The death of Steve Jobs: how the media design fortune from misfortune

Abstract

This paper analyses the design of organisational storytelling by the media. Media play essential roles in the process of widespread organisation stories, as well as in the creation and re-creation of them. We specifically propose to identify the elements in media narratives that make storytelling appealing to the public and facilitate the process of the sensemaking of an organisation and its leader. For this purpose, we study the case of media discourse during the episode of the death of Steve Jobs, the leader of one of the most economically valuable companies in the world – Apple. We reach the conclusion that media narrative in this episode seemed pasteurised to preserve a discourse of rational coherence. As ‘germs’ in discourse are eliminated, ambiguous and accidental aspects are neglected, or they gain a deterministic meaning in the plot.