Abstract
We live at a moment in time when digital transformations, whistleblowing, and organizational innovation impose pressing questions about transparency—the idea that organizations and societies are opened up to scrutiny, made accountable and increasingly become “naked” (Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003). In the age of transparency, we are told, it is harder to keep secrets and stay out of sight for organizations and individuals alike.
However, as Costas and Grey remind us in this book, such accounts both overlook the continued importance of secrecy, and misunderstand the complex relationship between transparency and secrecy. Their book explores how secrecy is a key organizational and social phenomenon that deserves much more scholarly attention. Secrecy is and will always be woven into the fabric of organizations and society, and this is why the authors suggest that we think of secrecy as a form of “hidden architecture” within our organizations and as a form of “social order” more broadly. The main contribution of Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life is that it adds secrecy to the conceptual repertoire of organization studies by showing why this topic is important, by highlighting productive ways of understanding it, and by suggesting how we may study secrecy.
To highlight this central role, the book conceptualizes secrecy as a form of architecture—understood not in terms of the aesthetics of buildings, but as the hidden logic or structure of built environments. The authors suggest that architectures, such as secrecy, are what make organization possible. Costas and Grey also work productively with this metaphor of architecture to organize the book itself. This means that the different chapters explore the steps involved in construction processes, such as building a (theoretical) foundation, laying the bricks and mortar (of the argument), constructing the walls and corridors (of formal secrecy), opening the doors (of informal secrecy), and finally exposing the hidden architecture (of organizational secrecy) and adding the finishing touches.
In the following, I will first outline how the different chapters of the book develop the argument about secrecy as an overlooked organizational architecture, and then offer some more analytical and conceptual suggestions about the book’s contribution and positioning in relation to emergent scholarship in organization studies.
The book starts out, in the introduction, by offering a useful distinction between secrets and secrecy. We may think that secrets and secrecy are the same thing, but they are not. If we focus on secrets, we mainly give attention to contents, such as what information was hidden, or what incident was kept a secret. In contrast, the concept of secrecy invites us to focus on the processes involved in hiding or concealing information. The authors want to “coax secrecy out of hiding” (p. 2), and to articulate the processes involved in the operations of secrecy as a powerful force in organizations. Costas and Grey define secrecy as “nonaccidental concealment” (p. 5), and invite us to understand secrecy beyond normative, simple distinctions, such as whether secrecy is good or bad. Rather, they argue, secrecy is endemic and a key dimension of organizational life. Concealing information on purpose is not exceptional, but part of how organizations work. We may recognize this need for secrecy when it comes to investigative journalism and product development, but what Costas and Grey offer is a much more extensive investigation of the entanglement between secrecy and organizational life. Offering another valuable distinction, Costas and Grey propose that secrecy is both an informational phenomenon and a social process. This is so because secrecy is not only about handling information, but also about drawing boundaries around knowledge, and between those who know and those who do not know.
The book builds on empirical insights from earlier research carried out by the authors. One source is Grey’s (2012) book on Bletchley Park, the British state agency famous for breaking the codes of the German military during the Second World War. Secrecy at Work extends these findings about the multiple operations of secrecy in a military organization to underpin the central and much broader point that secrecy is endemic to organizations. While there are obvious differences between state agencies, such as Bletchley Park, and modern organizations, the authors fruitfully develop and broaden the scope of their investigation to encompass most types of organizational settings. Also, Costas’s (2012, 2013) earlier empirical research on professional services work is used to support and illustrate the argument that secrecy is a central force in organizational settings.
The following two chapters consist of a thorough re-reading of both central and more marginal texts in organization studies and sociology, such as the work of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Elias Canetti, Melville Dalton, and Robert Jackall, that help Costas and Grey drive home their arguments about secrecy as an overlooked phenomenon and valuable source of insights for organization studies. The book rests firmly on multiple theoretical foundations. One of these is Max Weber’s work on bureaucratic organizations, which paves the way for the argument that secrecy involves not only the concealment of knowledge, but also the exercise of power. The book not only illustrates Elias Canetti’s argument that “secrecy lies at the very core of power” (p. 21), but also that secrecy produces organization. These arguments are fleshed out forcefully in a book that sets out to “approach secrecy above and beyond its immediate function of hiding knowledge” (p. 30).
Georg Simmel’s work on the “sociology of secrecy” also helps the authors articulate the lure of the secret, namely, that a great part of the attraction and value of secrets lies in their status as inaccessible or hidden. In this manner, social actors create suspense and excitement through keeping or having secrets, and the seductive nature of secrecy means that secrets seem to have more (truth) value than what we all know. From Erving Goffman, the authors pick up ideas about the different forms taken by secrecy, such as “dark secrecy,” “strategic secrecy,” and “inside secrecy.” Insights from both Simmel and Goffman also guide the argument that secrecy organizes social relations and boundaries between those who are in the know and those who are kept in the dark. In making this argument about secrecy as socializing phenomenon, Costas and Grey stress that “less importance is placed on the kind of knowledge concealed than on the significance that the process of concealment has for organizations” (p. 67). This focus on processes means that the work of managing knowledge and staging information—such as “covering, uncovering and counter-covering” (p. 42)—moves to the fore in the analysis of secrecy as organizational phenomenon. Again, insights from Goffman figure prominently, as well as work suggesting that secrecy is an ongoing accomplishment and a form of social ordering propelled by activities related to sharing and concealing knowledge among different groups.
Building on these theoretical foundations, the next two chapters of the book unpack, first, formal secrecy, and then informal secrecy. The focus on formal secrecy offers a range of insights about the work that goes into controlling information and creating boundaries around knowledge in organizations. As Costas and Grey show, all kinds of organizations seek to manage secrecy, through regulation, through surveillance, or to protect trade secrets from leaking. In fact, secrecy can be seen as inseparable from the cultures and rationalities that shape organizational life. Also, formal secrecy points to compartmentalization as a fundamental organizational activity. Formal secrecy creates “a kind of spider’s web of demarcations around secrets” (p. 89), and these activities lie at the core of secrecy as an important organizational phenomenon. In contrast, informal secrecy is much more fluid and indeterminate. Actors in organizations constantly have to manage information, and navigate carefully when it comes to what can be shared and with whom. Such instances range from closing the office door to engage in a private conversation, to distinguishing between insiders and outsiders in organizational networks and relations. Such activities involve a range of organizational issues, such as trust, control, and group and identity formation. Costas and Grey convincingly highlight these connections between secrecy and organizing, and pave the way for their overall argument about secrecy as organizational architecture.
Secrecy at Work is an excellent book, and one that will interest sociologists and organization and management scholars alike. It is written in an accessible and engaging style, and offers a valuable invitation to think of secrecy as a fundamental organizational and social phenomenon. To reinvigorate our field, we need more books like this one to unearth overlooked topics and turn them into new avenues for thinking and doing research in organization studies.
Zooming out, we can think of Secrecy at Work as part of a body of literature seeking to establish and extend considerations about the management of information in organizational settings. Such work has a long history in our own and related fields, but has mainly taken the shape of more functional and practical investigations of knowledge management—what Costas and Grey term “informational approaches.” In recent years, however, more critical and conceptual approaches have offered new ways of thinking about the role of information and knowledge in organizations. Such accounts explore how seeing, knowing, and acting shapes organizational life in profound and surprising ways. Framed as “critical studies,” these approaches explore questions about organization, social order, and politics made salient by the circulation and control of information and knowledge (Birchall, 2015; Hansen, Christensen, & Flyverbom, 2015; Roberts, 2009). Taken together, such work is interested in establishing visibilities as an umbrella concept for a wide range of visibility practices including transparency, surveillance, secrecy, and opacity as central to organization and management studies (Hansen et al., 2015). Implicitly, Costas and Grey’s book contributes to these efforts by positioning secrecy in relation to neighboring concepts, such as privacy, silence, anonymity, and taboo. This, however, is where the book is somewhat underdeveloped. It focuses mainly on connecting and relating secrecy to broader, more established concepts in organization studies, such as knowledge, power, and identity. A lot of the book takes the shape of a re-reading of such key themes in organization studies through a focus on secrecy. This is valuable both for people interested in organization studies and people interested in secrecy. For those interested in the broader set of phenomena that secrecy is part of, such as transparency and surveillance, the book mainly offers only a few nods and hints. A more developed engagement with these questions about the entanglement between secrecy and other visibility phenomena could maybe have pushed the authors beyond the re-reading of existing themes in organization studies and into new conceptual terrains. This would also allow the book to develop its own approach to secrecy and invite the authors to bring in more cases and empirical richness in the analysis of secrecy. Obviously, a book can only do so much, and the contributions of this one are already plentiful. I believe that it will pave the way for more work on secrecy as a social and organizational force, and that it will become a foundational piece in the emergence of a broader field of research capturing the management of information and visibilities in organizational settings.