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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.

The author explores the variety of ways in which sports brands have risen to prominence and how the development of particular activities and relationships, with athletes, fans, media and regulators, are designed to present them as authentic. This status is crucial given the cultural and emotional significance of sport alongside its ability to underpin forms of collective belonging. A range of examples, including Red Bull, Nike, Patagonia, Olympic skateboarding and Manchester United Football Club, are used to highlight these processes as well as the complexity of the contemporary social, cultural and political landscapes that such brands now operate in.

This chapter builds upon the analysis of the last chapter, as fans have to deal with the issues that arise from their team’s financial superiority. Here, we question what happens when that financial superiority is accompanied by significant moral and ethical issues. Recent involvement of state actors in the ownership of English football has been evidencable and occasionally appears clear. Various reflexes and cognitive distancing occur from fandoms when football club ownership engages in practices that, according to the normative models that fans ascribe to their clubs, are mutually exclusive with the values of the fanbase and the club’s history. A common form of fan reflex often takes the form of distancing the players on the pitch from the club’s institutional structures, effectively teasing out the matchday experience from the structures that benefit from the raw emotion it generates. Another reflex is questioning why the fan should surrender their club when a morally, ethically problematic ownership model has acquired it. Here we have perhaps the greatest challenge to the normative model and, rather than negotiating that tension, as often as not the response is to try and ignore it.