🔗 Share this article

Within the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, writer Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace advice to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, shifting the weight of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The impetus for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, filtered through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a tension between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the engine of her work.

It arrives at a moment of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and numerous companies are scaling back the very systems that once promised change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to contend that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a grouping of aesthetics, peculiarities and hobbies, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; rather, we should reframe it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Identity

Via detailed stories and interviews, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are cast: affective duties, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.

As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to survive what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to educate his team members about deaf culture and interaction standards. His willingness to discuss his background – a gesture of candor the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made daily interactions easier. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. After personnel shifts wiped out the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your honesty but declines to formalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a snare when institutions depend on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is both understandable and poetic. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of solidarity: an invitation for followers to engage, to question, to disagree. According to the author, professional resistance is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the effort of rejecting sameness in environments that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the stories institutions narrate about fairness and acceptance, and to reject engagement in customs that maintain inequity. It could involve identifying prejudice in a gathering, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the institution. Opposition, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in spaces that often praise conformity. It is a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book avoids just toss out “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. For Burey, authenticity is not simply the unrestricted expression of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – an integrity that resists alteration by institutional demands. Rather than treating genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adjust to cleansed standards of transparency, the author encourages readers to maintain the parts of it rooted in truth-telling, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and to connections and organizations where reliance, equity and answerability make {