identity as it emerges in workplace discourse (e.g. Holmes 2007). What comes to the fore is the way in which emotion is complicatedly entangled with the “semiotic ideologies” of one’s professional life (see again Keane 2018). Focusing on both Professional Speechwriting course materials as well as a video-recorded meeting between members of the Speechwriter Organization, Mapes demonstrates how participants characterize their professional expertise as especially superior to that of (hypothetical) speakers. In framing themselves as uniquely skilled and knowledgeable, speechwriters deem their transgressive professional practices as virtuous and admirable, allowing them to claim power and status within the neoliberal linguistic marketplace.

Chapter 6 explores how the business of speechwriting is necessarily caught up in the commodity chains of the market, and the ways in which status competition permeates high-end language work – including academia. After a brief section which summarizes the preceding chapters, Mapes identifies three overarching problems which her book helps to illuminate. These pertain to 1) political economy, field, and the marketplace; 2) folk linguistics; and 3) community-centered collaboration and consultation. As a means of further interrogating these specific issues, Mapes briefly analyzes data from her participation in a two-day Speechwriter Organization conference. Focusing on the ways in which practitioners both claim and contest their community membership, she identifies moments of solidarity building, and moments of individual status production. Across these two sections Mapes highlights speechwriters’ paradoxical struggle for legitimacy. They want their work to be acknowledged and valued, and yet it is only by operating and competing within the particular confines of their “field” (Bourdieu 2005 [2000]) that they can accumulate capital. Hence, in both avowing and disavowing ownership, power, and prestige, speechwriters demonstrate the real complexity of professionalized language work under neoliberal conditions.

Chapter 4 unpacks the complex ways in which claims to craft emerge in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work. As theoretical background Mapes considers the ways in which more ordinary instances of language play are necessarily distinct from the “exceptional” creativity which defines speechwriters’ work (see Swann and Deumert 2018). Relatedly, she turns to poetics (e.g. Jakobson 1960) to examine how speechwriters exemplify a spectacular, institutionalized expression of the aesthetic or artistic dimensions of language. The subsequent analysis draws primarily on speechwriter memoirs and interviews to investigate the the microlinguistic choices which characterize speechwriters’ claims to artistry; their emphasis on persuasion as creative practice; and their proclivity for formulating themselves as distinctly neoliberal “bundles of skills” (e.g. Holborrow 2018). This chapter thereby demonstrates how poetics/creativity are used as key status-making strategies by which speechwriters shore up their privilege vis-à-vis peers and other language workers.

Chapter 3 focuses on the notion of invisibility by tracking the life of a political speech from assignment to delivery. Mapes’ theoretical framework for this analysis comprises three interrelated concepts: language materiality (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012), or the ways in which language and material objects are complicatedly entwined and consequently a matter of political economy; text trajectories (e.g. Lillis 2008), as in the processes that facilitate a text’s evolution; and entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990), the de- and recontextualization of language. Following Macgilchist and Van Hout’s (2011) ethnographic approach to documenting text trajectories, the analysis is divided into three case studies which together demonstrate speechwriters’ strategic and material erasure throughout the evolution of their deliverables. Ultimately, Mapes concludes by arguing that this ethnographic text trajectory evidence is another indication of the ways in which language workers must discursively enact Urciuoli’s (2008) “new worker-self” in order to claim status and success as wordsmiths.

This chapter explores the economy of the later Roman Empire, with special emphasis on resource management, economic structures and regional variations. It highlights how land, labour and capital functioned within a largely agrarian system, with agriculture serving as the primary economic driver and tax base. The chapter examines diverse sources, including archaeological surveys, historical texts, coinage and environmental data. It analyses the effects of political instability, regional differentiation and resource distribution on economic trends. Case studies from North Gaul, Iberia, Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean reveal that economic activity was influenced by both local conditions and imperial policies. The study also incorporates ecological data, such as pollen analysis and lead pollution levels, to assess economic fluctuations. A central argument is that the later Roman economy was not a uniform system but a collection of interconnected regional economies. While political fragmentation led to economic contractions in some areas, others adapted through local specialisation and changing trade networks. This study thus challenges the view of economic collapse, instead emphasising resilience and adaptation, and calling for an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the complexities of late Roman economic life and its long-term transformations.

While the British or continental marriage plot generally culminates in a high-stakes social transaction involving fixed sums of old money, the story of American marriage in realist fiction is often less about inheritance than about the abstract, dynamic, and unpredictable force of new wealth. In both its new- and old-world settings, the marriage plot is fundamentally a money plot, but the kind of money at issue tends to differ in important respects, and the role of marriage in either reproducing or disrupting social conditions also differs as a result. Simply put, if the possibilities of heteronormative social reproduction signified by marriage were the things that chiefly struck the imaginations of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, it seems that for William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and other writers of American realism, money itself was the romance of the realist moment in America. It follows that the American marriage plot often enters the period’s fiction less as the climactic mechanism of social reproduction than as a minor event in the story of money’s own reproductive capability.

This study examines the role of art as a crucible of capital and property during the First World War and constructs a large-scale historical narrative of European auctions held between 1910 and 1925. By combining sources such as auction reports, newspaper articles, caricatures, individual memoirs, and financial and legal documents with an analysis of art prices, this study allows for making new observations about the evolution of European art markets, their disruption by the events of the First World War, and their transnational entanglements. Far from focusing solely on reconstructing the collecting patterns of prominent individuals or shedding light on specific histories of appropriation and looting, this book explores broader cultural and social developments across the British, French, and German art markets and their milieus and also touches upon trade spheres such as Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Russia. While the First World War has often been neglected in scholarly studies as a phase of stagnation and stasis, this study shows that it had a disruptive impact on the art trade in the twentieth century and introduces a new transnational methodology for historical inquiries into cultural and artistic markets.

This chapter presents capitalistic societies as organized by the constant accumulation of capital. It then describes fossil capitalism as a society organized around constant accumulation whose social division of labor and spatiotemporal fixes are characterized by hydrocarbonicity.

The concept of the cultural landscape represents a liminal space where physical and digital geographies intersect, creating a dynamic terrain where consumers, brands, and the landscape itself interact to create meaning and establish value. This introduction highlights the intricate relationship between brands and consumers within this landscape, exploring the fluid exchange of power and identity construction that occurs in these interactions. With a focus on how brands and consumers co-create meaning and value, the book examines the formation and exchange of capital, gender, authenticity, activism, and the power dynamics that come into play between consumers and brands.

This chapter focusses on the role of brands in shaping cultural intelligibility and consumer identity. It illustrates how brands, beyond their commercial role, embody cultural categories and stabilise societal norms. Brands are seen as multifaceted entities, serving as signs and symbols within a media-rich consumer environment. In exploring the company, consumer, and societal perspectives, this chapter presents an integrated approach to understanding the intricate relationship between brands and their audiences. This approach considers the complex milieu in which brands operate and the subjective realities constructed through social interactions in the habitus in branding, reflecting on how brands and consumers develop dispositions influencing social expectations. The dynamics of capital are highlighted in the exchange of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, wherein power, often veiled in accepted cultural perceptions, is dissected as a subtle force that both brands and consumers wield.