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Within the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, author the author issues a provocation: commonplace advice to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a mix of memoir, studies, cultural critique and discussions – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The driving force for the publication originates in part in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that the author encounters – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the core of her work.

It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and numerous companies are cutting back the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that landscape to argue that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – specifically, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; we must instead reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Identity

Via colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by striving to seem acceptable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of expectations are projected: emotional work, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to withstand what emerges.

According to the author, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the protections or the reliance to endure what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to share his experience – an act of transparency the organization often commends as “genuineness” – briefly made daily interactions easier. But as Burey shows, that improvement was precarious. When staff turnover eliminated the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your transparency but refuses to formalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when organizations count on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is both understandable and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a tone of connection: an offer for readers to participate, to interrogate, to oppose. According to the author, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that require thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, according to her view, is to question the stories institutions describe about equity and acceptance, and to reject participation in practices that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, withdrawing of voluntary “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the company. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that frequently reward compliance. It constitutes a discipline of principle rather than opposition, a way of insisting that a person’s dignity is not based on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just discard “authenticity” wholesale: rather, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not the unfiltered performance of character that business environment typically applauds, but a more intentional alignment between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that resists distortion by organizational requirements. As opposed to considering authenticity as a requirement to disclose excessively or conform to cleansed standards of transparency, the author encourages readers to keep the elements of it based on honesty, self-awareness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to move it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and to interactions and workplaces where confidence, equity and answerability make {