In recent times, there has been a substantial push by people to escape the metropolis for lifestyles in small coastal, country, or mountainside locales. This book explores the narratives emerging from amenity-left migration using methods developed within the 'strong' cultural sociology.

Seeking Authenticity provides reflection, insight, and humor, packaged into a series of essays and short stories. The essays integrate philosophy from the past and produce a spark for contemplation over timeless fundamental values. This writing aims to interrogate and explore an eminent buzzword of our era: Authenticity.Do you spend your time well? Are you honest? Grateful? Resilient? Responsible? Do you have purpose? How do these questions and ideas lead to authenticity in your own life? Explorations into these values are expressed in parallel with the story of a near year-long surfing and hiking adventure from British Columbia, Canada to Queensland, Australia, with stops down the West Coast of the United States and Hawaii. These stories encompass sometimes poetic, sometimes sarcastic, yet always honest, expression.

Volume 2 of the Research in Careers series focuses on the search for authenticity in one’s career. Although there has been growing interest in the topic within the popular press, relatively little academic research has been completed on authenticity and careers. Researchers are still refining the concept of authenticity and are just beginning to investigate how it influences the enactment of careers in today’s turbulent career landscape. This volume offers the first organized effort on the topic. This volume contains seven chapters which examine the search for authenticity derived from the Kaleidoscope Career Model (Mainiero & Sullivan, 2006). Chapters 1 and 2 present a review of the literature and an in-depth analysis of the construct of authenticity. Chapter 1 offers a new lens to view career authenticity based on two dimensions of self-awareness and adaptability. Chapter 2 uses two case studies to define how individuals are authentic in their career. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the authenticity of individuals in different career stages, with Chapter 3 examining recent college graduates and Chapter 4 examining mid to late stage careerists. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 focus on the interplay between social interactions and career authenticity. Chapter 5 offers a process model that traces how, through negotiation, a person’s identities shape and are shaped by relationships with others, leading to the enactment of an authentic career. Chapter 6 explores how individuals remain authentic in their career while negotiating the conflicting expectations of multiple interest groups. Chapter 7 examines the complex relationships among career authenticity, political behaviors, and strain.

As a concept that increasingly gains importance in contemporary cultural discourse, authenticity emerges as a site of tearing tensions between the fictional and the real, original and fake, margin and centre, the same and the other. The essays collected in this volume explore this paradoxical nature of authenticity in the context of various media. They give ample proof of the fact that authenticity, which depends on giving the impression of being inherent or natural, found not created, frequently turns out to be the result of a careful aesthetic construction that depends on the use of identifiable techniques with the aim of achieving certain effects for certain reasons.

Contrived. Disingenuous. Phony. Inauthentic. Do your customers use any of these words to describe what you sell—or how you sell it? If so, welcome to the club. Inundated by fakes and sophisticated counterfeits, people increasingly see the world in terms of real or fake. They would rather buy something real from someone genuine rather than something fake from some phony. When deciding to buy, consumers judge an offering's (and a company's) authenticity as much as—if not more than—price, quality, and availability. In Authenticity, James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II argue that to trounce rivals companies must grasp, manage, and excel at rendering authenticity. Through examples from a wide array of industries as well as government, nonprofit, education, and religious sectors, the authors show how to manage customers' perception of authenticity by: recognizing how businesses "fake it;" appealing to the five different genres of authenticity; charting how to be "true to self" and what you say you are; and crafting and implementing business strategies for rendering authenticity. The first to explore what authenticity really means for businesses and how companies can approach it both thoughtfully and thoroughly, this book is a must-read for any organization seeking to fulfill consumers' intensifying demand for the real deal.

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

One of Canada's hippest, smartest cultural critics takes on the West's defining value. We live in a world increasingly dominated by the fake, the prepackaged, the artificial: fast food, scripted reality TV shows, Facebook "friends," and fraudulent memoirs. But people everywhere are demanding the exact opposite, heralding "authenticity" as the cure for isolated individualism and shallow consumerism. Restaurants promote the authenticity of their cuisine, while condo developers promote authentic loft living and book reviewers regularly praise the authenticity of a new writer's voice. International bestselling author Andrew Potter brilliantly unpacks our modern obsession with authenticity. In this perceptive and thought-provoking blend of pop culture, history, and philosophy, he finds that far from serving as a refuge from modern living, the search for authenticity often creates the very problems it's meant to solve.