Unpacking the Transparency-Secrecy Nexus: Frontstage and backstage behaviour in a political party

Introduction

Transparency has attracted tremendous scholarly interest over the past two decades (Ringel, 2017; Vattimo, 1992). It is commonly understood as an effort to increase the visibility of organizational activities by eliminating secrecy, with secrecy – especially in the public domain – being widely considered illegitimate and unjustifiable. Transparency is therefore often promoted as a remedy to secrecy, earning itself the status of a ‘widespread normative doctrine’ (Hood, 2007, p. 193; Brighenti 2007). However, the normative approach to transparency seems also to be widely adopted by scholars who (often inadvertently) tend not to question or reflect on the value we assign to visibility in everyday life, thus promoting transparency as cultural worth to be universally pursued. Aiming to ‘improve’ organizations, many scientists have joined the global quest for refining transparency.

The interlinking of scientific and normative agendas, as valid as this might be from a political point of view, has, however, seriously hampered social scientific theorizing. Therefore, we lack a deeper understanding of the relationship between transparency and secrecy, as extant research tends to conceptualize secrecy in purely normative terms, thereby failing to analyse it as a mode of social action. In contrast, this article offers a non-normative theorization of the relation between transparency and secrecy. In a nutshell, I argue that the disclosure of information does not necessarily reduce opacity as such but often triggers the emergence of new forms of secrecy. Efforts to implement transparency are fundamentally performative (Loxley, 2007): they do not create neutral knowledge about and observations of organizations, but rearrange them in unexpected ways.

To this end, the article engages with critical research on transparency (Birchall, 2011; Christensen, 2002; Christensen & Cheney, 2015; Christensen & Cornelissen, 2015; Fenster, 2006; Hansen, 2015; Hansen & Flyverbom, 2015; Strathern, 2000; Tsoukas, 1997) and secrecy (Costas & Grey, 2014, 2016; Parker, 2016; Schoeneborn & Scherer, 2012; Scott, 2013; Stohl & Stohl, 2011). Conceptually, the article draws on Goffman (1959) to theorize the nexus of transparency and secrecy by applying the concept of front- and backstage. As will be demonstrated, despite all efforts to increase transparency, organizational front- and backstages, are rearranged and maintained by the nexus of people, practices, things and relations. Against this backdrop, I present the findings of an empirical study on the Pirate Party of Germany, a party in favour of enacting extensive forms of transparency. Its members are deeply committed to authentic self-disclosure, making it a case that provides rich insights into how an organization with a membership base of stern transparency believers struggles with the practical implications of its own ideology.

The paper proceeds as follows. In the second section, I portray dominant perspectives in transparency research and argue that the nexus of transparency and secrecy has not received sufficient scholarly interest. The third section discusses the contribution of the research on organizational secrecy and develops a Goffmanian reading of the issue that helps make sense of organizational responses to demands for transparency. The fourth section introduces the research site and the methods applied. The next three sections present the findings of a qualitative case study on a parliamentary group of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia. Finally the paper closes by discussing implications and suggesting avenues for future studies.

Transparency Research

At its core, organizational transparency entails the implementation of formal structures that ensure the dissemination of hitherto undisclosed – and thus secret – information to external audiences in oral, written, printed, audio, visual or digital form. According to the majority of research, such modes of self-disclosure create neutral observations of organizational activities. In their extensive literature review, Albu and Flyverbom (2016, p. 14) use the term verifiability to summarize this point of view: ‘Such conceptualizations start from the premise that by making more information available we can regulate behavior and improve organizational and societal affairs through processes of verification.’ Scholars who subscribe to this idea often see themselves as reformers who offer refined models for practical purposes.

Ever since Austin (1962), scholars across disciplines, organization and management studies included, have debated the performative dimension of speech, that is, the fact that speech often interferes in the world it merely seeks to describe, thus changing it in unforeseen ways (Gond, Cabantous, Harding, & Learmonth, 2016). According to Albu and Flyverbom (2016, p. 17), critical transparency research revolves around the idea of performativity in that it ‘highlights the generative nature of transparency projects to shape and modify the organizations they seek to render visible’. In other words, scholars are aware of ‘the complexity of communication and interpretation processes and focus on the complications and paradoxes generated by transparency projects’ (Albu & Flyverbom, 2016, p. 14). Disclosure practices thus do not simply convey information from a sender to a receiver, but they also variously influence subjects, objects, relations and situations. Research interested in the performative properties of transparency has produced rich accounts that differ significantly from the communication model inherent to verifiability approaches. While the latter argue that information can be packaged by a sender, transferred, and received by other actors in a neutral manner, the former deviate from this position in all three dimensions: the production, transformation and reception of information.

In terms of the production of information, Christensen (2002, p. 167) argues that self-accounts are necessarily a social construction, reflecting a particular position within the organization: ‘Transparency, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder’, meaning that it is ‘first and foremost a question of establishing a consensual system of meaning between different actors’. Representations of reality are therefore always selective (Strathern, 2000), even in the case of supposedly neutral and rational numerical operations (Hansen, 2015). Tsoukas (1997) is concerned with the issue of communicating information to external audiences. He questions the possibility of objective accounts of reality by emphasizing that the information transmitted is always decontextualized, suggesting that calls for transparency lead to the diffusion of more decontextualized and mediated public communication. By using terms such as ‘calculative devices’ and ‘mediating devices’, Hansen and Flyverbom (2015) also discuss the complexities of translating ‘local knowledge and relationships into new contexts and domains’ (Hansen & Flyverbom, 2015, p. 878) and suggest investigation of ‘the complex work of human actors and technologies that goes into producing that which appears to us as ‘transparent’’ (Hansen & Flyverbom, 2015, p. 873). Others, such as Fenster (2006), emphasize that the targeted audiences of transparency are active interpreters, thereby defying the idea of receivers merely ‘unpacking’ the original – ‘true’ – intention stored in the information. Audiences, in other words, are ‘active, productive, and creative’ (Christensen & Cheney, 2015, p. 82).

For the purposes of this paper, accounts of how organizations change in unforeseen ways due to the implementation of transparency measures are particularly illuminating. In their conceptual paper, Christensen and Cheney (2015, p. 85) describe a variety of such performative effects, which include ‘practices such as selecting, displaying, posing, framing, hiding, and distorting, as well as observing, checking, (self)-controlling and monitoring’. Empirical studies confirm these assumptions. They unveil a variety of unintended consequences such as overbureaucratization (Anechiarico & Jacobs, 1996), a decrease in efficiency (Bernstein, 2012), gaming strategies (McGivern & Ferlie, 2007), venue shifting (Van den Brink, Benschop & Jansen, 2010), selective reporting (Neyland, 2007; Levay & Waks, 2009) and decoupling (Heimstädt, 2017). What these studies have in common is that they register a reluctance to establish an information stream from the inside out that is in accordance with the institutionalized ideal of the ‘transparent organization’. Against the backdrop of these findings, the next section proposes a theorization of the nexus of transparency and secrecy, which draws attention to the performativity of information disclosure.

Frontstage and Backstage

The bulk of scholarly work in the verifiability camp assumes a zero-sum relation between transparency and secrecy: The more thorough disclosure practices are implemented, the less secrecy prevails. If touched upon, secrecy is deemed an evil that needs to be eradicated. Birchall (2011, p. 12) problematizes this narrow view by stating that a ‘moral discourse that condemns secrecy and rewards transparency may cause us to overlook the integral, perhaps constitutive, role secrecy (in different guises) might play’.

An emergent stream of research on secrecy, a phenomenon still understudied in the social sciences, suggests a non-normative perspective (Costas & Grey, 2014, 2016; Parker, 2016; Schoeneborn & Scherer, 2012; Scott, 2013; Stohl & Stohl, 2011). Costas and Grey (2014, 2016) shift the attention from the content, the informational aspect (‘the secret’), to processes and practices (‘secrecy’). Accordingly, the question is not what, but how information is hidden within the organization by one group from another as well as from external audiences. In a nutshell, they define secrecy as ‘the ongoing formal and informal social processes of intentional concealment of information from actors by actors in organizations’ (Costas & Grey, 2014, p. 1426). While formal secrecy pertains to rules officially decided upon and recorded, informal secrecy manifests itself in unwritten rules, conventions, traditions and shared beliefs. Typically, formal secrecy is ensured by the signature of non-disclosure agreements and guidelines to draw explicit boundaries between in- and out-groups. As a result, organizations possess a powerful resource to enforce formal secrecy. However, due to its written form it is always in danger of being leaked, as the famous examples of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning demonstrate. In contrast, informal secrecy is typically a side-product of organizational membership and learned via socialization in cliques, departments or working groups. Depending on how tightly knit such in-groups are, information might permeate relatively easily to outsiders, for instance in the form of gossip. However, since informal secrecy is usually not documented (and sometimes not even verbalized) it might actually be harder for actors to intentionally share secrets with outsiders. It is important to note that while both types of secrecy can be distinguished analytically, they are empirically intertwined and often coexist in dynamic interplays.

To what end, then, do actors create and apply practices of secrecy? According to Costas and Grey (2014, 2016), far from only being a strategy that serves the functions of bestowing and exerting control, secrecy also affirms, assigns and even creates social identities, making it as much an issue of meaning and belongingness as of power. Accordingly, it is not always the content of hidden information that renders a secret (strategically) important, but the act itself can transform otherwise trivial knowledge into a good that is precious precisely because others are not privy to it.

This summary underpins the necessity of engaging with the ‘intertwined relation between secrecy and transparency’ (Albu & Flyverbom, 2016, p. 20; Birchall, 2011). In what follows, I draw on Costas and Grey (2014, 2016) and Goffman (1959) to outline a heuristic conceptualization that stresses the performative relation between these two types of social situations. Goffman is particularly useful in analyzing the said relation. His approach (1) allows us to challenge the assumption that transparency can simply eradicate secrecy, (2) rejects the notion of secrecy being inherently ‘bad’ and transparency being inherently ‘good’ and (3) sheds new light on how social situations change in unforeseen ways when actors try to implement transparency.

Goffman (1959) assumes presentations of the self in front of an audience, on the frontstage, to always have an expressive, self-idealizing dimension. Individuals depend on their ability to prepare such appearances in private contexts called the backstage. Here they are ‘painstakingly’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 112) engaged in manufacturing and shaping their public presentations. Typical examples of front- and backstage are bedrooms and living rooms, kitchens and dining rooms, or the sales floor and the recreation area. Backstage behaviour protects three types of secrets from being exposed: strategic, inside and dark secrets. While strategic secrets pertain to practices that need to be hidden in order to achieve certain instrumental goals, inside secrets grant an individual membership in a certain group. Dark secrets come close to what is of most interest for the purpose of this paper: They concern practices that are ethically and often legally problematic, such as corruption or bribery (see the many examples in Costas & Grey, 2016). However, there are considerably less extreme forms of backstage behaviour that deviate from institutionalized norms of appropriateness. For instance, a couple that engages in emotional disputes in private while pretending to be in harmony at dinner parties obviously tries to give the appearance of a normal and ‘healthy’ marriage. The couple, albeit constructing a public self-presentation that is inconsistent with much of their daily behaviour, could hardly be described as engaging in dark secrecy. I thus suggest defining such instances as secrets of imperfection. These are not matters of grave ethical and/or legal misconduct but still indicate inconsistency of private actions with publicly endorsed norms of appropriateness. Goffman offers three assumptions that are crucial for theorizing the relation of transparency and what I call secrets of imperfection: (1) individuals try to appear as normal members of society in front of an audience; (2) this behaviour does not come naturally but has to be carefully prepared; (3) the process of preparation on the backstage often deviates from the ideals displayed in public. As a result, individuals are constantly engaged in (re)producing boundaries of visibility between front- and backstage.

How does this relate to the issue of organizational transparency? Put simply, implementing measures to increase transparency is supposed to make organizational backstages visible on their respective frontstage. External audiences (stakeholders, journalists, experts, the general public, etc.) should get ‘the full picture’, which is believed to have a disciplining impact on those being watched, thereby forcing backstage behaviour to be consistent with the norms and ideals espoused on the frontstage. However, by accepting the assumption that individuals and organizations alike are constantly engaged in separating front- and backstage, we can see an inherent tension between the promises of transparency and the necessity of a certain amount of secrecy. It might then be argued that making backstage behaviour more transparent is likely to spark tensions, struggles, negotiations and, most importantly, efforts to uphold existing or establish new backstages. To give a poignant empirical example: Roberts (2006), in his study on the impact of freedom of information laws in Canada, shows that public servants developed an oral culture in response to the implementation of the law. Minutes and files hitherto containing information on public organizations’ backstages have thus become accessible at the cost of moving some portions of backstage behaviour to new venues.

Goffman’s theory has important implication for transparency research. First, his processual focus on micro practices makes him attentive to breaches between frontstage and backstage: ‘There is an abiding sense in which chaos and disorder lurk always at the edges of interactions and these require work to manage and keep on track’ (Manning, 2008, p. 686). Research on organizational secrecy subscribes to the same view: ‘however rigidly the barriers are erected and however rigorously they are policed, they are never fully effective and may be subverted’ (Costas & Grey, 2016, p. 83). Second, frontstage and backstage are separated but also connected, since hiding backstage behaviour is foundational for the success of self-presentations on the frontstage. This claim is also supported by research on organizational secrecy. Third, by acknowledging that ‘we act better than we know how’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 74), Goffman offers a nuanced take on actors’ analytical skills and rationality. The division of front- and backstage rests to some degree on conscious design, but, importantly, also on habitualized practices and incorporated forms of tacit knowledge. By distinguishing between formal and informal secrecy, Costas and Grey (2014, 2016) reflect these different modes of social action. In sum, combining the terminology of Costas and Grey (secrecy as a formal and informal social process that pertains to both identity and control) and Goffman (frontstage, backstage; strategic, inside and dark secrets, as well as secrets of imperfection) makes it possible to define a specific type of performativity as a topic of research in its own right: the emergence or shifting of organizational backstages in reaction to the efforts of making boundaries between front- and backstages more permeable.

Notwithstanding the merits of this definition, two issues beg further discussion: the narrow focus on face-to-face interactions and the spatial dimension. First, Goffman does not theorize the self-presentations of organizations, but merely explores myriad interactions unfolding within organizational frameworks. However, there is reason to believe that organizations as emergent social phenomena also aim to produce an idealized self-presentation, not least because modern society treats them as if they are a unitary actor: ‘In the process of becoming social actors, organizations acquire a kind of soul or persona’ (Drori & Meyer, 2006, p. 38). Granted, when push comes to shove, individuals act in the true sense of the word. But in the context of organizations, (inter)action often represents the organization as a whole and not just the face-to-face interaction itself. When a shop assistant behaves improperly by using insensitive language, the whole company’s image can suffer. We might thus scale Goffman’s interaction theory up to the organizational level by assuming that spatially dispersed people and practices are related, thereby producing boundaries of visibility between the organizational front- and backstage.

Second and closely connected to the first point, Goffman anchors front- and backstages in a specific place where people literally see each other. Meyrowitz (1985) criticizes this narrow conceptualization and argues that due to technological progress it might be more accurate to conceptualize social situations as constituted by communication and not by physical co-presence. Accordingly, two people talking over a phone or chatting online create a social situation. Internal messaging software, social media services and web conferencing tools, to give just some examples, thus constitute large communicative networks within an organization and might sometimes even encompass the entire system. In sum, an array of spatially dispersed people, practices, things and relations collaboratively manufactures organizational front- and backstages. As this definition demonstrates, the theoretical lens that I suggest lies not on the properties of ‘stages’ as such but different modes of their interrelated creation and reproduction.

The section has outlined a heuristic conceptualization of transparency and secrecy by drawing on research on organizational secrecy and Goffman’s frontstage/backstage theory. The terms frontstage and backstage connote the intertwinement of these two types of social situations and the adaption of existing, or creation of new, forms of secrecy in reaction to the implementation of transparency measures. Costas and Grey’s (2014) theorization of formal and informal secrecy as social processes offers a rich vocabulary on how to analyse the practices of concealment that undergird organizational backstages. From this perspective, secrecy is not necessarily (re)produced because it is based on morally dubious or even illegal practices (such as corruption). Rather, organizational behaviour often simply fails to conform to cultural conventions, norms and ideals. This, of course, does not mean that organizations always successfully maintain a favourable impression – but they can be expected to try. How specifically people, practices, things and relations create boundaries of visibility between organizational front- and backstages and to what extent such efforts are successful remains to be answered in empirical studies.

Research Site and Methods

Founded in 2006, the Pirate Party of Germany focuses on the issues of transparency and web policies, especially copyright and public surveillance, combined with a grassroots approach to political processes, making it a perfect case to study the ramifications of ‘extensive transparency regimes’ (Albu & Flyverbom, 2016, p. 20). From 2006 until 2009, the party remained relatively small with only a couple of hundred members. Following the disastrous implementation of the ‘Zugangserschwerungsgesetz’ in 2009 (a law intending to ban web pages containing child pornography) the party gained momentum and underwent an enormous increase in membership from 800 to more than 11,000 members. Quickly, the Pirates became notorious for their radical approach to transparency. A comprehensive discourse analysis confirms that transparency is indeed the most important aspect of their ‘corporate identity’ (Hönigsberger & Osterberg, 2012, p. 27), which is represented in many verbal references to this issue and also visually by placing the topic on political advertisements. The party considers transparency to be a right and an obligation simultaneously: a right for every member to express their opinions publicly without any restriction and a moral obligation for party officials to document decision-making processes as well as all discussions in councils or committees.

The Pirates have a variety of measures at their disposal to ensure a maximum of transparency: (a) they video stream or audio-tape official meetings and discussions; (b) they make sure that interactions between the meetings are made public; and (c) each document produced by working groups or party committees must be published on the various party websites and/or the Wiki of the party. Furthermore, their mailing lists are open to every citizen and their discussions are made publicly available via software such as Mumble. Considering the importance of the Internet as a medium, it comes as no surprise that they are excessive users of social media (especially Twitter).

The party received 8.9% of the votes in the state election in Berlin in September 2011, which drew much positive media attention and was followed by a rapid surge in public polling and exploding membership numbers. Riding on a wave of success between the election in Berlin in 2011 and the summer of 2012, the Pirates gained parliamentary representation in three additional federal state elections. From July 2012 onwards, journalists increasingly started to focus on the party’s often messy ways of self-organizing and ubiquitous conflicts carried out in public. As a result, their polling numbers plummeted and political rivals began to launch verbal attacks. This brief historical account of the Pirate Party helps to contextualize the case study on the parliamentary group in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The election in North Rhine-Westphalia (term: 2012–2017) took place during the time of an enormous increase in membership as well as a peak in public polling at the federal level. Since North Rhine-Westphalia is the most populated federal province in Germany, the parliamentary group with its 20 representatives became the largest of the four parliamentary groups of the Pirate Party. Because of its size and the fact that it had to be built right in the moment when the media narrative on the Pirate Party at large began to change and their polling numbers plummeted, this parliamentary group was chosen as a case to study.

In Germany, parliamentary groups are well-organized entities formally independent of the party they represent, albeit having many informal ties. In the case of the Pirates the party in central office had almost no professional staff, administrative overhead or financial resources. Accordingly, parliamentary groups were even more autonomous than in the case of established political parties. Practically, they can be treated as organizations in their own right that belong to the same ‘franchise’ (Carty, 2004).

Since studying organizational secrecy is ‘by definition difficult’ (Costas & Grey, 2014, p. 1441), I have chosen a qualitative research design and began with a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1971). I refrained from predefining the types of data I was going to collect but decided on these matters in an iterative process by connecting the process of gathering data and building categories. Finally, the typologies of Goffman and Costas & Grey were used to organize the findings. In so doing, ‘forcing’ of theory onto the data was prevented. The study started in January 2013, eight months into the term. From January 2013 until August 2016 I was able to obtain various types of data. The prime sources are 17 interviews (ranging from 29 to 139 minutes), all of which were recorded and transcribed, and revolve around the time before the election, the election campaign, and the first months in the parliament. The data corpus was supplemented by newspaper articles from local as well as national outlets, personal homepages and/or blogs, Tweets, and discussions on the public mailing list of the parliamentary group. This heterogeneous pool of data helped to generate different perspectives on the case. The interviews provided the opportunity to reconstruct actors’ experiences, narratives and interpretations as well as detailed accounts of backstage behaviour. Newspaper articles were used to investigate how the media portrayed and sensationalized the parliamentary group. Personal blogs were informative on how the representatives present themselves to the public and talk about their everyday life. The public mailing list of the parliamentary group allowed studying online interactions between the members of the parliamentary group.

To build categories, I started with the interviews and then constantly switched between the interpretation and collection of different types of data. For instance, after having read articles about two scandals that happened in the first couple of months into the term, I made them a subject in the interviews; if someone made a conspicuous statement on his or her blog, I also brought that up in the interviews and asked them to specify or elaborate. After several rounds of interpretation, categories changed only gradually and were broadened via selective analyses of portions of data, whereby theoretical saturation was reached in the final stage of the research process.

In the following three sections, I discuss the different meanings and mutations of transparency and secrecy from the time before the election in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2012 onward. The findings are organized in three phases. Displaying backstage behaviour on the frontstage, the modus operandi in phase one (before the election), was possible due to the symbolic gratification of authentic self-disclosure by the mass media. After the election, in phase two, the situation changed: authentic self-disclosure became performative in unexpected ways in that it triggered sensationalization by the mass media, exclusion and exploitation by political rivals and alienation from the party base. As a consequence, the members of the parliamentary group introduced boundaries of visibility between the organizational front- and backstage in phase three.

‘Everything has to be transparent’: Defying the separation of front- and backstage (phase one)

Up until their election in four state parliaments, the Pirate Party seemed to have successfully rejected the implementation of boundaries of visibility between front- and backstage. My interviews with parliamentary representatives of the Pirate Party in North Rhine-Westphalia confirm this general trend. During the election campaign and consistent with the party’s ideology, they practised authentic self-disclosure with no restrictions in online streams, social media, interviews and blog posts. There are internal and external reasons why the Pirates could abstain from creating an organizational backstage. At the intraparty level, virtually all Pirates shared a deep commitment to the core issues of the Pirates, such as transparency, web policie, and grassroots politics, which provided meaning, purpose and a deep sense of belonging. No matter what a member of the party stated in public, it was considered legitimate behaviour by fellow party members due to the ideal of voluntary self-disclosure. Rejecting practices of concealment and, in turn, promoting the notion that ‘everything has to be transparent’ ¹ (interview, A) was clearly a linchpin of the local Pirate identity, thus matching the party at large.

External audiences – the mass media and rival parties – surprisingly abstained from attacking the Pirates during the election in North Rhine-Westphalia. In fact, after the successful campaign in Berlin the media often ran positive reports on how exciting, interesting and different the Pirates are. One of the main reasons for this positive reception was the party’s relative newness, which made it a curious object of investigation for journalists. In retrospect, the informants seem to be quite aware of their special status: ‘Back then, we had some sort of a sympathy bonus, we were perceived as being fresh and new and stuff like that’ (interview, D). Since the established political parties also treated them rather kindly, there was no need for the Pirates to prepare for attacks or to counter allegations. For example, in a newspaper interview the prominent Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel was asked to comment on the Pirate Party. Instead of criticizing public statements made by members of the Pirate Party (of which there were plenty), he said the following:

The Pirates have totally different concepts of life than my constituents. You have got to respect that. And they really have a sense of humor. I saw one of their billboards, depicting a man of my stature, and written on it: More substance. ² This is great. I can get along with people who have a sense of humor. (Dausend & Geis, 2012)

As this example vividly demonstrates, the fact that the Pirates were treated gently by their opponents and received symbolic gratification from the mass media allowed them to reject boundaries of visibility and unite around the organizational identity of the party.

This, of course, does not mean that literally everything happening inside the realms of the party immediately became publicly known. There are indications that even at this stage some actors applied practices of concealment to vie for intra-organizational control, for instance, by quietly influencing the process of creating party lists for elections. One informant mentioned the ‘influence of active members’ (interview, C), thereby indicating that those who put a lot of energy and resources into party work developed intraparty networks in order to exert control over party decisions. However, these forms of secrecy were neither collectively shared nor aimed at producing organizational front- and backstages.

‘How to state parliament’: The perils of transparency (phase two)

The success at the ballot box turned out to be a reality check for the candidates who were determined to implement the party’s vision of all-encompassing transparency at the institutional core of the political system. The parliamentary group enacted an array of formal disclosure practices to prevent any limitation of the flow of information: all official meetings – whether the weekly caucus meetings (in which all of the representatives met in order to prepare and make decisions regarding their formal structuring and collective actions in the state parliament) or working groups (in which a smaller number of representatives were responsible for preparing and developing political positions) – had to be streamed over the internet or at least audio recorded. Discussions outside these meetings were to take place on the public mailing list, on the software Mumble or on Twitter. Representatives not only had the formal right but also the moral support of the Party base when it came to freedom of speech, that is, they should be able to say anything they have on their minds in public (on Twitter, Facebook, blogs or in interviews).

Entering the state parliament, the Pirates seemed deeply confused and overwhelmed by their new work environment. The informants emphasize that they had to ‘jump in at the deep end’ (interview, M). They realized that a proper parliamentary group needed to be built ‘from scratch’ (interview, E; interview, M; interview, I). This willingness to ‘learn the ropes’ is manifest in many statements such as the following: ‘After the election, we met right here Monday evening at 6pm. At first, we didn’t have any office space, just one room, and then, well, we had to learn: ‘how to state parliament’ ³ (interview, A).

The biggest problem for the junior representatives clearly was that they lacked a common identity providing meaning and purpose in this new situation. Despite having implemented extensive disclosure practices, the informants felt lost and considered the Pirate Party’s frame of reference regarding transparency and grassroots politics to be of little use in this new situation. As a result, there was barely a sense of unity among the newly elected representatives. They described themselves as ‘20 individuals’ who ‘had to meet every day for a couple of hours in one room and were suddenly a team’ (interview, A).

Unsurprisingly, the process of self-organizing was complicated, even more so because it had to be carried out in a transparent manner. The social relations between the ‘20 individuals’ were tense and often conflict-laden. A heterogeneous pool of opinions, motives and interests, met by largely undefined organizational positions and responsibilities, resulted in ‘often contentious debates’ (interview, L) in the web-streamed caucus meetings (initially lasting up to 8 hours). A frequently mentioned example (and thus a symbol for the irrelevance of many of these discussions) is the ‘legendary fight’ (interview L) about the acquisition of a coffee machine, with the main issue being the question of whether the parliamentary group should buy an expensive machine or a cheap one. The avalanche of information, willingly disclosed by the newly elected representatives, enabled different styles of consumption by various external audiences, specifically the mass media, political rivals and the party base. These styles of consumption had a variety of unintended side effects. Transparency, in other words, became performative. The data suggest four such effects.

First, the type of authentic self-disclosure practised by the Pirates made it easy for the mass media to create a negative image by exposing dark secrets (Goffman, 1959) and secrets of imperfection, which damaged the parliamentary group’s legitimacy and devalued its identity claims. While the Pirates expected continuing support by the mass media and symbolic gratification for their openness and honesty, the extensive transparency regime they had implemented laid the groundwork for an avalanche of negative reports and scandalizations. Clearly, the honeymoon period between the Pirate Party and the mass media was over, as a quantitative content analysis of the press coverage confirms (Media Tenor, 2012). This shift was hard to grasp for the junior representatives: ‘Right now, our way of doing things is seen as a handicap…while, before the election, it was seen as something positive – but nothing really changed’ (interview, D). The parliamentary group was constantly presented as being ‘at loggerheads’ (interview, B; interview, L) and immature. The junior representatives had to come to terms with the fact that ‘of course, the media reports only if someone is dancing on the table naked’ (interview, A).

There is a vivid example of how the media sensationalized the parliamentary group by reporting on publicly available statements of representatives. A couple of months into the term, a female representative was heavily criticized on account of a comment she made on Twitter about an HIV test. The media attached the Tweet to another one in which she complained about the long hours she had to work and about how boring plenary sessions are. The whole affair had an enormous impact on her colleagues and made them aware that even past statements can matter a long time after the fact:

I realized that there is no statute of limitation. Because some of the Tweets that the press reported on date back to March, May. That means they were from the time before Birgit [Rydlewski] was a member of the State Parliament. (interview, B)

The second and the third performative property of transparency relate to the political environment. To understand them it is crucial to recognize the nature of inter-party communication rules in parliamentarian systems. The Pirates had to come to terms with the fact that parliamentary representatives often act quite differently in front of an audience (for example in plenary sessions or in newspaper interviews) than they do in private. This is a typical example of what Costas and Grey (2016, p. 119) call a public secret. Those privy to public secrets usually assume that others know of their existence; not to be aware of such secrets ‘is not simply to be cut off from this or that network, but to be estranged from the very foundations of belongingness’. The following quote demonstrates that this mode of secrecy posed a serious identity problem for the Pirates as it deviated from the norm of consistency, which is at the core of their transparency ideal:

This is all…this is all just a big show! Plenary sessions and fighting in front of the press – it is just a big theatre. And then in the cafeteria people are suddenly very friendly, they say hello, sit with you at the table…then it is suddenly different. (interview, A)

The second performative property of transparency is rooted in the distinct type of public political communication mentioned in the quote by informant A. Political rivals systematically used all information to attack the Pirates and exploited the exposure of strategic secrets (Goffman, 1959), which undercut the Pirates’ ability to participate in the state parliament in a meaningful way. Being as transparent as the Pirates made them highly vulnerable, since they did not have nearly as much knowledge about their rivals as they possessed about them. For this reason, engaging with the Pirates publicly, ‘when the camera was on’, was easy game for the other parties in the state parliament: due to the transparency measures undertaken, there was a rich variety of material to choose from. In terms of strategy, the Pirates’ rivals were always privy to plans for upcoming plenary sessions, which had been discussed in detail in the online streamed caucus meetings.

Third, other politicians felt that the Pirates ignored well-established conventions of secrecy, on the grounds of which they decide to exclude them from informal backroom negotiations. It is crucial to recognize that, empirically, parliaments are not only formal institutions of public political deliberation but simultaneously rest on a dense latticework of institutionalized informal encounters that facilitate political decision-making. Since such processes have to remain a secret (because they deviate from the public self-presentation of the political caste), the transparency imperative promoted by the Pirates caused a serious problem of trust. Their rivals could not be sure whether such informal encounters were to remain secret, since there was always the danger of a Pirate mentioning them in public. Thus, some of the junior representatives concluded early on:

They can let us starve to death in here if they want to. That’s why it is so important to motivate them to work with us. Because if we only act immaturely, they just shut the door in our faces. (interview, A)

Exclusion is a typical form of sanctioning the breach of public secrets (Costas & Grey, 2016). According to informant A, in order to be invited to participate in informal backroom meetings, one has to stop to ‘only act immaturely’ and honour the written and unwritten rules of the state parliament.

Fourth, authentic self-disclosure failed to connect the parliamentary group with the third environment, the party base, and even sparked demands for more intrusive forms of transparency. Despite having access to an avalanche of information via streamed caucus meetings, Twitter, mailing lists and personal blogs, the party base felt shut out. The provision of raw information evidently did not generate trust. On the contrary, the modes of self-disclosure practised by the newly elected representatives even seemed to have created demands for more transparency. For instance, three informants mention that some members of the party base called for the installation of cameras in the representatives’ offices. Such accounts suggest that the party base’s need for information was not satisfied but was actually driven further by transparency measures. The representatives rejected such demands; some even considered them to be in the spirit of ‘Big Brother’ (interview, A; interview, C; interview, I; interview, K).

The main reason for the increasing distance between the representatives and the party base seems to have been that they ceased to share a common frame of reference after the election. While the former felt ‘sucked into’ (interview, H) their new work environment, in the process of which they were willing to adapt to the identity of being professional politicians, the latter insisted on the importance of sticking to the original party values. The findings thus support the assumption of critical transparency research that information is not a neutral object that connects sender and receiver (Christensen & Cheney, 2015; Fenster, 2006). In the light of these experiences, the representatives increasingly came to terms with the idea of limiting and organizing transparency. ‘This is the downside of transparency: If you make everything transparent you basically have a huge pile of raw data that needs to be processed’ (interview, I). One informant even told me the following ‘wisdom’ that reflects how the unfiltered disclosure of large portions of data might sometimes impede rather than enforce transparency (Birchall, 2011; Christensen & Cornelissen, 2015): ‘If you want to hide information, just put it in the public wiki [of the Pirate Party, L.R.] where no one can find it.’

Closed sessions, ‘gentleman’s agreement’, and private mailing lists: Emergence of an organizational backstage (phase three)

In reaction to the four performative properties of transparency presented in the last section, the junior representatives, in a piecemeal process, revised the meaning of transparency, engaged in formal/informal practices of concealment, developed a professional identity, and exerted some degree of control in the arena of the state parliament by means of strategic secrecy.

Concluding Discussion

A growing body of scholarly work examines the performative properties of organizational transparency, that is, the way in which the disclosure of information changes the objects described (Albu & Flyverbom, 2016). This has provided significant insight on meaning making (Christensen, 2002), the socio-material dimension of creating and translating information (Hansen & Flyverbom, 2015), the interpretation of transparent information by audiences (Fenster, 2006) and the mythological quality of transparency in modern society (Christensen & Cornelissen, 2015). Generally speaking, the concept of transparency is tightly connected to secrecy. When discussed, the latter is usually described as harmful and considered to be in need of abolition with the ‘transparent organization’ as the ultimo ratio. Costas and Grey (2014, 2016) argue for a non-normative perspective and suggest shifting the attention from the content of secrecy to the social process of hiding information. They thereby emphasize the practical dimension of formally and informally maintaining secrets (Costas & Grey, 2014, 2016).

In this article, I combined both streams of research by drawing on the terms frontstage and backstage (Goffman, 1959) to emphasize the performative relation of transparency and secrecy, specifically, the way in which existing backstages are rearranged or new ones emerge due to the implementation of transparency measures. I applied this theoretical lens in an empirical study on the Pirate Party of Germany, a political party dedicated to conducting its affairs as transparently as possible. The case study on the parliamentary group in the federal state North Rhine-Westphalia unveiled how people (elected representatives and their employees), formal and informal practices of concealment (for instance, the ritualization of the beginning of caucus meetings, hidden interactions, closed parts of caucus meetings, gatherings in the offices or the cafeteria, and heightened reflexivity), things (offices, the cafeteria, private mailing lists) and relations (explicitly reflected by the press office) created boundaries of visibility between the organizational front- and backstage. The article concludes with a discussion of implications and potential avenues for future studies.

Critical research on transparency has mainly focused on the social construction of information, the socio-material implications of transforming information in the process of travelling between social contexts, and audiences as active interpreters. Meanwhile, the intertwined relation of transparency and secrecy has received only minor attention among researchers interested in the performative properties of transparency. By implication, the focus suggested in this article is critical of the popular assumption that secrecy can be replaced outright by transparency. It argues for non-normative accounts of intra-organizational forms of managing transparency by preserving and creating new forms of secrecy. It thus highlights that practices of secrecy are part and parcel of the process of manufacturing an idealized public presentation of the organization. As a result, the article makes the case for in-depth qualitative and ethnographic research on organizational responses to the paradoxes and intricacies created by invasive transparency regimes.

My findings draw further attention to the importance of audience reactions to disclosed information: scandalized by the mass media, exploited and excluded by political rivals, and – all authentic self-disclosure notwithstanding – criticized by the party base, the parliamentary group, step by step, introduced boundaries of visibility to filter the information permeating from the inside to the outside. Furthermore, it is worth noticing that one sub-division specifically – the press office – was preoccupied with organizing the frontstage of the parliamentary group by reflecting the perspectives of external audiences, especially the mass media, and relating different kinds of backstage behaviour. This begs the question whether (formal or informal) authorities, whose responsibility it is to orchestrate practices that, in concert, create the frontstage of an organization, exist in different shapes and forms in other organizational settings.

The article also contributes to research on organizational secrecy. Costas and Grey (2014, 2016) discuss a variety of reasons for secrecy: strategy, identity, power struggles and culture, among others. By drawing on Goffman I propose to see secrecy as a social process aimed at creating an organizational frontstage that reflects institutionalized norms of appropriateness. I suggested complementing the three types of secrets defined by Goffman – strategic, inside and dark – with a fourth type: secrets of imperfection. While dark secrets pertain to drastic breaches of ethical and/or legal norms, secrets of imperfection mark lighter deviations from cultural conventions, rules, norms and ideals. Most forms of secrecy unveiled in the case study on the Pirate Party are secrets of imperfection. Typical examples are cases in which the representatives settled disputes in closed parts of caucus meetings to make the parliamentary group not appear at loggerheads in public.

The study shows that information and communication technology is crucial for many types of secrecy (Hansen, 2015; Hansen & Flyverbom, 2015). For instance, the parliamentary group supplemented public mailing lists with private mailing lists, which facilitated the emergence of online front- and backstages. These online practices were then closely entangled with offline interactions in offices, the cafeteria, the hallway and retreats. Future studies could benefit from examining how different kinds of online practices of secrecy create front- and backstages and relate to, or are even foundational of, their offline counterparts.

Finally, it is paramount for studies on organizational transparency to investigate how actors attach meaning to secrecy. Costas and Grey (2016) mention several justifications, for example, the professional ethos of a group, which is clearly reflected in the findings of the study. When they became professional politicians, the Pirates created distinctions between political, strategic, practical and personal matters and attached the emergent set of formal/informal practices of secrecy to this new identity which, among other things, implied filtering information between the core of the political system and society. Reconstructing not only different practices of secrecy but also the meaning(s) attached to it is thus crucial for a deeper understanding of the nexus of transparency and secrecy.