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Throughout the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author the author issues a provocation: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural commentary and discussions – attempts to expose how companies co-opt identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The driving force for the work lies partially in the author’s professional path: different positions across corporate retail, startups and in global development, interpreted via her background as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of her work.

It emerges at a moment of general weariness with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as opposition to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that terrain to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of appearances, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self

Via colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, employees with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are placed: emotional labor, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the reliance to endure what emerges.

According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the trust to survive what arises.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the workplace often applauds as “sincerity” – briefly made routine exchanges easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was fragile. After staff turnover wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be told to share personally lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when organizations count on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is both understandable and lyrical. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of connection: a call for audience to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that expect thankfulness for simple belonging. To resist, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts institutions narrate about fairness and inclusion, and to reject participation in rituals that maintain injustice. It might look like identifying prejudice in a discussion, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an declaration of self-respect in environments that frequently encourage compliance. It is a practice of integrity rather than rebellion, a way of insisting that a person’s dignity is not based on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Authentic avoids just eliminate “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not the raw display of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that opposes distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than treating authenticity as a requirement to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of transparency, the author encourages readers to preserve the elements of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the goal is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward relationships and organizations where reliance, equity and responsibility make {