Place-centred branding is increasingly perceived as a mode of product differentiation and a rural development strategy that emphasizes the singularities of production regions and methods to meet global market demands for quality and authenticity. We use a global value chain (GVC) analysis to compare the trajectories of Peruvian and Chilean pisco - a distilled spirit like brandy - finding that each country's efforts to claim its authenticity are grounded in different cultural-economic imperatives as well as vexed historical bilateral relations. Our analysis suggests that antagonism can compromise the authenticity premium. A GVC lens offers important analytic leverage for locating pisco producers' market strategies as nested within the larger GVC for alcoholic spirits, and we suggest this perspective would benefit from more robust considerations of local-global trade-offs therein.

The 21st century rise of culturally omnivorous tastes and classifications proffers a new dilemma for how markets create attachments and achieve trust for global consumers. Consumer entities must be both globally circulatable and offer a sense of localized authenticity without compromising either. Drawing from research on market trust and attachment, this article introduces the concept of mobile trust regimes to account for how sets of actors and repertoires attempt to address this tension. Through two case studies from gastronomic industries—food halls and natural wine—we investigate the devices of mobility used to facilitate the global circulation of the local. These include standardized aesthetic and affective templates communicated through physical décor, recurrent narratives, and social media curation. We argue that the concept of mobile trust regimes helps clarify two key issues in contemporary consumer culture: tensions between homogenization and heterogenization and how the symbolic value of omnivorous tastes becomes institutionalized and even banal.

This article examines perceptions of health risk when some individuals within a shared space are in heightened danger but anyone, including unaffected others, can be a vector of risk. Using the case of peanut allergy and drawing on qualitative content analysis of the public comments submitted in response to an unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to prohibit peanuts on airplanes, we analyze contention over the boundaries of responsibility for mitigating exposure to risk. We find three key dimensions of proximity to risk (material, social, and situational) characterizing ardent claims both for and against policy enactment. These proximity concerns underlay commenters’ sensemaking about fear, trust, rights, moral obligations, and liberty in the act of sharing space with others, while allowing them to stake positions on what we call “responsible sociality”—an ethic of discernible empathy for proximate others and of consideration for public benefit in social and communal settings. We conclude by discussing the insights our case affords several other areas of scholarship attentive to the intractable yet timely question of “for whom do we care?”

We examine how entrepreneurs might build a viable, values-driven niche. Extant templates for niche creation typically employed in moral markets depend on instrumentally rational logics that privilege economic ends such as profitability and efficiency. Entrepreneurs seeking to construct a nascent niche whose purpose and objectives include the amelioration of social ills, however, may find such templates inadequate. Using the emergence of the U.S. bean-to-bar chocolate niche, through which entrepreneurs attempt to address the social and environmental shortcomings of conventional chocolate production, we demonstrate that constructing an alternative model for niche creation is feasible. Most bean-to-bar entrepreneurs deliberately opted out of extant private regulation initiatives, developing instead alternative encompassing, values-driven sourcing and cooperative relationships, which we term collaborative governance. This is enacted throughout the niche by promoting shared values, best practices, and transparency and is supported by strategic meaning-making work to cultivate customers. Together, these three values-driven strategies form a novel template of niche creation based not on cognitive repositioning or exploiting exogenous change within existing structures and institutions, but on a reconceptualization of how markets might work to support the implementation of nonmarket goals. Based on our mixed-methods analysis, we find that, instead of hoping to accomplish nonmarket goals through established market structures, entrepreneurs built a niche centered on the achievement of specific social goals. Our findings suggest that to understand the strategies supporting emergent socially oriented markets, researchers must explore the intersections of values, entrepreneurial motivations, and operational complexities.

Research in organizational theory suggests that category-spanning organizations typically suffer penalties in evaluations, as consumers downgrade producers they see as violating authenticity norms. We challenge this view by linking two heretofore separate insights: first, that categorical boundaries erode as categories become taken for granted and, second, that consumers in a given category tend to become more heterogeneous as their numbers increase. We argue that newer consumers employ diverse evaluative schemata and rely less on established conceptions of authenticity than do veterans, leading to more generous evaluations as the ranks of consumers grow. Using the canonical case of craft beer, we test the effect of audience growth on consumer evaluations, particularly when producers violate categorical authenticity norms. Our analysis of an original dataset of more than 1.2 million unique ratings of craft beers from a popular online forum finds both that overall beer ratings increase and that penalties to authenticity norm violations attenuate as the number of new reviewers participating in the evaluative process rises. These results refine our understanding of shifting demands for categorical purity, conceptions of authenticity, and consumer evaluations as functions of market growth.

Sociology's focus on sociality and co-presence has long oriented studies of commensality-the social dimension of eating together. This literature commonly prioritizes face-to-face interactions and takes physical proximity for granted. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 largely halted in-person gatherings and altered everyday foodways. Consequently, many people turned to digital commensality, cooking and eating together through video-call technology such as Zoom and FaceTime. We explore the implications of these new foodways and ask: has digital commensality helped cultivate co-presence amidst pandemic-induced physical separation? If so, how? To address these questions, we analyze two forms of qualitative data collected by the first author: interviews with individuals who cooked and ate together at a distance since March 2020 and digital ethnography during different groups' online food events (e.g., happy hours, dinners, holiday gatherings, and birthday celebrations). Digital commensality helps foster a sense of co-presence and social connectedness at a distance. Specifically, participants use three temporally oriented strategies to create or maintain co-presence: they draw on pre-pandemic pasts and reinvent culinary traditions to meet new circumstances; they creatively adapt novel digital foodways through online dining; and they actively imagine post-pandemic futures where physically proximate commensality is again possible.

ing with men’s violence surrounding specific issues or specific kinds of violence. One chapter summarizes interview data on men’s understanding of guns and gun violence related to the larger issues explored in the book. A central argument that draws a thread throughout the book is the notion that men’s violence can be best understood as compensatory gendered enactments on the part of men who feel out of control in one way or another. Scholarship on guns and gun violence broadly supports this claim. And Sumerau’s analysis might be of use particularly to scholars studying prospective gun ownership, specifically examining the role that gender and gendered ideals play in shaping prospective gun owners’ attitudes toward guns. A separate chapter deals explicitly with men’s sexual violence. This chapter was among the shorter chapters in the book, went into less detail, and engaged less data than some of the other chapters. The chapter also dealt with the topic in what seemed to be an intentionally broad way. Sumerau begins summarizing her findings relative to men’s understandings of heterosexuality and how masculinity shapes their understandings of sexual relations and interactions with women. But later, she documents the ways this is connected with cisgender, heterosexual men’s gender violence against women more generally. And subsequently, she deals with data concerning violence against LGBT individuals. This was a vitally important chapter, but the breadth of issues covered made me wish there were more on each of these topics. The final substantive chapter in the book examines the issue of violence relative to social movements, specifically MeToo and BlackLivesMatter. In this chapter Sumerau was specifically interested in documenting the ways the men in her study reacted to these movements asking for change in the existing gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies and structures of society. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the men in her study shared patterned responses on these issues that Sumerau summarizes as framing these movements as threatening, both to them personally, but also to masculinity more generically. Violent Manhood is a book about how men are socialized into violence and about the role violence plays in their socialization into manhood. It is an important book, and I hope it is one that is widely read, taught, and engaged. While her sample is of young, collegiate, white, heterosexual, cisgender men, I imagine many of Sumerau’s discoveries and claims will be of use in studying different groups of men. It is also, despite the scope of the project, a brief book that could easily be used to engage undergraduate audiences because it is accessibly written and carefully argued.

emanating from ethnographic research on social media and semi-structured interviews, the author clearly and concisely reveals how the group readily communicate a range of emotions and, in doing so, dispels the myth of working-class young men as guarded or emotionally distant individuals. The book culminates in a short, yet engrossing conclusion, which authoritatively unites the key themes of the book. Roberts states that workingclass masculinity has been subjected to negative theorisations from the 1970s and 1980s that are no longer representative of contemporary masculinity. With that in mind, Roberts calls for a re-evaluation of social theory to accurately reflect how young working-class men have adapted to the stock of educational, employment, parental and emotional evolutions in recent decades to provide more inclusive forms of masculinity. While Roberts provides readers with a fascinating dataset and the application of relevant theories, the book stops short of providing its own detailed theorisation of contemporary working-class masculinity, instead highlighting the relevance of Inclusive Masculinity Theory. The theories presented within the book could have been strengthened by utilising the ‘epistemological fallacy’ of Furlong and Cartmel (1997) to better theorise the disjuncture between the educational and labour-market aspirations and the outcomes through Bourdieu’s theory of social class. Also, the strength of the book in terms of breadth occasionally becomes a slight weakness as more space is required to showcase the data and theory to its full. Overall, the book was a fascinating and deeply enjoyable read; it provides significant contributions to a number of areas within academia and sets a high bar for future writings on working-class masculinity.

The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted by UNESCO to enshrine and preserve exemplars of the intangible heritage of humanity – practices, traditions, and cultural expressions – on a global register. In our view, this convention highlights a tension between the valorization of cultural diversity on one hand and the universal relevance and value of masterpieces of intangible heritage to all humankind on the other. We introduce the term rationalized authenticity to refer to processes by which this tension is mitigated through simultaneous 1) fostering of a diversity of ways that heritage may be expressed or understood and 2) translation into rationalized forms that demonstrate the transnational relevance of cultural heritage. Based on a comparative analysis of three diverse examples of heritage on UNESCO’s list from outside the core of the cultural world system – tango from Argentina and Uruguay, acupuncture and moxibustion from China, and the Kodály concept from Hungary – we show how rationalized authenticity encourages the adoption of alternative definitions of cultural heritage and also facilitates the transnational spread and transformation of select masterpieces of intangible heritage.

We examine why entrepreneurs in the emerging bean-to-bar chocolate market segment fail to adopt socially-oriented certification schemes such as Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and USDA Organic. Despite the widespread acceptance in other domains of third-party certification schemes, which signal firms’ non-market social and environmental goals, our quantitative data show that their use is negligible among even explicitly socially-oriented bean-to-bar chocolate makers. We find that three beliefs underlie the rejection of certification: the cost of label adoption is too high relative to its efficacy; certifiers’ enactment of professed values is fundamentally flawed; and many labeling schemes have become commercialized and watered-down. Our qualitative data demonstrate that the very entrepreneurs who reject certification are working to shape their market by engaging in the disruption of the global cacao supply chain, exerting informal influence within their market segment, and building connections directly with customers. Taken together, these results suggest limit conditions to certification schemes with implications for the study of non-governmental market regulation and socially-conscious consumer markets.

This chapter shifts attention to the more general challenges and paradoxes of developing moral understandings around a contested food such as foie gras by asking, up front and center, how we can know if a practice is cruel and, for individuals who wish to be moral eaters, which side we must take. It offers analyses of the moral discourses, empirical claims, perceptions, and political strategies that both sides of the foie gras debate have employed. In doing so, the chapter unpacks the social antagonisms that anchor the contemporary gastropolitics of foie gras in the United States, revealing that the relational contexts that make symbolic boundaries between “us” and “them”—and the social antagonisms that they spur—continue to matter tremendously within the contemporary politics of food.

This chapter uses an ethnographic lens to explore how gastronationalist sentiments crisscross the social worlds, landscapes, and local economies of the French regions that celebrate foie gras production. It underscores the affective relationships that both producers and consumers have toward this food, and also analyzes tensions over foie gras's moral disapprobation as a modern and contested industry. The chapter asks how micro-level practices of production and consumption articulate with the more macro-level politics of identity, especially in places where foie gras “traditions” are classified as heritage; if the heritage being celebrated is a dissonant one; and how the people involved in the production of foie gras experience the dissonance of nostalgic romanticism and the industry's empirical realities.

The world of restaurantsas organizations as well as indicators of social status and cultural tasteshas, 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.