Incoherent Corporate Speech

F. Scott Fitzgerald imagines corporate marriage proposals as a promising thought experiment to think through the fundamental incoherence of what was eventually to be known as corporate speech after the U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United (2010). His autobiographical and underappreciated meditations on the film industry, The Love of the Last Tycoon (1940) and The Pat Hobby Stories (1940–1), tease out corporate expression’s difficulties and possibilities—complications that are typically overlooked in contemporary discussions of corporate speech. In Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood executive producer imagines that he can “buy” what is in his screenwriter’s “mind.” His understanding of speech articulates Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s theory of contractual meaning and economist Ronald Coase’s literalization of “the marketplace of ideas,” anticipating the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Citizens United. But when that tycoon’s lover treats her multiple Dear John letters to him in the same literal manner—as automatic, repetitive, and commodified—the tycoon senses the flaws in his account of language. After examining Citizens United and related precedents struggling to conceptualize corporate speech, this chapter argues that Fitzgerald’s focus on the problem of repeated action reveals a basic incoherence in theories of corporate speech. Conceiving of ideas as brain content that can be bought and sold, Tycoon’s corporate executive unwittingly stumbles on the essentially impoverished nature of corporate speech as repetitive but not meaningful. Decades before corporate speech had First Amendment protections, Fitzgerald’s late fiction imagined and represented its potential problems.

Hybrid Telecoaching for Corporate Speech Training and Potential Applications to Clinical Practice

Purpose The purpose of this article was to describe a model for “hybrid speech telecoaching” developed for a Fortune 100 organization and offer a “thought starter” on how clinicians might think of applying these corporate strategies within future clinical practice. Conclusion The author contends in this article that corporate telecommunications and best practices gleaned from software development engineering teams can lend credibility to e-mail, messaging apps, phone calls, or other emerging technology as viable means of hybrid telepractice delivery models and offer ideas about the future of more scalable speech-language pathology services.

Disposable

When television was introduced to the American public at the New York World’s Fair, its prerecorded content was dominated by sponsored film. These programs, designed to achieve goals ranging from securing participation in public health campaigns to cultivating viewer goodwill, were produced by diverse civic, governmental, educational, and industrial institutions. For many fairgoers being introduced to television, the marvel of the new medium would have been interlaced not with Hollywood and entertainment programming, but with the tropes of industrial and civic progress, corporate goodwill, and national expansion so often found in the period’s sponsored films. This article traces these intersections beyond the Fair, when sponsored films found their way to television in high numbers thanks to their ability to mediate between the needs and interests of several key groups within early American broadcasting (stations, networks, industrial film producers, and the government). Operating as “filler” for stations hoping to nourish and grow their local schedules, sponsored film provided a critical resource that supported the development of broadcasting infrastructure (and, of course, flow) while reinforcing the medium’s commercial status through the provision of an additional, alternative avenue of corporate speech on the small screen. Returning to a wide set of texts that continue to persist—despite assumptions regarding early American television programming’s irrevocability—this article works with and against disposability, positioning ephemerality as a problem of attention.

Corporations as Speakers

This chapter examines the justices' views and the reasoning behind Supreme Court's 5–4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It does so through a review of the second oral argument before the Court and an analysis of the Court's opinion. After the Court had first heard oral argument in 2009, it scheduled a second argument and instructed the parties to brief and argue the general question of the constitutional status of corporate speech. The Court had ruled in prior cases that much corporate speech was protected by the First Amendment, but as a general rule the protection afforded such speech was weak and limited. After taking full stock of the Court's decision, and in light of the virtual absence of serious constitutional analysis of the core question of the First Amendment's meaning, the chapter then steps back and considers from a fresh and broader perspective whether corporations should be fully protected speakers under the First Amendment, drawing on the Constitution's text, its history, and the structural, philosophical, and practical considerations that bear on this central question.