Ted Turner’s Corporate Cross-Dressing and the Shifting Images of American Business Leadership

Eric Guthey

Enterprise & Society, 2001, vol. 2, issue 1, 111-142

Abstract: The media celebration of media owner Ted Turner's career and personal biography reflects important shifts in the image of American corporate leadership over the past thirty years.Even aspects of Turner’s life we would normally consider private, such as his sex life and his marriage to Jane Fonda, have taken on this very public function.As a result Turner has served as a transitional figure between two competing visions of corporate identity and responsibility: paternalist managerialism and the “real entity” theory of the firm on the one hand, and on the other, antimanagerial market adventurism and the new economic theory of the firm as a nexus of contracts.The story of how Turner has come to serve this gender-charged iconic function helps clarify how the balance of representational power continues to shift back and forth between these two visions during a period of considerable upheaval in the social, legal, and symbolic construction of the American corporation.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:2:y:2001:i:01:p:111-142_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Enterprise & Society from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().