The concept of authenticity lies, often unrecognized, at the heart of a good deal of cultural research and is a crucial ingredient of sociality. It is also a concept apparently straightforwardly undermined by simplistic barbs, centred on its supposed limited applicability to varieties of subculture research. Perhaps more tellingly, its’ sociological utility and relevance is largely seen to have collapsed in the wake of the cultural and postmodern turn; as in the perennial rhetorical seminar question, ‘what is authentic nowadays, anyway’? Such a query of course begs many more questions that it satisfactorily answers and suggests the need for a serious theoretical and empirical treatment of the topic. In their introductory chapter Vannini and Williams make it clear that their approach to this collection seeks to advance a social constructionist theory of authenticity. For them, and their collaborating authors, authenticity is something tacitly organized, performed and ultimately agreed upon by members within particular cultural settings and scenes. All this is not exactly new for cultural sociologists, but it is in the empirical and conceptual details where innovations and discoveries are made, and in the championing of the authentic as a viable and indeed central conceptual dimension of any account of social life. Such a task is attempted in the first third of the collection, which succeeds in establishing the conceptual and theoretical bases of authenticity and contains some particularly instructive and erudite contributions which situate the philosophical and theoretical bases of the concept in imaginative ways.