Episode 050: Maxim Voronov
Authenticity. Corporations chase it. Consumers desire it. Maxim Voronov, Professor of Sustainability and Organization at the Schulich School of Business, studies authenticity in a business context. He breaks it down into two categories, traditionality and originality. Which one a corporation pursues depends on factors such as how large they are, and how old they are. In this episode, host Cameron Graham talks to Maxim about his study of authenticity in the Canadian whisky industry.
Cameron: Maxim, welcome to the podcast.
Maxim: Thanks, Cam, for having me on your podcast.
Cameron: Why don't you tell us who you are?
Maxim: Great. Happy to. My name is Maxim Voronov. I am a professor of sustainability and organization at Schulich School of Business in Toronto. I do research on social change at organizational industry and societal levels, and more broadly at the intersection of organizations and society. And I've done work on a variety of topics in different contexts. I'm particularly interested in how individuals and groups either promote or thwart change. I've also more recently gotten interested in understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on organizations in public sector as well as in private sector. And a big stream of research of mine has been on authenticity, and that's what I'm here to talk about today.
Cameron: Tell me about this paper. I hinted at it in the introduction. Can you tell us about this particular study?
Maxim: The name of this paper is the "Distilling Authenticity: Materiality and Narratives in Canadian Distilleries' Authenticity Work," which was published recently in Academy of Management Journal. And the paper builds on my fairly longstanding interest in authenticity. Of course, as as your introduction mentioned, Cam, is such an important, preoccupation of contemporary society.
Cameron: Tell me just a little bit about why this matters for whisky. Because when I think of whisky, I think of scotch. Is that considered the authentic form of whisky and everybody else is catching up?
Maxim: That's a really interesting question actually. Also, of course scotch whisky is one of several major whisky traditions. There are really four major ones. So there is scotch, of course, there is bourbon, there is Canadian and there is Japanese. Then there's, of course other smaller whisky producing regions. And incidentally, while scotch whisky is seen as pinnacle of authenticity it is not necessarily more or less so. It may be the most famous one, right? And in fact, some of the innovations that people sometimes attribute to scotch whisky, such as, for example mandating that whisky has to be aged for a minimum period in oak barrels, those are actually Canadian innovations. In fact, Canadians have been mandating aging whisky in oak barrels longer than than Scotch has. And Scotch has started doing so in response to Canadian moves. But your question gets us into a more important kind of issue here, right? The authenticity, right? And that then the fact that oftentimes we tend to think of authenticity as something that's inherent to people or things. And in fact, it's actually in the eye of the beholder, right? Of course, the very notion of authenticity is the audience's perception that an entity's projection of images or communication, is the same as their identity or consistent with their identity or consistent with their internal properties. But ultimately it is the audiences that decide whether something is authentic or not.
Cameron: I can try to be as authentic as I want in the classroom, but unless my students perceive me as authentic, it really doesn't matter.
Maxim: Absolutely. That's exactly a great starting point. There are of course different, sort of conceptualizations of authenticity in various literatures. It's something that has been preoccupying not only business scholars, really philosophers going back hundreds of years. But that is the perspective that I certainly align myself. And I think that I find that particularly useful perspective for understanding how organizations can manage images of authenticity, because it sort of acknowledges that.
Cameron: We just clarified that it doesn't matter what I try to do. Unless my students understand me to be authentic, I have failed. But now you're starting to talk about what corporations can do to manage authenticity. So you use this phrase, authenticity work in your paper. Can you tell me what that's all about?
Maxim: Absolutely. Yes. So, so, authenticity work refers to strategic efforts to manage audiences' perceptions of authenticity, in essence, trying to convince audiences that I am authentic, right? So basically every time I try to convince my students that I'm authentic, every time as a marketer or as an influencer, I try to convince my audiences that I'm authentic, I am doing authenticity work.
Cameron: Okay. Authenticity doesn't come for free. It's costly.
Maxim: Absolutely.
Cameron: Tell me more about how this connects to the business context.
Maxim: So in the business context, of course, and again, as you mentioned in introduction, authenticity can be an important source of strategic advantage. And so of course, organizations do try to make claims that whatever it is that they're doing is authentic, right? And we see these claims all over the place, right?
So when you go to a restaurant, they claim to serve authentic X type of food, right? Or you're buying an authentic product, or, social media influencers. Basically they trade in authenticity, right? To the extent that they are valuable at all, it's really because they're able to convince certain segment of population that they're authentic, and therefore they're worth following, for their lifestyle, for their opinion, whatever else, right? It is a enormously strategically valuable.
Maxim: But everybody is making those claims, right? And audiences are so inundated with those claims that they don't necessarily believe them anymore. And that's why authenticity work can be challenging because organizations do not always succeed in convincing their audiences and sometimes their authenticity claims plain backfire.
Cameron: So what kinds of things matter when an organization is trying to establish authenticity?
Maxim: Yeah. And that's really the core of of this particular article as a matter of fact, is that we've, we found out that materiality, is a really important influencer of what kind of authentic claims organizations can make credibly.
And by materiality we mean culturally meaningful, culturally legitimated physical resources.
For example, in the context of whisky industry, of course, it's the liquid itself, but also production equipment, distillery buildings and facilities and even, even the human beings, the people involved with it. So the whisky makers.
Cameron: Yes, you've seen the ads with the old Scottish whisky makers hauling these barrels on their backs and so forth, or rolling them across the factory floor.
Maxim: Absolutely.
Cameron: It's, it looks very authentic. I don't know if I could tell the difference between a commercial and actual production though.
Maxim: Absolutely. And of course, the actual production oftentimes is different, right? Particularly in this day and age, right? When we have a lot of machinery that can make a lot of things more efficient, but actually better, more reliable, more consistent as well, right?
So that, so you know when somebody does everything by hand, who knows? Maybe today things will work out well, maybe tomorrow, not so well. Machinery helps to eliminate a lot of the guesswork.
Cameron: Yeah. So I'm just wondering, like you, you said that authenticity is about something that is kind of in the eye of the beholder. How does a corporation help people connect these images, these material resources to that business. What can they do to make sure that it sticks with them?
Maxim: Yeah. Yeah. And this is and this is a really important thing that, that actually surprised us, as a matter of fact, right? Is that, is that sometimes sometimes our as we all know in business corporations or businesses in general, want to go to where the customers are what the customers want, provide, what the, what's currently popular and what's in demand, right?
So with whisky in particular, it's not always easy to do so. For the listeners who, who may not be familiar with whisky process, it starts with grain. And it is mashed, it is distilled and a really crucial aspect of it is that it has to be aged in oak barrel for a minimum number of years, which is, prescribed differently in different countries. So for example, in Canada has to be at least three years, right? So can you cannot even call Canadian spirit a whisky unless it has been aged in oak barrel for at least three years. So what that means is that whisky distilleries are not in the best position to follow customer demands. So if customer tastes change, they cannot necessarily adapt quickly because Canada's older distilleries that have been around in some cases for 150 years or more are sitting on stock of whisky that is sometimes decades old. They keep on distilling it and putting it in barrels. And therefore there's the things that customers want, or consumers want, and then there is the things that distilleries are able to deliver, which is of course the case with distilleries all over the world.
That's one of the things that we talk about in the paper, that was an important thing we found out is that materiality, as manifest in this liquid itself, right, which has been produced in a particular way in put in barrel aged for X number of years, anchors, distilleries to the particular stories that they're able to tell, or particular stories that they cannot tell; makes some stories more difficult to tell. So for example, consumers for quite some time now have been more and more keen to get rye whisky, whisky made from rye grain. To meet that demand, the distilleries either have to tap into their stocks of aging whisky if they happen to have that already, or if they don't, they have to distill it and then they have to age it for at least three years. And at that point in time, who knows what the consumers will be wanting.
So therefore this is a very interesting industry where we see that, but it is a generalizable point that companies are not always able to meet customers where they are, what they currently demand, right? and because of this anchoring of this material, endowments and limitations.
Cameron: Yeah Well, I mean, since we're talking about Canadian whisky, it's only appropriate to haul out that Canadian quote from Wayne Gretzky you don't go to where the puck is, you go to where it's gonna be. So this is something that these distilleries would be hoping to do is to, in some way lead consumer taste, right?
So they can get the customers to where they want, where their product is gonna be three years down the road. Is that something that authenticity can accomplish?
Maxim: That is the challenge of course is that it's... you know, predicting where customer will be is difficult and oftentimes, impossible. And again, particularly for larger distilleries that, need to move large volumes of whisky they cannot just keep on adjusting. So they try to diversify their portfolio of what they're aging so that they're able to then, maybe as tastes change, that they can then hopefully figure out how to tap into their reserves and to deliver something that customers want. But it, again it's very difficult for them to do that very quickly because they're very large operations. Some of Canada's largest distilleries, right? They're aging million, literally millions of barrels of whisky in their warehouses, right? and so it's not always easy for them to do so. Micro distilleries are a little bit in a better position to do so because, they're just doing small experiments and they don't have large stocks of whisky. They have opposite problem actually, that they are, they don't have well aged whisky and essentially, they can trade on experiments, if you will. They're essentially like, okay, we have this innovative thing that we are able to offer to the customers. And hopefully that will be interesting and innovative enough for them. And really, that's really what what we're, what we saw that the kind of different basis or kind of different competing basis of authenticity in this industry. So there is the authenticity based on traditionality claims, right? So we're making whisky in a traditional way.
And that's something that was much more likely to be done and much more conducive to large distilleries that have been around again for decades in some cases, more than 150 years versus, the basis of authenticity around innovation and creativity or originality as we call it. And that was much more likely to be practiced by newer micro distilleries. Some of them have been around for just a few years. Right.
And that's really this anchoring thing that I just mentioned, right? We found that older, large distilleries tended to be anchored to the traditionality authenticity claims.
So it was much easier for them to make that claim. While for the micro distilleries, they were anchored to the originality basis of authenticity. And so that's the kind of claim that they were more likely to be making and to be making it successfully.
Cameron: So these are almost like mutually exclusive things, authenticity and originality. Is it an either-or, or is it like a spectrum or what?
Maxim: It can be. But of course businesses don't like that. And it's not really it's not really mutually exclusive, but there's a trade off, right? And so it places some limits, right? So essentially some of the older distilleries end up then, because they still want to be able to claim originality because audiences want that. So, they emphasize originality in the sense of maybe coming up with unusual blends of different traditionally made whiskies. Or more innovative aging regimens where they might age the whisky in oak barrel in a kind of more traditional typical oak barrel.
And then they might finish it off for another year or two in a barrel that previously held for example, sherry or some other beverage, that would then add some unusual or more interesting notes to the resulting whisky.
Cameron: I'm familiar with that from my own research in the field of scotch, which admittedly is not as rigorous as yours.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you went about conducting all this research? I see that you had interviews with corporate executives and so on, and you attended some whisky festivals. I hope you got to taste some of the whisky. And you also did observations of the operations. Could you tell me about that?
Photo: Robin McSkelly, Unsplash
Maxim: This was quite a bear of a study. It was a lot of, a lot of work. We did dozens of interviews with whisky makers, with executives with their sales representatives, but also very importantly with the audience members because, again, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.
And, not all, all, not all audiences are created equal. So various kind of taste making audiences such as, bartenders or whisky writers or bloggers, and so on. So we've tried to get it to as many of them as we could, but we also, yeah, did a lot of we used a lot of secondary documents whether it's popular press or social media. But yes, of course, we were fortunate enough to be able to observe how some of these whisky makers do their work and kind of, and see how they run their day-to-day operations. Specifically how they distill stuff how they bottle it, how they age it and so on and so forth. Right. the festivals that you mentioned were quite important for us to be able to actually see how they interact with audiences as well. So who the distillery sends to to represent the distillery.
So for example, some whisky distilleries will send their master blender, who is a real expert who is really close to the, to the production process and tends to be able to convey a lot of kind of tacit knowledge to audiences about how a particular whisky was made, versus other distilleries that may not be able to do so. They might send a sales rep, who may have learned a lot of important things about whisky making, but is not nearly as close to the process. And for example, one of the things that was quite important for us to see this that having a kind of very knowledgeable representative from a distillery who's very close to the production process tended to resonate with audiences much more, to give them a sense that, you know that this particular distillery and this particular products from the distilleries are authentic, you know, as opposed to distilleries that were not able to, to put somebody like that forward.
Cameron: This leads us to the question of how you would like to see this paper taken up in, in industry, what people can learn from it, because there's this notion of closeness in relation to authenticity. Can you tell me how these whisky producers manage or emphasize closeness in relation to authenticity?
Maxim: Yeah, this is an excellent and really important question, right? And so, we distinguish in the paper here between two types of closeness, corporeal and physical, right? Corporeal is basically, it's... and these are not mutually exclusive by the way.
And so corporeal closeness is basically having some kind of an expert, who is close to the production process and is able to share this tacit knowledge, about whisky making in to represent distillery and speak to audiences.
Cameron: That's that firsthand account kind of thing.
Maxim: Yes. Yeah. Someone who's able to offer that kind of first hand account from a hands-on expert point of view.
Cameron: So in your, your example, the sales rep who knows about the company but isn't firsthand on the shop floor, has less authenticity than the person who's actually right working on the shop floor.
Closeness. Okay. Okay.
Maxim: Exactly. Yes. And then physical authenticity is basically, is trying to reduce, the boundaries and break down the walls to as much as possible, of course, between audiences. And the distilleries, inviting them into to enable audiences to see the production process as closely as possible.
So whether it involves more kind of structured tours around production facilities or sometimes just the way the physical design of the distillery tends to facilitate this. For example, some of the newer micro distilleries would have like glass walls. That, while people are hanging out at the boutique sampling whiskies, they can see the stills behind the glass wall and see people working in them and so on, right?
So, of course these are not mutually exclusive, right? But of course they tend to manifest in a little bit different way, right? And so physical authenticity I think is particularly important because again, as we all know, you can tell me stuff, but I'm much more convinced if you can show me the stuff.
So physical authenticity, so physical closeness, I should say gets into really showing the stuff much more.
Corporeal authenticity is very important as well. And it can also enable a distillery to expand the radius, right? So obviously not everybody's able to visit the distillery and see what's happening there, but yeah, you can send your master blender or your distiller to, to a trade show somewhere, so that people actually get to put a face to the name and they actually talk to the person, and the person can actually tell them things that they are doing
Right? And, Yeah. And there was tremendous difference between distilleries and in their ability to do this and willingness really to do this.
Cameron: Yeah. And it's also what we refer to in accounting, which is my field, as a costly signal. Because you're taking one of your most important people from the factory floor where they're needed and sending them off to some sort of a trade event.
Maxim: Yes, absolutely. And I think this is one of the reasons that many of the kind of older, more established distilleries are not able or willing to do that. And this is why sometimes, actually this is one of the surprising things actually found early on in the study, that even though some of these larger distilleries had been around again for decades, at least in some cases more than a hundred years the larger distilleries oftentimes had the perception among key audiences as being less authentic than some of these newer distilleries that had been around only for a couple of years. And um, you know, were still kind of learning their craft and and we're just experimenting in some cases.
I think this is one of the reasons, right? So because the micro distilleries were just in much better position to, they were, they were simple organizations like, let's say four people running the whole organization versus, hundreds of people working in the organization. So it's much easier for them to A, invite people in and see the facilities, and B, when they show up and who are they greeting? They're greeting the, uh, distiller, for example, the master blender who is when they're not interacting with customers, they're spending most of their time, actually making the whisky, right.
Whisky barrels. (Photo: Katherine Conrad, Unsplash)
Whereas, of course, larger distilleries, they have their corporate structure, they have division of labor, and so until recently most established distilleries or older distilleries didn't even appreciate the importance actually of having their, master blender or their distiller interface with audiences.
Cameron: Yeah. So this raises for me the question of what kinds of industries this insight would apply to. So obviously the distillery industry, the whisky industry. I can think of chocolate makers: you could have a big factory that produces chocolates or you could have a small boutique chocolate maker where you can watch them work through the window.
Coffee shops. That sort of thing. Micro breweries for, for beer, right? The hipster's choice of which brand is cool this month. What about other industries though? Does it ex... does this extend to others?
Maxim: Of course. Naturally industries that produce what's known as experience goods, such as the examples, if you've given, the beer, the wine, the chocolate, other kind of more upscale agricultural products, of course, those are the most obvious places, right? But the thing is that authenticity is important in all sorts of contexts, right? So some of the case-specific things that we talk about in our study, because, we needed to tell a credible and rich story of whisky industry. So those may not necessarily apply, but for example, basis of authenticity, right? Traditionality versus originality, right? This is important in, ironically, something as different from this industry as high tech industries of various sorts, right? Where , for example, as entrepreneurs try to pitch their ideas to the prospective investors,
they need to figure out how to strike that balance, between being traditional, right? Because that gives them a sense of credibility, versus being original, so it's not just me-too kind of product, not me-too kind of solution, not me-too app, right? And they need to do so in an authentic way, again, so that the audiences, or in this case, investors, can buy it and say, yes, this is credible. I see that that you are authentic, that you're doing... that this is genuine representation of what your business is or will be doing. So that's just another example. But again we see it everywhere that really authenticity matters, right? The other really key thing, right, is this point about the importance of materiality, right? Nowadays since we spend so much time online in virtual world, and we work from home and we socialize from home, et cetera, sometimes we forget that, that we are still living in a material world, right? And such things as technology, for example. So in the paper we talk about this idea of affordances, right? So how, how the different kinds of materiality, in the case of that particular study, production equipment, et cetera, has certain affordances, meaning it makes certain stories easier to tell while others, harder to tell. The very idea of affordances we borrowed from studies of technology.
Cameron: Right.
Maxim: Because, for example, such things as social media, what it enables people to do and not do, right? This is driven very much by the affordances of the different platforms and the algorithms, right? Whether algorithm boost or damper particular kinds of ideas or particular types of claims or particular types of stories from particular type of people, right? So I think, this is a reminder, right, that, that really, the materiality matters, right, in a variety of, contexts. It is, it is a particularly important in our context where essentially the ultimate judgment of whether a whisky is authentic or not from audience point of view is they take a sip of this liquid, right? And they feel something authentic or they don't, right? But in more remote context, where this materiality just is not as visible, not as salient, it still matters a lot.
Cameron: I wonder if you could flip this around for me for just a second as we move towards wrapping up, and just think about this from the position of the individual consumer. How do you know when a corporation is actually authentic and as opposed to maybe you're being manipulated by some romantic notion of what it takes to make whisky or what it takes to make chocolate.
Maxim: Yeah, no this is a really challenging question. And honestly, the years of research on authenticity have actually made me more skeptical about the very use of notion of authenticity, right? Because I realize that oftentimes when I feel, when, like, putting myself in the shoes of a consumer or an audience member, the reality is that the times when I feel like I'm having authentic experience are ironically the times when I'm most likely to be manipulated, right? Because basically, that's when this materiality and narrative come together most fluidly and voila, they got me, right? In a sense, so in general, and this is something that I've been talking to a variety of audiences is that maybe we should be as consumers and actually more importantly than consumers, citizens in the society, maybe we should spend a little bit less time chasing authenticity. Right? Maybe we should try to, for example, when we are making a purchase, maybe we should think a little bit more about what is the quality of this thing that I'm buying? Or, if I'm choosing, you know, a controversial tangent over here, if I'm choosing a elected politician, or if I'm deciding whether my manager is an authentic leader, maybe I should actually flip it off and say, you know what? I shouldn't be asking this question at all. If I'm looking at a politician, why don't I ask if I like the policies.
If the manager, maybe I say are they actually good at their job? Like, should I really care that they're authentic leader, or should I really care if they're good at the job and are they helping me do my job?
Cameron: Yeah, good questions. Thank you for talking to me about this study, Maxim. It's really fascinating.
Maxim: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for for the opportunity, Cam. I appreciate that.
Cameron: Have you got any new papers coming out or any new grants for conducting research that you could tell us about?
Maxim: Yeah, there's several things that we're working on. There's, uh, one thing that I'm quite excited about that is being led by a PhD student of ours. And we are working on a very early stages study on what's known as indoor clean air movement. So as pandemic kind of made it very clear for us that viruses such as COVID and many others are transmitted in the airborne manner. And there's a lot of science that has backed it up. What we're studying here is some of these movements that have organized to try to push politicians and other decision makers to improve indoor air quality in variety of public settings, whether it's in schools and hospitals and so on. So that's one study that we are in very early stages so far, but I'm quite excited about.
I'm also working with a PhD student from University of Toronto on a paper that explores the role of middle managers and their ability to tell convincing and persuasive narratives and how that influences the success or failure of the organization's DEI initiatives.
Maxim: Then there is the paper that in a more, not public domain, but more general public outreach front that was published in Scientific American with a co-author from Stanford, Mary Ann Cooper that explores how we are collectively as a society unfortunately learning to become more sophisticated at denying some of the most disturbing, some of the most threatening things that are happening around us, whether it's the lingering effects of the pandemic or ongoing climate change crisis and how we are learning to sort of normalize it and turn what sort of we would call the garbage can fire, the garbage fire. What is, what's the term now? Garbage fire?
Cameron: Yeah. Garbage can fire works for me.
A dumpster. Not on fire. Yet. (Photo: Kevin Butz, Unsplash)
Maxim: Garbage can fire. Yes. Yeah. Moment into, something that's normal and manageable even. And something that we're okay with.
Cameron: It sounds like you are reaching out into a bunch of different diverse areas. That's really lovely to see. I always appreciate a colleague who's got some breadth. I. Not just depth, but breadth as well. So this is nice to see. Where can people find you, Maxim?
Maxim: I have a website maximvoronov.net where I have put up a variety of published papers. I'm of course also on LinkedIn and on Twitter though I'm not really active anymore. I'm trying to get off. And I'm trying to do more on Bluesky and so, you know, so people want to look for familiar faces on names on Bluesky, please look me up.
Cameron: All right.
Maxim: I'm there.
Cameron: Good. I'll provide links to those in the the webpage and in the show notes. Thanks, Maxim. Really a pleasure to talk to you.
Maxim: Thanks so much, Cam, for having me and for this really engaging discussion. Really appreciate it.
Cameron: Wonderful.
A younger Maxim Voronov, early in his career (photo credit: Brock University)
Links
Maxim Voronov’s website
LinkedIn: Maxim Voronov
Bluesky: Maxim Voronov
Research
Credits
Host and producer: Cameron Graham
Co-producer: Andrew Micak
Photos: York University
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Descript, Squadcast
Recorded: November 5, 2024
Location: Toronto
