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Quality kills the mediastar? Career paths of intellectuals

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Abstract

Recent economic crises show that forecasts made by “experts” are frequently off the mark, fueling discussion about a potential decline in intellectuals’ reliability to offer opinions of value. While intellectuals were originally assumed to be trusted with sound analyses of developments in society, nowadays intellectuals (or those pretending to be) are often blamed for primarily striving for prominence, giving birth to the role model of the “public intellectual”. We adopt an economic perspective and take a market-oriented view on intellectual output. Our data suggests that the market for public intellectuals brings forth few omnipresent “media stars” that are able to largely cover the market demand for “expert knowledge”. On such markets with “winner-takes-all” characteristics, the best performers can command substantially higher (non)monetary incomes. Our research question is: What separates the media stars from the long-tail of media midgets? Thereby, we focus on an economic issue of general interest: Does it pay off to further engage in knowledge specialization, or is it better to capitalize on your current skillset and engage in increasing market presence? We focus on news media and TV presence of Germany’s most influential intellectuals and identify factors that create versus destroy the chances for “intellectual stardom”, applying both a static and a longitudinal perspective. Based on our results, we cautiously draw some conclusions concerning developments of the quality of public intellectual output offered.

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Notes

  1. Losses of pecuniary income may result, for example, from reducing presence at well-paid executive trainings in favor of receiving (small) allowances from TV stations (which further involves costs for preparing public performance and risks of losing scientific reputation; Gattone 2012; Park 2006).

  2. Cicero is a well-reputed German magazine, published monthly, that endeavors to provide high quality journalism on politics and culture. It most likely corresponds to The Atlantic or The New Yorker from the US.

  3. We deleted those intellectuals whose surnames were among the 100 most common surnames in Germany, as it turned out practically impossible to separate the “right” “Herta Müller” from all her namesakes when recording LexisNexis hits or web of science citations.

  4. We focused on “German Language News” in LexisNexis. LexisNexis has the advantage that only media mentions are listed, while scholarly articles are not. Therefore, hits in LexisNexis are a better proxy for non-scholarly prominence than Google hits (Landes and Posner 2000). Furthermore, LexisNexis can separate the two survey periods more precisely than Google (Danowski and Park 2009).

  5. An exemplary listing of intellectuals in the Cicero 2012 sample, showing both MEDIASTARs and MEDIAMIDGETs, can be found in the Appendix (Table 5).

  6. We considered the talk shows “Günther Jauch”, “Maybritt Illner”, “Menschen bei Maischberger”, “Hart aber Fair”, and “Anne Will”. Because first broadcast of some of these shows was after 2007, we only study the 2012’s ranking here.

  7. For comparison: in Germany there are 97,000 social scientists (including economists), 44,000 humanities scholars and 65,000 natural scientists (figures refer to employees that are subject to social insurance contributions according to data from the Federal Employment Agency).

  8. Information according to the German Federal Office of Statistics.

  9. While humanities scholars frequently ruminate on gender diversity, only 14 % of German philosophy professors are women (compared to, for example, 23 % in economics and law). Moreover, the percentage of women among scientific staff is significantly lower (p < 0.05) in philosophy (27 %) than in economics (30 %).

  10. To revisit the introduction: MEDIASTARs publish significantly more books than MEDIAMIDGETs (p < 0.05); we assume that outstanding media presence rubs off on book sales (in line with Posner 2001).

  11. Results may be insignificant due to different citation habits across scientific disciplines. However, we made an effort to establish any effect, if truly present, of REPUTATION, which however did not become significant.

  12. Though we were not able to evaluate growth of the LexisNexis database for the entire period from 2003 to 2012, figures on a sample basis suggest that the database grew slower in the category “German Language News” than the threshold to MEDIASTAR.

  13. See Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) for a detailed discussion.

  14. Detailed results available upon request from the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Strategic Management, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Leonardo-Campus 18, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Brinja Meiseberg, Thomas Ehrmann & Jochen Lengers

Authors
  1. Brinja Meiseberg
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  2. Thomas Ehrmann
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  3. Jochen Lengers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brinja Meiseberg.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Table 6 Excerpt from the intellectuals’ listing in the Cicero 2012 sample
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Table 7 Overview of the operationalization of variables
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Meiseberg, B., Ehrmann, T. & Lengers, J. Quality kills the mediastar? Career paths of intellectuals. J Bus Econ 86, 1043–1066 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11573-016-0810-z

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