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In the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, writer the author raises a critical point: typical advice to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural commentary and conversations – attempts to expose how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The motivation for the publication originates in part in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of the book.

It arrives at a moment of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and numerous companies are cutting back the very systems that previously offered change and reform. The author steps into that terrain to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, forcing workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; rather, we should reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Identity

Via colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, disabled individuals – soon understand to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people overcompensate by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are cast: emotional labor, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what comes out.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to endure what comes out.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

The author shows this dynamic through the story of an employee, a deaf employee who decided to educate his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – a behavior of openness the office often praises as “sincerity” – temporarily made everyday communications easier. However, Burey points out, that improvement was unstable. After staff turnover eliminated the casual awareness the employee had developed, the culture of access vanished. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to share personally absent defenses: to face exposure in a structure that celebrates your openness but fails to codify it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a trap when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is at once understandable and lyrical. She blends academic thoroughness with a manner of kinship: a call for followers to participate, to challenge, to dissent. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts companies describe about equity and acceptance, and to refuse involvement in rituals that maintain inequity. It might look like calling out discrimination in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of individual worth in settings that often praise conformity. It is a habit of principle rather than defiance, a method of insisting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Her work does not merely discard “authenticity” entirely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not simply the raw display of personality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a principle that opposes distortion by institutional demands. Instead of treating genuineness as a mandate to disclose excessively or adjust to cleansed standards of openness, Burey urges audience to preserve the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, self-awareness and principled vision. According to Burey, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to move it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and to interactions and organizations where trust, justice and answerability make {