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.