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Throughout the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: everyday advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a mix of memoir, studies, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how organizations co-opt identity, moving the weight of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The motivation for the publication stems partly in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across business retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of Authentic.

It emerges at a period of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as opposition to DEI initiatives mount, and various institutions are reducing the very structures that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, keeping workers concerned with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.

Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self

Through detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which persona will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by attempting to look agreeable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of assumptions are projected: emotional work, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the protections or the confidence to withstand what emerges.

As Burey explains, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to withstand what comes out.’

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this dynamic through the story of an employee, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to inform his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication practices. His willingness to discuss his background – a behavior of openness the office often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made everyday communications easier. But as Burey shows, that advancement was unstable. Once personnel shifts eliminated the casual awareness the employee had developed, the culture of access vanished. “All the information left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a framework that applauds your openness but refuses to codify it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a trap when organizations count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is both understandable and lyrical. She combines academic thoroughness with a manner of solidarity: an invitation for followers to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, dissent at work is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the effort of rejecting sameness in workplaces that demand gratitude for mere inclusion. To resist, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives institutions describe about justice and acceptance, and to decline engagement in practices that maintain unfairness. It might look like calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Opposition, she suggests, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that frequently reward compliance. It is a practice of principle rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that one’s humanity is not based on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not simply discard “authenticity” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its restoration. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that opposes manipulation by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating sincerity as a mandate to disclose excessively or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges readers to maintain the elements of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward connections and offices where reliance, justice and answerability make {