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The author addresses the world of Instagram influencers but offers a very different perspective by focusing on the gendering of claims to authenticity on social media. The author observes how high-profile male and female Czech influencers are required to navigate an authenticity bind (Duffy & Hund, 2019) through two key strategies: the opinion-leader strategy and the community-building strategy. Men rely predominantly on the opinion-leader strategy while women position themselves as community builders. By focusing on the communicative strategies of the influencers, the author offers an analysis of authenticity as performative process, rather than a static concept, that gets negotiated in everyday interactions between influencers and their followers.

In her introductory chapter, the author has two main objectives. First to offer an overview of changing approaches towards researching authenticity in digital spaces, which have, alternatively, emphasised issues of congruence, authorship, verification and vulnerability. Second, to provide an intensely personal reflection on the concept that ultimately asks us, as researchers, to question what we do when we try to perceive and interrogate the notion of ‘authenticity’.

This chapter provides an overview of research on authenticity in tourism studies focusing on the development of the field and noting four main strands: objective, constructive, postmodern, and experiential. Underlying the various approaches to authenticity are distinct authentication processes with more recent work arguing for a move away from an authentic/inauthentic dichotomy toward an emphasis on the social construction of authenticity, and associated questions of power, production and performativity.

Discussion around authenticity has grown in marketing and consumption discourse in the last two decades. Consumers are viewed as seeking authenticity, and brands have responded to this. This chapter identifies three foundational categories of authenticity: personal, expressive and material. The main elements of each category are outlined. Key tensions are identified between authenticity as experienced by consumers and authenticity as leveraged for instrumental purposes by the marketplace.

This chapter starts by defining authenticity and then addressing the role that the concept has played in political communication research. It then examines authenticity as an issue in conventional politics before discussing more recent engagements with the concept, notably with regard to campaigns, populism and voting preferences.

This chapter is interested in exploring whether philosophical understandings of authenticity are applicable to Western conceptualisation of heritage, from physical sites (tangible) to social practices (intangible). In viewing heritage as a dynamic process, the author argues that the concept of genius loci (or spirit of place) is the most logical theoretical framework to accommodate these shifting understandings of authenticity and heritage. Moreover, by moving beyond anthropomorphised and material-centred themes and focussing instead on participation, locus and action, building conservation can explore the dynamics between materials and meanings in order to work towards a more performative interpretation of historic building authenticity

The authors discuss the case of Whang-od, a renowned and revered tattooist in the Philippines, whose skill with batok (traditional tattoos) has generated worldwide attention. While batok was originally designed for a warrior class to signify their power and elite status, it has been transformed into a commodity for national and global audiences and promoted via social media. Utilizing participation observation of, and interviews with, visitors to the village where Whang-od lives, the authors show how this form of “ethnic tourism” is built around the status of batok as an authentic practice that influences both the ways that locals present, and tourists, try to consume, the culture of the village.

The author focusses on corporate history from a media aesthetic perspective using the case of the Danish brewer Carlsberg. Through a careful examination of the company’s website that draws on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s work on modality, the author examines how images and symbols of the past and present are intertwined so as to ‘curate’ history and present the brand as both deeply rooted and authentic.