Why do some CEOs become celebrities, while others with seemingly equal accomplishments do not? After two decades of research, far more is known about the substantial consequences of CEO celebrity than about its determinants. Drawing on the media routines literature, we develop and test a “push-pull theory” of CEO celebrity attainment, arguing and finding that a) journalists pull certain CEOs into the limelight, particularly those whose firms are nonconformists within their industries and who themselves are demographically atypical; b) CEOs, through various self-promotion tactics, can push themselves and their stories into public view; and c) these push tactics are particularly beneficial for helping atypical CEOs achieve celebrity. We conceptualize CEO celebrity as an ordinal construct with discrete gradations, which we refer to as non-celebrities, B-list celebrities, and A-list celebrities. We test our theory using a longitudinal sample of CEOs, and develop a novel, ordinal measure of CEO celebrity that encompasses a broad array of media (newspaper, broadcast, magazine, and online), allowing us to set forth and test a more nuanced theory about different levels of celebrity attainment.

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获得 CEO 名人的推动和拉动：媒体惯例视角

为什么有的 CEO 会成为名人，而其他看似成就相当的 CEO 却没有？经过二十年的研究，人们对 CEO 名人的实质性影响的了解远多于其决定因素。借鉴媒体惯例文献，我们开发并测试了 CEO 名人成就的“推拉理论”，论证并发现 a) 记者将某些 CEO 拉到了聚光灯下，特别是那些公司在其行业内不墨守成规且他们自己是人口统计学非典型；b) CEO 通过各种自我推销策略，将自己和他们的故事推向公众视野；c) 这些推动策略特别有利于帮助非典型 CEO 成名。我们将 CEO 名人概念化为具有离散等级的有序结构，我们将其称为非名人，B-list名人，和A-list名人。我们使用 CEO 的纵向样本来测试我们的理论，并开发了一种新颖的、有序的 CEO 名人测量方法，其中涵盖了广泛的媒体（报纸、广播、杂志和在线），使我们能够提出和测试更细微的理论关于不同层次的名人成就。