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Individual And Organizational Celebrity: Two Essays On Media Attributions And Organizational Agency, Laura D'Oria

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in how organizations are perceived by their constituents, because such perceptions have important implications for strategy formulation, strategy implementation and organizational outcomes. In this two-essay dissertation, I focus on a specific type of social approval asset, celebrity – the extent to which a social actor attains high levels of public attention and elicits positive emotional responses. Specifically, I examine how celebrity emerges at different organizational levels.

In Essay 1, I first develop a theoretical multilevel framework of business celebrity, building on agenda setting theory and framing theory. Second, I propose a typology of business celebrity …