Badm 3103 - Human Capital - Angelina Jolie

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Under her “dual-identity” of both a celebrity and a female leader of global beneficence, Jolie continuously raises funds and is involved with more than 29 global charitable organizations, such as the Afghanistan Relief Organization, Care to Learn and Women in the World Foundation, and has become a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She makes an increasingly larger effect on the community by taking on more important positions within these international organizations (Good Celebrity, 2015). As mentioned before, she has helped UNHRC have more power in specific areas. Her persistent effort successfully leaves the public a deep impression of a female leader on global philanthropy. Nowadays, when we mention Angelina Jolie, our first response is that she is not only a great actress in Hollywood, but also an honorable female leader dedicating to children’s education and women’s health issues around the world.

Angelina revealed that she had a double mastectomy to cut her risk of breast and ovarian cancer in 2013. According to the research made by Lebo, P. B., Quehenberger, F., Kamolz, L. P., & Lumenta, D. B., 2015, she helped Raising request for genetic testing facilities as well as enquiries about risk-reducing surgeries. What’s more, more than 20% people said that she affected their interest in the breast cancer (Lebo, P. B., Quehenberger, F., Kamolz, L. P., & Lumenta, D. B., 2015). Even though Angelina helped to raise the public awareness of the risk of breast cancer and the surgery, according to a study, it was discovered only less than 10% of people that were interviewed had a clear understanding of what the surgery is and the risks involved with having the BRCA gene mutation (Borzekowski, 2013). While she has raised awareness about this mutation, the public concern that was raised was unnecessary. From the external perspective, she has failed in some ways because of lack of professionals and misinformation spread.

On the side of internal perspective, Jolie’s personal decision to adopt refugees and displaced children also enhanced her charity work, broadening her sphere of influence in the ways of increasing media “discoverability” and creating an emotional connection with the public with her role as a mother. By 2003, Jolie had already adopted three children from third-world developing countries (ABC News, 2005). With such a large and diverse family, Jolie’s family has been regularly picked up by media outlets and has been covered multiple times over the years (ABC News, 2005). Jolie’s actions enlarge her impact by potentially encouraging more people to accept international adoption and build multicultural families which benefit many of the organizations that Jolie works closely with (ABC News, 2005). While many have praised her for her mother-without-border image, there is still a portion of the public that argue this is bad politics and diplomacy (Mostafanezhad, 2013). Jolie’s adoption of refugee children has effectively widened the public’s awareness on the extreme poverty and tough conditions in these countries and prompting them to contribute more to the community (ABC News, 2005). In conclusion, Jolie, as a female celebrity, has successfully brought her humanitarian propositions to public consciousness in adoption because she sentimentalized and depoliticized the global concerns on worldwide health and education through replacing the political nature with the personal effect, making her thought and philanthropy more acceptable to public.

Positives and Negatives of Jolie’s leadership

When Angelina started to let the public hear her voice, she was able to take advantage of her social status which helped promote her cause. As noted, celebrities tend to have a significant impact on the causes that they promote and advertise for (Lebo, 2015). Most Americans are inclined to construct profound respect for their idols, such as Jolie, and put strong confidence in the propositions they create and insistently engage in politics and worldwide beneficence. Based on their wide popularity and good reputation on individuals’ integrity that even exceed their achievement on public service, it is not surprising that Jolie and other similar celebrities, who enter the world of politics, are not only able to broadly propagate their opinion to each corner of the world but also have a much easier time to win mass support and gain a great success in a way that a large portion of conventional politics cannot reach, greatly motivating celebrities to further contribute to their public welfare establishments and social development.

However, this biased phenomenon also possesses essential drawbacks associated with celebrities’ personal leadership. To some extent, the reasons of boom and extensive support of celebrity politics are based on publics’ worship, behaving admirably toward these celebrities as their fans instead of being objectively discriminative citizens. The tendency of undiluted mass admiration is highly possible to turning into charismatic leadership, which is characterized by fans’ blind followership and idolization, completely distorting community’s original intention that current celebrity should properly guide publics and positively drive peaceful and harmonious development of the world. Moreover, due to being lack of timely and effective supervision to check their power of leadership, it is hard to guarantee that the celebrities, such as Jolie, will advocate noble causes forever. More importantly, it is also risky that a celebrity may not exhibit their behaviors consistent with their values and is rarely possible to correct their performance and propensity when they are running in the opposite direction. In the end, these celebrities and their programs for public good will end up on wrong side of the law and even raise social issues with significant possibility.

Reflection

Ultimately, this project helped the team learn not only about the leader, Angelina Jolie, and information that the public may have not learned about, but also how important it is to work together as a team in order to succeed. Due to being in groups for such a short period of time, our group stayed within the forming stage, making working together easy and without any conflict. The few difficulties were meeting up at specific times due to the different obligations that each member had during this time. Another difficulty was time management, especially for the group presentation because there was a time limit on the presentation and it was important for everyone to not only know their part, but to minimize their information so that it is effectively communicated and straight to the point. Finding information was easier than we thought, especially because there

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