Corporate Romanticism

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

In this smart, playful, and provocative book, one of today’s most original business thinkers argues that we underestimate the importance of romance in our lives and that we can find it in and through business—by designing products, services, and experiences that connect us with something greater than ourselves. Against the backdrop of eroding trust in capitalism, pervasive technology, big data, and the desire to quantify all of our behaviors, The Business Romantic makes a compelling case that we must meld the pursuit of success and achievement with romance if we want to create an economy that serves our entire selves. A rising star in data analytics who is in love with the intrinsic beauty of spreadsheets; the mastermind behind a brand built on absence; an Argentinian couple who revolutionize shoelaces; the founder of a foodie-oriented start-up that creates intimate conversation spaces; a performance artist who offers fake corporate seminars for real professionals—these are some of the innovators readers will meet in this witty, deeply personal, and rousing ramble through the world of Business Romanticism. The Business Romantic not only provides surprising insights into the emotional and social aspects of business but also presents “Rules of Enchantment” that will help both individuals and organizations construct more meaningful experiences for themselves and others. The Business Romantic offers a radically different view of the good life and outlines how to better meet one’s own desires as well as those of customers, employees, and society. It encourages readers to expect more from companies, to give more of themselves, and to fall back in love with their work and their lives.

This edited volume studies how in European literary culture the codified verbal system of rhetoric shifted towards persuasion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

US period drama starring Christina Ricci as an air stewardess working for Pan American Airways in the 1960s at the dawn of the jet engine and mass public air travel. Joining Head Stewardess Maggie (Ricci) on the Pan Am flight crew are Laura (Margot Robbie), an inexperienced stewardess Maggie takes under her wing, and the relentless charmer Ted (Michael Mosley). The episodes are: 'Pilot', 'We'll Always Have Paris', 'Ich Bin Ein Berliner', 'Eastern Exposure', 'One Coin in a Fountain', 'The Genuine Article', 'Truth Or Dare', 'Unscheduled Departure', 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang', 'Secrets and Lies', 'Diplomatic Relations', 'New Frontiers', 'Romance Languages' and '1964'.

Long before the US Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely "speak" with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), they elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This volume offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments, modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, this volume analyzes legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

The Corporation engages with current issues of the corporation as an institutionalized organizational form, approaching the concept from the backgrounds of organization theory, law, and economics, combining different theoretical views and empirical approaches.

This collection of cutting-edge research reviews the evolution of the American corporation, the dominant trends in the way it has been studied, and at the same time introduces some new perspectives on the historical trajectory of the business organization as a social institution. The authors draw on cultural theory, anthropology, political theory and legal history to consider the place of the firm in nineteenth and twentieth-century American Society.