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Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, author Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, moving the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Broader Context

The motivation for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, filtered through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the driving force of her work.

It emerges at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that landscape to assert that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reframe it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Self

By means of detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, people with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional work, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to withstand what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this situation through the account of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who chose to educate his colleagues about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – an act of openness the office often commends as “sincerity” – for a short time made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was precarious. After personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a structure that celebrates your honesty but refuses to institutionalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a snare when institutions depend on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is at once understandable and poetic. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an offer for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To oppose, according to her view, is to interrogate the accounts organizations narrate about fairness and acceptance, and to reject participation in rituals that maintain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Opposition, she suggests, is an declaration of self-respect in spaces that typically praise obedience. It represents a habit of integrity rather than rebellion, a method of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely eliminate “genuineness” entirely: instead, she urges its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the raw display of personality that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that opposes alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a mandate to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey urges followers to maintain the aspects of it based on sincerity, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and into connections and organizations where reliance, fairness and accountability make {