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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author the author poses a challenge: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of memoir, studies, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations co-opt identity, moving the weight of organizational transformation on to staff members who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The motivation for the book stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of the book.

It emerges at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and many organizations are scaling back the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. The author steps into that terrain to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, forcing workers focused on managing how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead redefine it on our individual conditions.

Minority Staff and the Act of Identity

Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how marginalized workers – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which persona will “pass”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are placed: affective duties, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what comes out.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to endure what arises.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this situation through the account of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his colleagues about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of openness the organization often applauds as “authenticity” – temporarily made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. After staff turnover erased the informal knowledge Jason had built, the culture of access disappeared. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be told to share personally absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a system that celebrates your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

Burey’s writing is at once clear and expressive. She marries intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: a call for followers to participate, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect appreciation for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to question the narratives organizations narrate about justice and acceptance, and to refuse involvement in customs that perpetuate injustice. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that often praise conformity. It constitutes a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a method of asserting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely discard “genuineness” completely: rather, she advocates for its redefinition. According to the author, authenticity is not the unrestricted expression of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that resists alteration by institutional demands. Rather than treating genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adjust to cleansed standards of candor, the author encourages readers to preserve the parts of it based on sincerity, individual consciousness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and toward relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and responsibility make {