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Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author the author poses a challenge: typical advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – aims to reveal how companies co-opt identity, transferring the burden of corporate reform on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The motivation for the book originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.

It emerges at a time of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and many organizations are cutting back the very structures that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers focused on managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Self

By means of vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey shows how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which self will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of assumptions are cast: affective duties, disclosure and continuous act of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but without the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to survive what arises.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

The author shows this phenomenon through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to educate his co-workers about deaf culture and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the workplace often applauds as “authenticity” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. When staff turnover erased the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be requested to expose oneself without protection: to face exposure in a framework that applauds your honesty but declines to institutionalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies depend on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is at once clear and expressive. She combines scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: an offer for audience to lean in, to interrogate, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, from her perspective, is to question the stories institutions describe about fairness and belonging, and to decline engagement in rituals that sustain injustice. It might look like naming bias in a discussion, withdrawing of unpaid “inclusion” labor, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an assertion of individual worth in settings that frequently encourage compliance. It represents a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a method of insisting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Her work avoids just eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: instead, she urges its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that business environment typically applauds, but a more intentional correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – an integrity that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Rather than considering genuineness as a directive to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges readers to preserve the elements of it based on honesty, personal insight and ethical clarity. In her view, the aim is not to give up on authenticity but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into relationships and organizations where trust, justice and answerability make {