The Powerless ‘Elite’: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars

Celebrity capital: redefining celebrity using field theory

“…Audiences judge the authenticity of stars and the possible tensions between their private and public lives (Dyer 2004(Dyer [1986). Or, as Alberoni (1972) contended, the industries can fabricate celebrities and put them on the shelves to be bought and consumed, but it is eventually the customers who pick their favorite celebrities and determine whether they will have successful careers and how long these will last. Before going into detail on celebrity as defined from the perspective of the customer or the public, let us focus on the 'shelves' first, the media.…”

“…Early traces of this, albeit not always in terms of celebrity, can be found in the work on charismatic leadership by one of sociology's founding fathers, Max Weber (1948), in Charles Wright Mills' (2000Mills' ( [1956) work on elites, devoting a full chapter on celebrities (see also Alberoni 1972), or in Richard Sennett's (1976) The Fall of Public Man in which he started from charisma to explore the star system. The attention for stars became more systematic with the development of star studies, within which French sociologist Edgar Morin (1972Morin ( [1957) and Richard Dyer (2007Dyer ( [1979) are among the spearheads.…”

Generating forms of media capital inside and outside a field: the strange case of David Cameron in the UK political field

“…How political insiders then judge, and thus bestow symbolic capital on, other politicians, varies considerably from how a wider public judge, and thus bestow it. Such a conclusion is also to be deduced from several non-field oriented studies of politics, culture and communication (Alberoni, 2006;Ankersmit, 1997;Corner, 2003;Davis, 2007). A second obvious means of distinguishing forms of media capital is between that linked to institutionalized position and that linked to individual personality.…”

Celebrity CEOs and the Cultural Economy of Tabloid Intimacy

“…Drawing on similar terminology, Francesco Alberoni (1972) focused upon the category of the 'especially remarkable' world of idols and divas which, he suggested, constituted a 'powerless elite'. A tradition was in place in critical writing on celebrity in which celebrities were being defined as the opposite of figures with serious institutional power.…”