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Throughout the initial chapters of the book Authentic, writer Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of memoir, research, cultural critique and discussions – aims to reveal how companies co-opt identity, shifting the burden of institutional change on to staff members who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The driving force for the book lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, filtered through her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of her work.

It emerges at a time of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that landscape to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

Through vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which identity will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people overcompensate by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional labor, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the protections or the reliance to survive what emerges.

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

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this situation through the account of a worker, a deaf employee who decided to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – a behavior of openness the office often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made everyday communications smoother. However, Burey points out, that advancement was fragile. Once employee changes eliminated the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a framework that applauds your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a snare when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: an offer for audience to participate, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that demand appreciation for mere inclusion. To resist, from her perspective, is to question the accounts institutions narrate about justice and acceptance, and to reject involvement in rituals that maintain injustice. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of unpaid “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the company. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an declaration of self-respect in environments that often reward obedience. It represents a habit of principle rather than rebellion, a approach of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic avoids just discard “authenticity” wholesale: rather, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful harmony between personal beliefs and individual deeds – an integrity that opposes alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of treating authenticity as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to cleansed standards of transparency, Burey urges readers to maintain the aspects of it based on sincerity, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and organizations where trust, equity and responsibility make {