With perceptions of authenticity offering contemporary organizations a key competitive advantage in the marketplace, a growing body of research has investigated “authenticity work”: the diverse ways in which organizational actors fabricate authenticity claims for their audience members. However, claiming authenticity is a challenging and problematic task, because organizations must weigh how much authenticity they can safely project without incurring backfire. This is further complicated by consumers’ fickle and contradictory attitudes regarding authenticity work. This study examines this challenge by asking how organizations can claim authenticity in a way that aligns with their audiences’ variable understandings and expectations. Drawing on a qualitative study of underground restaurants—alternative social dining establishments, also known as “pop-ups” or “supper clubs”—I show that organizers claim authenticity through the coperformance of three illusions: community, transparency, and gift-giving. Instead of rejecting these illusions, most diners and underground organizers knowingly embrace them as authentic. This paper suggests that authenticity work, far from sending a one-way signal that audience members passively accept or reject, involves a continual process that generates the active co-construction of illusions by organizers and their audiences.
The world of restaurants-as organizations as well as indicators of social status and cultural tastes-has, thus far in the 21st century, become especially dynamic in the United States and elsewhere.Social scientists have begun to engage seriously with issues concerning germane shifts in the culinary profession and the emergence of new forms of cooking and dining out. For sociologists interested in consumption, organizations, and creative work, this offers a number of timely topics, such as restaurants' financing strategies and ownership models, the institutionalization of new culinary trends, the expanding roles of chefs, and the labor practices of upmarket restaurants. This article synthesizes recent scholarship on the modern culinary field in the United States, specifically examining three interrelated themes: tensions between concurrent demands for creativity and financial returns, new ways of catering to consumer desires for authenticity, and issues of inequality in professional kitchens. It concludes by discussing several issues facing the future of dining out, as forecast by field leaders themselves, which offer further opportunities for burgeoning sociological and organizational inquiry.
Authenticity is a valuable attribution for organizations, but one that raises a challenge of audience acceptance for innovative entrepreneurs. In particular, organizations that depart from an established type risk being judged as inauthentic. However, entrepreneurs may be able to overcome this challenge by basing their authenticity on notions of craft—such as skilled hands-on techniques, sophisticated ingredients, and small-scale artistry rather than mass industrial manufacturing—that better support innovation. We propose that communities vary in the extent to which they embrace craft production as an evolved understanding of authenticity that is less concerned with conformity to type. This local context, in turn, conditions the likelihood of entrepreneurs creating innovative ventures that rely on perceptions of craft authenticity. We develop this argument through a mixed-methods study of the spatially uneven emergence of gourmet food trucks across the United States. Our findings contribute to research on authenticity and the geography of entrepreneurship and innovation.
We investigate how material poverty functions as a cultural space, specifically addressing when it becomes a strategy, that is, when an individual with cultural and social capital adopts a life of low income in order to form other social identities. We examine two groups that use low income to further other goals but differ in their temporal lens: (1) ''transitional bourgeoisie,'' graduate students and artists who frame their economic deprivation as a temporary means to prospective identities, such as a professorship or success in art; (2) ''embedded activists,'' committed adults rooted in political and religious organizations who see low income as a permanent strategy to bolster their anticonsumerist desires. Relying on 37 in-depth interviews with informants we ask, how do people in strategic poverty construct satisfying lives? What cultural tools and skill-sets do informants draw upon to negotiate their economic circumstances and middle-class backgrounds?
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