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Throughout the opening pages of the publication Authentic, author Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, research, cultural commentary and discussions – aims to reveal how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The driving force for the book lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that the author encounters – a tension between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.

It lands at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey enters that terrain to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with handling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona

Via detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to adjust which identity will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and ongoing display of thankfulness. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the protections or the reliance to endure what emerges.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the trust to withstand what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

The author shows this dynamic through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – a behavior of openness the office often commends as “authenticity” – briefly made routine exchanges easier. However, Burey points out, that improvement was precarious. When employee changes wiped out the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a framework that praises your transparency but fails to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is at once lucid and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a style of solidarity: an offer for readers to engage, to interrogate, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that expect gratitude for basic acceptance. To dissent, in her framing, is to challenge the accounts companies tell about equity and acceptance, and to decline involvement in customs that sustain injustice. It might look like naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of unpaid “inclusion” work, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an affirmation of personal dignity in settings that often encourage conformity. It is a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a method of insisting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply toss out “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its redefinition. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the unrestricted expression of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a principle that rejects alteration by institutional demands. As opposed to treating authenticity as a directive to reveal too much or conform to cleansed standards of transparency, the author encourages followers to keep the parts of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the aim is not to give up on genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and offices where trust, fairness and accountability make {