ABSTRACT
In this chapter we develop our definition of business celebrity as both an interactive, industrial process of cultural production and as the end result of that process.We do so by drawing on previous scholarship on celebrity and tailoring it to the topic at hand. For all their media exposure, business celebrities have received little serious academic scrutiny.This is ironic since, as we explain in this chapter, the growing body of research on celebrity in sociology, cultural, and media studies emphasizes that celebrity is big business, and that celebrities need to be understood as products of the overlapping networks of organizational and economic dynamics that characterize what have been labeled “the celebrity industries” (Turner et al. 2000;Turner 2004). Yet few of the scholars doing this work have ventured to make any connections between the celebrity business and business celebrities. The many theories and definitions that emphasize the industrial dynamics of celebrity barely acknowledge the existence of business celebrities, let alone place them at the center of the phenomenon itself.
