In Inventing Authenticity, Carrie Helms Tippen examines the rhetorical power of storytelling in cookbooks to fortify notions of southernness. Tippen brings to the table her ongoing hunt for recipe cards and evaluates a wealth of cookbooks with titles like Y’all Come Over and Bless Your Heart and famous cookbooks such as Sean Brock’s Heritage and Edward Lee’s Smoke and Pickles. She examines her own southern history, grounding it all in a thorough understanding of the relevant literature. The result is a deft and entertaining dive into the territory of southern cuisine—“black-eyed peas and cornbread,fried chicken and fried okra, pound cake and peach cobbler,”—and a look at and beyond southern food tropes that reveals much about tradition, identity, and the yearning for authenticity. Tippen discusses the act of cooking as a way to perform—and therefore reinforce—the identity associated with a recipe, and the complexities inherent in attempts to portray the foodways of a region marked by a sometimes distasteful history. Inventing Authenticity meets this challenge head-on, delving into problems of cultural appropriation and representations of race, thorny questions about authorship, and more. The commonplace but deceptively complex southern cookbook can sustain our sense of where we come from and who we are—or who we think we are.

‘Authenticity’ and authentication is at the heart of museums’ concerns in displays, objects, and interaction with visitors. These notions have formed a central element in early thought on culture and collecting. Nineteenth century-explorers, commissioned museum collectors and pioneering ethnographers attempted to lay bare the essences of cultures through collecting and studying objects from distant communities. Comparably, historical archaeology departed from the idea that cultures were discrete bounded entities, subject to divergence but precisely therefore also to be traced back and linked to, a more complete original form in de (even) deeper past. Much of what we work with today in ethnographic museum collections testifies to that conviction. Post-structural thinking brought about a far-reaching deconstruction of the authentic. It came to be recognized that both far-away communities and the deep past can only be discussed when seen as desires, constructions and inventions. Notwithstanding this undressing of the ways in which people portray their cultural surroundings and past, claims of authenticity and quests for authentication remain omnipresent. This book explores the authentic in contemporary ethnographic museums, as it persists in dialogues with stakeholders, and how museums portray themselves. How do we interact with questions of authenticity and authentication when we curate, study artefacts, collect, repatriate, and make (re)presentations? The contributing authors illustrate the divergent nature in which the authentic is brought into play, deconstructed and operationalized. Authenticity, the book argues, is an expression of a desire that is equally troubled as it is resilient.

Argues that there is no authentic self, that reality is people continually remaking themselves to look like the people they want to be, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentrification began as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates searching for "authenticity" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern architecture, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) fought for a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly technocratic society. Osman examines the emergence of a "slow-growth" progressive coalition as brownstoners joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure.

In Creating Country Music, Richard Peterson traces the development of country music and its institutionalization from Fiddlin' John Carson's pioneering recordings in Atlanta in 1923 to the posthumous success of Hank Williams. Peterson captures the free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit of the era, detailing the activities of the key promoters who sculpted the emerging country music scene. More than just a history of the music and its performers, this book is the first to explore what it means to be authentic within popular culture. "[Peterson] restores to the music a sense of fun and diversity and possibility that more naive fans (and performers) miss. Like Buck Owens, Peterson knows there is no greater adventure or challenge than to 'act naturally.'"—Ken Emerson, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A triumphal history and theory of the country music industry between 1920 and 1953."—Robert Crowley, International Journal of Comparative Sociology "One of the most important books ever written about a popular music form."—Timothy White, Billboard Magazine

Thought provoking questions designed to stimulate authentic conversation and meaningful self-reflection.

The insular Pacific is a region saturated with great cultural diversity and poignant memories of colonial and Christian intrusion. Considering authenticity and authorship in the area, this book looks at how these ideas have manifested themselves in Pacific peoples and cultures. Through six rich complementary case studies, a theoretical introduction, and a critical afterword, this volume explores authenticity and authorship as “traveling concepts.” The book reveals diverse and surprising outcomes which shed light on how Pacific identity has changed from the past to the present.

A comprehensive study of the power of differentiation as a key component of any business model, this book includes a step-by-step process to help leaders discover, achieve, express, and sustain their own authentic position. For the first time in recent history, trust is as important to corporate reputation as quality of products and services, according to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer. Still, nearly 70 percent of people say that organizations will revert to "business as usual" once the economy recovers. Moreover, U.S. job satisfaction is at a 22-year-low, according to a 2010 Conference Board report, and by most every measure, the consumer outlook is bleak. The good news? Organizational authenticity is attainable, declares Morin in Better Make it Real. However, it isn't the goal, she says, but the result of providing, consistently and continuously, an authentic "total experience" to your stakeholders—workers, customers, vendors, and other business partners. In other words, Morin affirms, authenticity isn't a destination—it's an ongoing journey that will serve to differentiate any organization in its marketplace, which too often is littered with fakes. Morin's recommended roadmap is Kahler Slater's Total Experience Design—a specific, step-by-step process for designing stakeholder experiences that are "authentic, intentional, and wholly integrated." In Better Make It Real, Morin offers a comprehensive guide to implementing Total Experience Design inside organizations of all types and sizes. She also shares behind-the-scenes stories from Kahler Slater projects and clients, including Google, Robert Redford's Sundance Cinemas, Monster.com, and numerous entrepreneurial enterprises. Bottom line: Organizational authenticity is sorely lacking—and urgently needed. On the heels of the Great Recession, Morin rolls out a roadmap to "real"—helping executives and entrepreneurs find their way forward.

Our identity is often bound up what we do at work. The work we do goes some way to describing who we are, what we stand for and it reveals, in one dimension at least, a tangible and valued contribution that we make to the world. Authenticity in organizations matters more than ever. In today's complex and global economy it's more important than ever that we empower employees to bring their authentic selves to work. Doing so leads to increased innovation, productivity, more thoughtful risk-taking, a sense of responsibility and enhanced adaptiveness to change. Creating Authentic Organizations goes beyond the remit of authentic leadership and shows how the concept of authenticity can and should be applied to your organization. It offers a new management framework based on the freedom to operate, meaningful dialogue and a deep search for personal meaning at work; autonomy and the opportunity to make an impact is a key driver of productivity. With simple and powerful models and strategies to bring about workplace authenticity, this bold and cutting-edge approach will show you how to ensure more authentic dialogue and encourage open and meaningful discussion around threats and challenges. Creating Authentic Organizations gives you the tools to bridge the gap between the corporate persona and the authentic self, leading to greater employee engagement, well-being and organizational resilience. Online supporting resources include an authenticity and freedoms diagnostic tool and guidance notes.

Authenticity is taken-for-granted as an absolute value in contemporary life. In Culture and Authenticity, Charles Lindholm calls upon anthropological case studies from different cultures, historical material, and comparative philosophy, to explore how notions of authenticity develop, what forms it takes, and how it changes over time. Examines the idea of authenticity and its role in modern culture Explores society’s preoccupation with authenticity and the search for ‘real’ experiences Looks at how the concept of authenticity intersects with questions about religion, ethnicity, and race Investigates authenticity in the context of fields such as dance, cuisine, travel, and the modern marketplace