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 which 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 proposed notion of celebrity capital should be seen as an attempt to integrate the existing approaches of celebrity into one comprehensive conceptualization which can enable us to better grasp this societal and cultural phenomenon.
In recent debates about the ever-growing prominence of celebrity in society and culture, a number of scholars have started to use the often intermingled terms celebrification and celebritization. This article contributes to these debates first by distinguishing and clearly defining both terms and especially by presenting a multidimensional conceptual model of celebritization to remedy the current one-sided approaches that obscure its theoretical and empirical complexity. Here celebrification captures the transformation of ordinary people and public figures into celebrities, whereas celebritization is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification.
This article addresses these shortcomings by studying politicians' personalization, not as a product of media logic but by looking at politicians' media-related practices and the media's anchoring of practices. Our in-depth interviews with Flemish politicians show that politicians' practices are in many ways organized by the media, but at the same time aim to retain control over them. Practices related to image-building and the constitution of the private-public boundary demonstrate this. We conclude that practice theory offers great potential for mediatization research but needs further empirical application.
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