Biography
Kevin is currently an Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Amsterdam Business School.
His research explores how the world is moving away from tangible signals of quality and relying more on the symbolic. He studies how social evaluation mechanisms of focal actors—such as their reputation, stigma, or celebrity impact others such as competitors, new categories, the media, and stakeholders. He studies these topics in a variety of contexts such as newspapers, the tobacco industry, Mixed Martial Arts, and the charity sector.
Kevin teaches courses on ethics and entrepreneurship at the undergraduate and masters levels.
Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, Kevin obtained his PhD from Cass Business School (now Bayes) and was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. During his studies, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Georgia in 2016 and 2017. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a facilitator for start-up digital entrepreneurs and as a freelance journalist in Ireland.
My Research
My developing research program aims at addressing how the broader cultural and social structure affect entrepreneurial and strategic processes with particular interest in the social evaluation mechanisms celebrity and reputation.
Below are the three papers from my doctoral work
Celebrity Entrepreneurs
In this paper, we examine how the popular press constructed four entrepreneurs – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg – as societal-level celebrities. We compare their press coverage with the coverage of four highly successful, but less popular entrepreneurs in equivalent industries at about the same time. Our analysis begins to illuminate the narrative practices through which the press constructs entrepreneurs as celebrities, by developing them as characters in broader narratives of changes in industry and society, and gradually infusing their names with a significance that transcends their entrepreneurial accomplishments, and constitutes them as categorical prototypes and cultural symbols.
Examining the celebrity spillover effect to competitiors
Social approval assets can generate a variety of benefits for a focal actor, yet past research is unclear how these benefits can spill over to rivals in highly competitive environments. In this paper, we theorize that a positive spillover effect from a focal celebrity actor to rivals occurs as a by-product of the narrative construction process in the media, and that this spillover is longer lasting than past research has theorized. We test our hypotheses using a novel data set from professional mixed martial arts (MMA) between 2009 and 2017. Our findings generally support our theoretical arguments, providing evidence about how celebrity spills over to provide financial and social benefits to non-celebrity rivals.
Exploring the development and effects of organizational hubris
In this paper we conceptualize the development and consequences of organizational hubris, which we define as an attitude marked by an extreme and inflated sense of pride, certainty, and confidence in the organization that becomes a characteristic of a bulk of organizational members. We propose that it develops in organizational members through positive external attributions and eventually influences the development of a hubristic culture which makes it more sustaining than individual level hubris. Additionally, we argue that once developed, organizational hubris leads to two defining outcomes: latitude and insularity, which can have both positive and negative outcomes for firms.
Contact
Kevin Curran
Centre for Corporate Reputation
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford