ABSTRACT
In the realm of business and management, the functioning of commercial organizations today is also marked by the central role that celebrity CEOs play in establishing a fi rm’s success, and fi rms themselves will often achieve success by attained celebrity status, in the sense of being known for being well known – Walt Disney, Coca-Cola and Nike are just some examples. The whole point of branding is precisely to establish a celebrity status for a name, a face, a word, an object or an image. Many leading corporations are closely identifi ed with their CEOs. As Jo Littler (2007) and Guthey et al. (2009) observe, most of the scholarly accounts of celebrity, especially in cultural and media studies, tend to overlook business celebrities, focusing instead on entertainment and sports stars. However, before Hollywood took its central position in the public imagination in relation to celebrity, entrepreneurs such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Edison and Ford ‘became highly visible repositories of the tensions and debates generated by social, commercial, and technological changes that contributed to the development of the Hollywood fi lm industry itself’. For Guthey and his colleagues, commercial and fi nancial celebrities ‘helped make up the rules of the game in the fi rst place’ (2009: 8-9).
