Seminar – Rhetorical strategies of authenticity: social value judgements in the emerging contest over cellular meat

Roy Suddaby, Professor, University of Victoria, Washington State University and University of Liverpool

This paper analyses the role of authenticity in processes of technological innovation and new market creation. In 2005 Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University, supported by funding from Google’s Sergey Brin, created the world’s first cultured beef burger, a technological innovation by which embryonic stem cells of animals are engineered to induce the growth of muscle cells in a cell culture media, a process now known as cellular agriculture. The capacity to culture meat in a lab is an innovation that threatens to disrupt traditional animal husbandry in agriculture but holds the promise to solve many of the problems created by modern industrial meat production. It has initiated growing competition between incumbent agribusiness actors and upstart cellular producers. It has also initiated a less predictable, but equally important disruption in the value and identity claims of social groups whose mission is to contest traditional methods of animal husbandry because of the ethical, environmental and health issues created by traditional methods of animal food production.

Our analysis focuses on the contestation of authenticity in the regulatory hearings over the labelling of cellular meat by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Food and Inspection Services Agency (FISA). Based on a review of over one thousand regulatory filings, our study demonstrates how rhetorical claims of authenticity differ from, yet occur in conjunction with rhetorical claims of legitimacy. We also find that rhetorical strategies of authenticity are premised the naturalistic fallacy – ie injecting cultural norms and values into the category of “natural” and then using claims of nature to assert that a product or practice is value-free – i.e. independent of cultural norms and values. We extend existing categories of types of authenticity claims (Carrol & Wheaton, 2009) by identifying the foundational role played by concepts of nature or naturalness in any claim of authenticity and demonstrating how social value judgements, which are theoretically distinct, tend to cluster in distinct configurations that mutually constitute each other.

Speaker bio

Roy Suddaby is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada. He also is a Professor of Management at the Carson College of Business, Washington State University, USA and Liverpool University Management School, UK, an adjunct Professor at Ritsumeikan University, Japan and IAE Business School, Argentina.

Professor Suddaby is an internationally regarded scholar of organisational theory and institutional change. His work has contributed to our understanding of the critical role of symbolic resources – legitimacy, authenticity, identity and history – in improving an organisation’s competitive position. His current research examines the changing social and symbolic role of the modern corporation and the intersection of craft and science in innovation.

Roy is a past editor of the Academy of Management Review and is or has been an editorial board member of the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and the Journal of Business Venturing. He has won best-paper awards from the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada as well as the Greif Research Impact Award from the Academy of Management. Roy is an associate editor of the Academy of Management Perspectives. AMP’s mission is to publish papers with policy implications based on management research.

Roy was recently named JMI Scholar by the Western Academy of Management and a Fellow of the Academy of Management and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.

For more information, please contact Luke Slater.