Authenticity, Consumer Culture and Charismatic Authority <sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is divided into four parts which move the discussion from authenticity to consumerism to charismatic authority. The introduction discusses “what is authenticity,” and how social sciences can address the question. The article argues that authenticity claims can be classified in different registers, which in turn are part of overarching, socio-historical regimes. The rise of the culture of authenticity is the product of a change in such regimes, which have shifted from a “national-statist” to a new consumerist or “market” regime in the wake of the consumer revolution of the 1960s and the latest wave of economic globalisation. The third section turns to the issue of religious authority, starting with the diagnosis that consumer cultures are prone to a shift from rational-legal to charismatic types of authority, in reference to Max Weber’s typology. In response to the question as to why charismatic authorities arise in capitalist cultures, the article argues to their structural and coextensive nature. Finally, the last section revises Weber’s typologies with the help of Mauss’s Essay on the Gift and a contribution from sociologist Alain Caillé and develops some of their heuristic potential.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".