"In their book, CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life, Peter Bloom and Carl Rhodes consider one troubling outcome of the permeation of neoliberalism in society: the social phenomenon that regards CEOs as synonymous with the pinnacle of success. The illustrative example that they postulate throughout the book is, understand-ably so, Trump — though they also offer references to other billionaire CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos. Synthesizing many of the discourses in which they engage, Bloom and Rhodes ask provocatively: How has neoliberalism turned our society into one that unapologetically adulates the persona of the CEO? [...] CEO Society is certainly an appealing and a thought-provoking read. The book is posited at the interface of two growing bodies of critical scholarship in the field of organization and management studies: (i) the literature that demonstrates how the ubiquitous logic of neoliberal capitalism subsumes any substantive idea of social responsibility [...]; and (ii) the critiques of economic inequality and how it constitutes social relating [...]. However, Bloom and Rhodes do not limit their analytical scope to reciting extant arguments. They move the debate forward by illuminating how the precepts of neoliberal capitalism have not only engendered the normalization of economic inequality, but symptomatically established the conditions for idolization of the CEO. Their position is compelling. Indeed, at the very minimum, it offers one possible explanation for what occurred on 8 November 2016."

"Peter Bloom and Carl Rhodes focus on famous CEOs, who have been both founders and major shareholders in the corporations with which they have been identified, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs,Tesla’s Elon Musk and Virgin’s Richard Branson, The Body Shop’s Anita Roddick and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett. Their approach is quite nuanced as they elaborate that although such CEOs have been described at the same time as visionaries and pragmatists, as inventive entrepreneurs and monopolistic proprietors, as wealth producers and tax evaders, and as generous benefactors and get-rich-quick artists, these business leaders have promoted through their public relations machines that they have had to be economically aggressive in order to be creatively productive. [...] The message to the public has been to compete with one another, without pangs of conscience, and to use the methods of corporate executives, ‘ruthlessly playing the game to win’, as if this will enable them to rise above the prosaic materialism of everyday life and achieve‘their hopes and dreams’. Furthermore, for Bloom and Rhodes, the ideological and normative ascendancy of the executive elite in the last 30 years or so has been associated with the emergence of neoliberal doctrines. This has culminated with the notion that a career in a corporate boardroom has prepared politicians such as the United States’ Donald Trump, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull to make the tough choices and unilateral decisions to manage crises and to impose market solutions on sluggish bureaucracies and reluctant electorates. These are said to be essential for nations in order for them to be fiscally responsible, technologically agile, and energetically efficient in an unsettled global economy [...] Inasmuch as Bloom and Rhodes exaggerate the mastery of CEOs over the corporations they head, they underestimate the extent that company boards have increased their interaction with institutional shareholders to obtain investor feedback on CEO performance, in relation to share prices or returns on equity or asset values, when CEO remuneration has invariably included bonuses and stock options. [...] In recent years, a number of high-flying CEOs have been brought down to earth by under-performance. [...] As far as we can tell, at least in Australia, these efforts to re-invent and re-energise, what Bloom and Rhodes assert to be the cultural hegemony of the CEO society, do not appear to have met with a lot of success."