Country music as impression management: A meditation on fabricating authenticity

Without using Goffman's well-known theory of impression management in any conscious way, Richard Peterson, in his Creating country music: Fabricating authenticity (1997), demonstrated that impression management was a central process in creating country music. The present study explicitly links Peterson's ideas about the fabrication of authenticity to Goffman's Presentation of self in everyday life (1959) in an attempt to show that impression management provides a set of concepts and a theory to conceptualize the processes underlying the fabrication and maintenance of authenticity. In addition, the parallel between Peterson's and Goffman's work shows that macrosocial units have to deal with the same problems faced by microsocial actors in fostering and sustaining definitions of the situation, and that the solving of these problems can be understood in much the same way at both levels of analysis. Finally, the present study suggests that concepts used to understand interpersonal interaction can be used to bridge the gap between culture theories that currently focus separately on the processes of production and consumption of culture. (c) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.