6 November 2009
Business celebrities like Sir Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Donald Trump worry about reputation, fame and public face just as much as Hollywood stars, but an upcoming book with Kiwi connections says they are facing the brunt of growing criticism at “prancing about like Big Brother contestants.”
Demystifying Business Celebrities, the first book-length investigation into business celebrity co-authored by The University of Auckland Business School leadership expert Professor Brad Jackson, says the proliferation of media channels and encroachment of celebrity culture means today’s business leaders have to worry about more than just the nuts-and-bolts practicalities of running a business.
Business celebrities – just like their Hollywood celebrity counterparts such as Britney Spears, the late Michael Jackson and Boy George – depend almost as heavily on the efforts of a variety of loosely connected cultural intermediaries to promote them to the public.
These include photographers, paparazzi, journalists, editors, publicists, agents and public relations professionals who work to “orchestrate the co-production, cross-promotion and circulation of a rather strange species of mediated persons,” Professor Jackson and his colleagues Assoc Professor Eric Guthey of the Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) and Professor Timothy Clark of Durham Business School (England) say.
“Now the proliferation of media channels and the encroachment of celebrity culture mean that business leaders have to worry about reputation, about fame and about the way that celebrity works too.
“From this perspective, the business celebrity is a Johnny-come-lately to the media spotlight who, many argue, should stop prancing about like a Big Brother contestant and stick to his balance sheets.”
However the book, published by Routledge Press and to be officially launched at a Business School public debate on November 20, contends that business celebrities are not a passing fad or superficial phenomenon distracting managers away from real business issues.
Business celebrities, the trio say, are not just people who have made it big because they are good at what they do, but are often people widely celebrated in the media for their success – deservedly so or otherwise.
If these icons of success and leadership didn’t exist, the media would have to create them...making the media a crucial factor in the production of celebrities.
“Business celebrities remain a perennial object of media fascination, in large part because they function both to highlight and to smooth over some of the key cultural and ideological tensions generated by the dominance of business institutions in contemporary society,” the authors say.
“They are also involved in some of the key challenges faced by the people who must work and manage inside these institutions. And these struggles are real.”
Twentieth century media first started to question the notion of business leaders such as John D Rockefeller or JP Morgan as figures to be revered and emulated, paragons of virtue, heroic, self-made, patrons of the arts and humanitarian philanthropists, Professor Jackson – the Fletcher Building Education Trust Chair in Leadership at the Business School - says.
“Business celebrities come to represent the possibility and desirability of untrammelled individual agency, power and distinction in a complex world.
“They are held up above the rest of the business community by elaborately constructed scaffolding in a way that promotes the notion that they can remain floating in mid-air by virtue of their own innate skills and exemplary characteristics.”
Recent years have seen a business celebrity backlash, the book says, with leadership scholars more adamant in their criticism of their usefulness, and a rejection of the kinds of heroic models of leadership implied by the very phenomenon. It is ironic, Professor Jackson says, that New Zealanders are more familiar with names such as Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, swashbuckling Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson and American property developer Donald Trump than that of Kiwi multi-billionaire Graeme Hart, who is wealthier but tends to shun publicity.
“The answer has to do not just with the tall poppy syndrome, but also with the peculiar phenomenon of celebrity, and the way that it works its magic.” |