Guest Editors’ Introduction Manufactured Authenticity and Creative Voice in Cultural Industries

All work of culture industries, in some way or the other is preoccupied with claims to authenticity. This insight comes from the recent work of the sociologist Richard A. Peterson that has been inspired by Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) landmark volume on ‘invented tradition’. While much of Peterson’s earlier work focuses on the organization and production of popular music (for a review, see Peterson and Anand, 2004), in Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity he examines the way in which meaning is manufactured through various organizational processes in the culture industries. Starting with the observation that producers and consumers alike declare that authenticity is the hallmark of country music, Peterson (1997) skilfully shows that authenticity is not only socially constructed and agreed upon, but also used as a renewable resource for securing audiences, performance or exhibition outlets and relationships with key brokers by participants in the milieu. To create country music, it would seem, is also to participate in an ongoing discourse about what authentic country music is. In this special issue we examine the tension between manufactured authenticity and creative voice. Two distinct strategies may be used for claiming authenticity. One is to subject one’s creative voice to the perpetuation of tradition and to copy canonical works as exactly as possible such as symphonies performances of classical canons. A second route to authenticity, as Peterson states in this volume, is to be original and offer a distinctive approach such as Hank Williams did in reshaping country music in the 1950s. In our call for papers, we sought to understand the dynamic tension between authenticity seen as an individual’s creative voice – that is, their ability to resolve problems in unique and distinctive ways, often described as self-expression Journal of Management Studies 42:5 July 2005 0022-2380