It’s All About Me (Or Is It Us?): The Narrative Antecedents of the Locus of Celebrity

Abstract For two decades, research on individual and organizational celebrity has flourished. However, the literature remains limited in several ways. First, despite recent gains regarding the antecedents of celebrity, current theory does not fully explain why celebrity resides at a specific locus (i.e., at the individual‐ and/or organizational level). Second, research has suggested that both the media and organizations play significant roles in celebrity attainment. However, researchers have focused more on the media’s role in creating celebrity narratives and less on the role that organizational communications play in the narrative process and how they affect the locus of celebrity. Lastly, research has provided a fragmented picture of individual and organizational celebrity, disregarding that organizations and their leaders can share high degrees of positive attention (i.e., have concurrent celebrity) that likely have different effects than celebrity located at only one locus. We address these issues by integrating celebrity research across multiple loci to develop a theory of the narrative antecedents of the locus of celebrity. In doing so, we explain how organizations can actively create individual, organizational, or concurrent celebrity.