Celebrity capital: Redefining celebrity using field theory
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
This article proposes to redefine celebrity as a kind of capital, thereby extending Bourdieu's field theory. This redefinition is necessary, it is argued, because one of the main limitations shared by current definitions of celebrity is their lack of explanatory power of the convertibility of celebrity into other resources, such as economic or political capital. Celebrity capital, or broadly recognizability, is conceptualized as accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations. In that sense, it is a substantial kind of capital and not a subset or special category of social or symbolic capital, the latter being defined as legitimate recognition by other agents in a social field. Rather than adding another definition of celebrity next to many others, the notion of celebrity capital proposed here should be seen as an attempt to integrate the existing approaches of celebrity into a single comprehensive conceptualization that can enable us to grasp this societal and cultural phenomenon better.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Theory and Society |
Volume | 42 |
Issue number | 5 |
Pages (from-to) | 543-560 |
Number of pages | 18 |
ISSN | 0304-2421 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sep 2013 |
- Bourdieu, Celebrity, Definition, Field theory, Media, Symbolic capital
Research areas
ID: 324969599