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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.

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.

How does a hobby evolve into a business? This paper examines how entrepreneurs transition from freelance ventures—creating organizations “on the side” to test the entrepreneurial waters while maint...

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.

We examine the unique challenges of entrepreneurs and organizations in nascent craft markets in which normative expectations are negotiated, navigated, and sometimes defied. In this collection of p...

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 anti-consumerist 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?

Drawing on participant observation of a high-end restaurant, I examine how work group culture and discourse are formulated through the organization of space and time. To date, scholars have typically divided the study of space and time into two separate fields of inquiry, but the two constructs are intimately integrated. I use a natural ethnographic experiment, observing two different kitchen regimes while keeping the space and occupational pressures constant, to illustrate that groups can arrange time and space according to local cultures. My findings reveal that internally created pressures (i.e., chefs creating constraints via their managerial style) combined with external demands influence both how restaurant workers use the kitchen space during particular moments and what forms of speech they deem acceptable in those spaces and times. My study demonstrates the social organization of time and space, particularly in the context of a restaurant kitchen.

In this article we extend the papers by Steven Van den Berghe, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Virginie Amilien to highlight the most salient changes and evolution of the restaurant industry, emphasizing the first decade of the twenty-first century. Reflecting some of the themes raised by the preceding articles we ask: what are the identities of the contemporary restaurant and how are they expressed? Focusing on the American context we trace four major developments: the new charismatic celebrity chef, food enthusiasts and the expansion of a unique food culture, “moral” eating and related food politics and the changing structures of kitchen life.

This paper investigates the types of resources actors draw from when improvising in the face of unfamiliar settings. Using the empirical context of underground restaurants – episodic dining establishments that occur in a variety of unexpected locations and must regularly improvise to problem solve emergent crises – I draw from ethnographic observations and interviews with organizers to demonstrate that three interlinked resources support improvisation: affective, material, and cognitive. Whereas previous work has focused substantially on the cognitive resources of individual improvisers, the findings presented here contribute to scholarship by highlighting other potentially valuable resources, notably material and affective resources, that actors draw from to improvise. In addition to a stockpile of knowledge and intuition, this paper shows that improvisation also relies on physical means – the raw materials to enable spontaneous action – and the emotional desire, motivations, and understanding to do so. ...

In the past decade there has been growing scholarly interest in temporary and episodic organizational forms as opposed to established organizations characterized by stable rules and hierarchies. Re...

The emergence of gourmet food trucks in the last five years represents a surprising market transformation. The trucks succeed by crossing boundaries pertaining to both status and genre, which usual...

Authenticity is an intangible asset for many organizations. Specialist organizations that produce cultural goods, however, are especially susceptible to claims of authenticity in the marketplace. W...