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Throughout the beginning sections of the book Authentic, writer the author raises a critical point: typical directives to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, research, cultural commentary and discussions – aims to reveal how businesses appropriate personal identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to staff members who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The driving force for the publication originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the core of her work.

It emerges at a moment of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to argue that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; rather, we should reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Self

By means of vivid anecdotes and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of expectations are placed: emotional work, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what arises.

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

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

The author shows this phenomenon through the account of a worker, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – an act of openness the office often applauds as “genuineness” – briefly made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was fragile. After personnel shifts erased the informal knowledge Jason had built, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What was left was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be asked to share personally without protection: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your openness but refuses to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a snare when companies depend on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She combines academic thoroughness with a manner of connection: a call for readers to lean in, to question, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that expect gratitude for simple belonging. To oppose, according to her view, is to question the narratives companies narrate about equity and acceptance, and to refuse engagement in rituals that perpetuate injustice. It might look like identifying prejudice in a gathering, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that typically reward conformity. It is a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book does not simply toss out “sincerity” completely: rather, she calls for its restoration. For Burey, genuineness is not simply the raw display of personality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that opposes alteration by corporate expectations. Rather than viewing sincerity as a directive to reveal too much or conform to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises followers to maintain the parts of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and into connections and organizations where trust, equity and accountability make {