‘At least he’s doing something’: Moral entrepreneurship and individual responsibility in Jamie’s Ministry of Food

Abstract

Jamie Oliver’s celebrity image has undergone various transformations since his debut as ‘the naked chef’. In this article, we focus on his recent series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, locating it within debates about lifestyle television, class and neoliberalism. We identify a shift in his image from lifestyle expert to moral entrepreneur, involved with a range of social enterprises. We examine the show’s textual strategies, highlighting similarities with earlier forms of social exploration and contemporary depictions of the working class. We conclude with a consideration of how the show resonates with an emergent discourse that represents Britain as a broken society in need of political and social ‘healing’. In the show, representations of fast food, obese bodies, sink estates and poverty of aspiration delineated a general crisis demanding direct action by an inspirational figure. In this way, the show legitimated Jamie’s new role as a moral and social entrepreneur.

The Moral Entrepreneur: A New Component of Ethical Leadership

“…The concept of moral entrepreneurship, or what Sunstein (1996) calls norm entrepreneurship, has been applied to the challenges faced by nongovernmental organizations concerned with human rights (Felner 2012), to the conditions under which global norms become part of the agenda of global governance (Reich 2003), to the transformation and institutionalization of international commercial arbitration as the leading contractual method for the resolution of transnational commercial disputes (Dezalay and Garth 1995), and to kitchen television programs that tackle some social problems like health and social exclusion (Hollows and Jones 2010). Fishman (2014) analyzed four examples of moral entrepreneurship: the incubation of moral norms against smoking, drunk driving, underage drinking, and copyright infringement.…”

Campaigning culinary documentaries and the responsibilization of food crises

“…By deploying Oliver beyond the lifestyle format, both chef and channel were associated with an emerging genre that combined 'foodatainment' (Finkelstein 1999) with issues such as health, social exclusion and food ethics. This helped to establish Oliver as not just a lifestyle expert but also as a moral entrepreneur (Hollows and Jones 2010) and proved a useful formula for a commercial TV channel with a public service remit (Hobson 2008).…”

“…Third, Jamie's School Dinners presents positive change as the result of a special and inspirational figure: Jamie is presented as the only person capable of effecting change, a viewpoint repeated in much approving commentary on the series (Hollows and Jones 2010). This makes the CCD an exceptional vehicle for a branding exercise, but also works to individualize the political imaginary surrounding social change, in terms of both celebrity interventions and more broadly by transferring responsibility to the individual and away from state initiatives -key tactics of responsibilization.…”

Traditional Retail Markets: The New Gentrification Frontier?

“…Now this experience is being enclosed by the logic of capital, packaged and sold to a new audience. Central to this commodification of the "market experience" is the particular British connection between class and food where often appreciation for the quality and origin ("provenance" as it is now called) of food, a taste for the "exotic" and home cooking are regarded as a middle class trait while working class food habits are stereotyped as being driven by price and convenience (Hollows and Jones 2010). In this class-food landscape, markets again perform this "frontier" space in which to acquire and perform new foodie practices (Coles and Crang 2011) and culinary cultural capital (Bell 2002).…”