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Celebrity capital: redefining celebrity using field theory

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Media are generally understood here as mass media, or the “central media (primarily television, radio and the press, but sometimes film and music, and increasingly also computer-mediated communication via the Internet)” (Couldry 2003b, p. 2). Still, it is important not to exclude other types of media such as portraiture or photography, especially when studying historical celebrities (see van Krieken 2012).

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the Theory and Society Editors and reviewers for their very useful suggestions. This article also greatly benefited from the constructive feedback by Nick Couldry and my colleagues at CIMS, while Aeron Davis and Rodney Benson were so kind as to have discussions with me on its main ideas.

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  1. Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, Korte Meer 7-11, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Olivier Driessens

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Driessens, O. Celebrity capital: redefining celebrity using field theory. Theor Soc 42, 543–560 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9202-3

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