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In the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: commonplace directives to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a combination of memoir, studies, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how companies co-opt identity, moving the responsibility of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Broader Context

The driving force for the publication originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.

It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as opposition to DEI initiatives grow, and numerous companies are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; we must instead reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona

Via colorful examples and conversations, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are projected: emotional work, revealing details and continuous act of thankfulness. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.

According to the author, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what arises.’

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this situation through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His readiness to talk about his life – a behavior of transparency the organization often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. However, Burey points out, that progress was precarious. After personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a system that applauds your honesty but fails to formalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when organizations count on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is at once understandable and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a style of connection: an invitation for readers to engage, to interrogate, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the effort of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts organizations narrate about justice and belonging, and to decline engagement in rituals that maintain injustice. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “inclusion” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of personal dignity in spaces that frequently reward conformity. It is a practice of principle rather than defiance, a method of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not based on corporate endorsement.

Reclaiming Authenticity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply eliminate “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its restoration. According to the author, authenticity is far from the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and individual deeds – an integrity that resists distortion by institutional demands. As opposed to considering authenticity as a directive to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, the author encourages followers to maintain the aspects of it based on sincerity, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the goal is not to discard genuineness but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward relationships and organizations where trust, justice and answerability make {