🔗 Share this article

Throughout the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, speaker the author poses a challenge: typical directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a mix of personal stories, research, cultural commentary and conversations – aims to reveal how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Larger Setting

The impetus for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her background as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of her work.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and many organizations are cutting back the very frameworks that once promised change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; we must instead reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Identity

Via detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, employees with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which identity will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people try too hard by attempting to look agreeable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are placed: emotional work, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the confidence to survive what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the protections or the trust to withstand what arises.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the account of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – an act of openness the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – temporarily made daily interactions easier. However, Burey points out, that advancement was unstable. When employee changes erased the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the fatigue of having to start over, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that applauds your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when institutions rely on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is simultaneously lucid and poetic. She blends scholarly depth with a manner of kinship: a call for audience to lean in, to interrogate, to dissent. According to the author, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that require appreciation for simple belonging. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives organizations tell about justice and belonging, and to decline involvement in practices that perpetuate inequity. It could involve identifying prejudice in a gathering, choosing not to participate of voluntary “equity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is made available to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that typically reward compliance. It is a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses brittle binaries. The book does not merely eliminate “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she advocates for its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is far from the unrestricted expression of individuality that business environment typically applauds, but a more thoughtful alignment between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that resists manipulation by institutional demands. Rather than treating sincerity as a directive to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of openness, Burey urges readers to maintain the aspects of it grounded in honesty, individual consciousness and principled vision. According to Burey, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to relocate it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and to interactions and offices where reliance, justice and responsibility make {