The American Idol Next Door: Conforming Behavior, Media Attention and Achieving Celebrity
Abstract
We draw on the celebrity and categories literatures to explore how unknown actors’ conforming and non-conforming behaviors affect their ability to advance in a celebrity certification contest, the media’s role in this process, and how the timing of their conforming and nonconforming actions affect their influence. We use data on competitors during the first fifteen seasons of American Idol to explore how the extent to which competitors’ song and costume choices conform to their initial musical genre affects their ability to advance in the competition. We also explore how this relationship is affected by the media coverage they receive, and when the behaviors and coverage occur. We find that conforming to a certain genre increased the likelihood they advanced in the competition. However, this base relationship was influenced by both the individual’s media visibility and the timing of when it occurred. We found evidence that media visibility attenuates, and can even reverse, the effect of conformity, but only during the early phase of audiences’ exposure to the actor. Our study contributes to our understanding of celebrity’s antecedents, how conforming behavior can enhance celebrity, and the importance of temporal considerations when assessing non-conforming behavior.
Speaker Biography
Tim Pollock is the Haslam Chair in Business, Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship and Kinney Family Faculty Research Fellow. He is an international research fellow with the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and a research fellow with Haslam’s Neel Corporate Governance Center. Prior to joining Haslam, he held faculty positions at Penn State University, the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Broadly defined, Pollock’s research focuses on the social construction of value in uncertain and ambiguous circumstances, particularly the contexts of corporate governance, executive compensation and entrepreneurial market environments, with a focus on the initial public offerings (IPO) market. He considers how social and political factors such as reputation, celebrity, social capital, impression management activities, media accounts and the power of different actors influence firm performance, survival, alliance formation activities, and executive recruitment and compensation. He is also interested in how entrepreneurs’ experiences and organizational resource endowments influence their strategic decision making.
His research has won the 1997 INFORMS/Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition, the 2000 Lou Pondy Award from the Organization and Management Theory Division of the Academy of Management, the 2009 IDEA Thought Leader Award from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management for the best recent entrepreneurship research, the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation Best Published Paper Award for 2010 and the 2013 Bright Idea Award from Seton Hall University and the New Jersey Policy Research Organization. Tim also won Haslam’s 2020 Vallett Family Outstanding Researcher Award. Tim’s research has been selected as a finalist for the 2010 Academy of Management Journal Best Paper Award and the 2022 Academy of Management Review Managerial Practice Award. He has published articles in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Organization, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, Human Communication Research, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Organizational Dynamics, Academy of Management Executive, British Journal of Management and Corporate Reputation Review.
Pollock served as associate editor for the Academy of Management Journal from 2010-2013 and is a member, or has been a member, of the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Business Venturing, Organization Science and Strategic Organization. He received outstanding reviewer awards for his reviewing activities from the Academy of Management Journal in 2004 and 2010 and from the Journal of Business Venturing in 2010. He also co-edited “The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Reputation” and “Corporate Reputation: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management,” and authored the book “How to Use Storytelling in Your Academic Writing.” He served on the executive committee of the organization science division of INFORMS from 2006-2010, and served as representative-at-large on the executive committee of the organization and management theory division of the Academy of Management from 2006-2009.
At Haslam, Pollock teaches an undergraduate elective on managing startups and doctoral seminars on organization theory and academic writing. He has previously taught courses on strategy at the undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA and doctoral levels, and on power and influence in full-time and executive MBA programs. In 2002 he won the Mabel C. Chipman Award for Teaching Excellence from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, and in 2000 he was named one of the Top Five MBA professors by the Wisconsin MBA Graduate Students Association.