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This paper seeks to identify the impact of celebrity status in post-acquisition international performance. We adopt a relational-sociology perspective to consider the strength of socioemotional relationships existing among celebrities, their newly-acquired unrelated company acquisitions and their international audiences. Based on the empirical analysis of the post-acquisition export performance of 341 French wineries acquired by foreign investors (including business and showbusiness celebrities) during the 2004-2020 period, we examine whether these celebrity-acquired companies deliver superior post-acquisition international performance and what enables or inhibits this superior performance. This paper emphasizes the relational determinants of post-acquisition performance, shows the intangible assets facilitating entries into distant foreign markets and overcoming liability of foreignness that celebrity ownership constitutes for acquired companies, and provides additional insights into the family business literature's core notion of socioemotional wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this detailed field study we explore how managers react to changes resulting from globalization. In observing and analyzing these managers in their daily routines, the situations they face, the discourse they engage in and the actions they display, we reveal the existence of an anomic mindset. Its presence leads them to react against rather than adapt to the globalization that surrounds them and the responses it demands. Our interpretive ethnography of these managers in situ casts particular light on a previously underexplored phenomenon whereby the more exposed to globalization, the more the observed managers appear to take an antagonistic stand toward it and entrench themselves in their previous worldviews, perceptions and opinions. The insights we assemble from our fieldwork are designed to serve as additional inputs to the evolving debate on global leadership in international business and its academic, managerial and methodological implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]