The Transparency–Power Nexus

Abstract

Although transparency is often believed to mitigate the negative effects of power by providing access to the hidden sides of organizational and political life, extant research fails to specify how transparency more fundamentally relates to power. To make sense of this relationship, this article develops an analytical language along two dimensions: “observational control” and “regularizing control.” Within this framework, we look at (a) attempts to carry out control through observation, (b) identity-oriented forms of normative control, (c) strategically ambiguous articulations of transparency, and (d) attempts to normalize and institutionalize behavior across organizational settings through the use of reporting and ranking systems. In the concluding section, we discuss how our conceptualization might nuance and enrich future studies of the transparency–power nexus and we point to some important implications for management practitioners.

Keywords

transparency observational control regularizing control strategic ambiguity power

Dave Eggers’s book The Circle describes an organization in which all aspects of the lives of employees are monitored and ranked. Even outside work, their activities must be shared with others, because “privacy is theft” and “secrets are lies.” Managers and employees at The Circle promote a technology-driven societal vision of transparency as the ideal solution to misconduct, selfishness, and dishonesty. If everything is observed all the time, bad things will stop occurring and people will behave as they should. Following this philosophy, the company works aggressively to gather and connect data about as many people as possible to “close the circle” and build a perfectly transparent organization. As Mae, the main character in the book, describes her workplace, “Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected.” Employees wear cameras and broadcast everything they do. Simultaneously, they push politicians to similarly “go transparent” in all situations. Recalling famous literary works such as Orwell’s 1984, Eggers’s story highlights one of the hottest political and managerial trends of our times: transparency (Lord, 2006; Piotrowski, 2010; Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003). Is transparency necessarily a good thing? And, can we be sure that it only serves legitimate forms of power?

The transparency ideal itself is not new. Since ancient times, it has been acknowledged that power, illegitimate or not, resides and thrives in contexts marked by secrecy and opacity (Hood, 2006). Transparency, accordingly, has been thought of as a potent antidote to the mischiefs of power, such as inefficiency, fraud, and corruption (e.g., Lord, 2006; Oliver, 2004). This is still the case today. Yet, under the impact of new communication technologies, globalization, and inquisitive media, this idea has come to shape virtually all aspects of contemporary society, especially in the contexts of management and governance. In accordance with this trend, we initially define transparency not as a precise end state in which everything is clear and apparent, but as a predominant social value that stimulates and guides a general quest for insight into and regulation of organizational, institutional, and political practices, particularly in the Western world (Christensen & Cornelissen, 2015).

Because transparency is widely considered a solution to misuses of power, there is an urgent need to focus on how transparency relates to power. Although the intersections of transparency and power are multiple, there is a lack of analytical vocabularies to make sense of these varieties. This article provides a conceptualization of the transparency–power nexus by pointing to some of the ways that transparency guides and shapes human and organizational conduct. In addition to the predominant view that transparency facilitates control through observation, we argue that transparency produces particular conditions for human and organizational action and meaning-making, a kind of broader regularizing control.

A burgeoning body of empirical and theoretical literature has produced nuanced understandings of transparency, including critiques of simplistic expectations as to what increased transparency may accomplish (e.g., Drucker & Gumpert, 2007; Garsten & de Montoya, 2008; Strathern, 2000; West & Sanders, 2003). We see this in discussions of, for instance, good governance (e.g., Florini, 2007; Hood & Heald, 2006; Piotrowski, 2010), disclosure practices (Fung, Graham, & Weil, 2007), surveillance (Thompson, 2005; Waiton, 2010), and social accountability (Christensen, Morsing, & Thyssen, 2011; Fox, 2007). In this research, the ambiguities surrounding transparency are brought to the fore and acknowledged, not as mistakes or imperfections of an otherwise impeccable ideal, but as inescapable dimensions of the transparency pursuit itself. The fact, for example, that confidentiality and secrecy are inevitable side-effects of any disclosure practice (Birchall, 2011; Etzioni, 2010) indicates that transparency is not only about clarity and insight but also, and simultaneously, about boundaries, regulation, and control. Transparency, as we shall argue below, is wrought with power.

We conceptualize the relationship between power and transparency as a nexus involving two dimensions in which specific manifestations of power, conveyed here heuristically in terms of the concept of “control,” come to the fore: “observational control” and “regularizing control.” The first of these, observational control, involves a conception of power that equates transparency to information gathering, processing, and provision. In this case, control is exercised by means of co-presence or accessibility that can make people or processes transparent and thus subject to control. Most organizational projects referring to openness and disclosure, and the bulk of mainstream research about transparency, conceptualize transparency in terms of observation and information (e.g., Rawlins, 2009; Schnackenberg & Tomlinson, 2014).

The second dimension of the nexus, transparency as regularizing control, emphasizes the conditions and subjectivities produced by transparency practices (cf. Roberts, 2009). Regularizing forms of control guide behavior on the basis of shared, internalized norms and expectations, not direct interventions or coercion. Regularizing control, thus, concerns the communicative and discursive capacities of the transparency pursuit when it comes to steering the conduct of individuals and organizations (Hansen, Christensen, & Flyverbom, 2015). These two dimensions of the transparency–power nexus are not easily separable and co-exist in practice in many organizational settings. Here, our distinction between them is analytical and helps us demonstrate how existing research has mainly conceptualized transparency as observational control at the expense of a more sophisticated understanding of the regularizing control that transparency can produce.

In what follows we first define power analytically and elaborate on the two dimensions of the nexus by connecting them to studies of transparency and related issues. This serves as a basis for articulating how transparency efforts come to work not only as observational control but also as a wide-ranging regularizing control in organizational settings. Our illustrations foreground various facets of the transparency–power nexus and their workings in organizational settings by looking at, respectively, (a) attempts to carry out control through observation, (b) identity-oriented forms of normative control, (c) strategically ambiguous articulations of transparency, and (d) attempts to standardize and institutionalize behavior across organizational settings through the use of reporting and ranking systems. We substantiate our argument with examples from an organizational setting where the transparency ideal is explicitly accentuated, Google Inc., as well as with examples of reporting—a highly celebrated transparency technique that operates across organizational settings. Finally, in the concluding section, we discuss how our conceptualization might enrich future studies of the transparency–power nexus and inform management practices.

Power and Transparency

Power is a contested concept (Haugaard, 2002, 2009; Hindess, 1996; Lukes, 2005), which is why connecting it to discussions of transparency is not an easy task. To initiate this conceptual effort, we rely on Barnett and Duvall (2005) who define power as “the production, in and through social relations, of effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine their own circumstances and fate” (p. 4). This very general definition of power can be further broken down into two broad assumptions about how power works, each of them corresponding to a particular understanding of transparency and its relation to specific manifestations of power (i.e., instances of “control”).

First, power can be seen as an attribute of particular actors and their interactions. That is, as something actors possess and utilize in attempts to regulate others. This classical understanding of power is often associated with the work of Lukes (2005) and others who discuss how social actors can use power knowingly as a resource to control other people’s actions, including their capacity to determine their own circumstances and fate. Resources can be material and symbolic, including information obtained through observation and mobilized for purposes of control. This conception roughly corresponds to Goehler’s (2000) notion of “transitive power” (transitive as in verbs requiring a subject and an object) and Haugaard’s (2009) notion of “power over” where specific actors subordinate, force, or restrict the actions of others. In these cases, it is the possession of resources such as information that makes the exercise of power possible, and control is understood in terms of co-presence and direct attempts to influence the actions and capacities of others. As we will show below, this assumption about power correlates with an understanding of the transparency–power nexus as a matter of observational control, taking place in social interactions that are quite specific, immediate, and direct.

Power is also understood as a matter of how wider social relationships are constituted in the first place. In such an instance, power is not simply about one actor’s direct influence over another based on resources or positions (Barnett & Duvall, 2005). Rather, power works mainly through extensive and institutionally anchored relationships, including systems of signification, all of which can produce social identities and capacities. Such operations of power are diffuse and indirect. This dimension of the transparency–power nexus relates transparency to what we term regularizing control and primarily relies on Foucault’s later work, in which he shifted his attention from the more narrow workings of “discipline,” focused on the targeted control of individual conduct, and set out to account for the logic of more elaborate attempts to govern populations and societies, or what he variously termed “bio-politics,” “regularizing control,” and “security” (Collier, 2009; Foucault, 2003).

Drawing a parallel between Foucault and related conceptions, regularizing control echoes the idea of “power to” (Haugaard, 2009). Here, the focus is on how wider social relations come to establish particular conditions and make certain capacities and practices available to social actors, including social systems of signification and meaning-making. Another conception of power that resembles that of regularizing control is Goehler’s (2000) notion of “intransitive power.” Whereas transitive power focuses on the exercise of power with a view to constraining actions (often through observation), intransitive power encompasses “common spaces for action” (Goehler, 2000) and indirect ways of shaping conduct. Analyzing transparency as regularizing control, thus, foregrounds the communicative processes and ambiguities involved in the mobilization of transparency and considers how such practices shape conduct in social relations and organizational settings.

Drawing on the conceptualizations of power laid out above, we now turn to a more detailed conceptualization of transparency in terms of observational control and regularizing control, respectively. Specifically, we seek to ground our conceptualizations in relevant literature on transparency and point to some of their consequences for concrete analyses of the workings of transparency.

Transparency as Observational Control

Extant writings have largely conceptualized the power dimension of transparency as observational control (Finel & Lord, 2002; Prat, 2006). For a society devoted to visibility (Brighenti, 2007), this makes perfect sense. Observation, after all, appears to be an immediate type of transparency that we find, for example, in face-to-face interactions and other close-knit social settings, where peers observe each other or where managers oversee workers’ behavior directly. Observational control involves either co-presence (Etzioni, 2010) or observations through mediating technologies, such as cameras and information-sharing systems. Extrapolating from such situations, many theoretical accounts associate transparency with surveillance and monitoring, direct or indirect. For instance, in game theoretical models of principal–agent relations, “transparency corresponds to the ability of the principal to observe what the agent does” (Prat, 2006, p. 91), typically with a view to minimizing the likelihood of fraud, laziness, and other unwanted activities. In such accounts, transparency is understood as a symbolic resource that takes the form of information.

A related, albeit more complex, version of transparency as observational control is represented in the policies of governmentally mandated disclosures through which corporate leaders and their organizations, politicians, and public officials are held accountable for their decisions and words. Through these disclosures, the press and the public are granted access to governmental and corporate budgets and files, and society and its members can protect themselves against power abuse, corruption, tax evasion, and other types of frauds (Henriques, 2007; Oliver, 2004). Examples of such transparency practices are found in open meetings, financial disclosure statements, sunshine laws, budgetary reviews, corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, and audits (e.g., Fung et al., 2007; Power, 1997). When transparency is understood as observational control, the provision of information to one or more audiences is pivotal (Fenster, 2006). Williams (2005) defines transparency accordingly “as the extent to which the organization provides relevant, timely, and reliable information, in written and verbal form, to investors, regulators, and market intermediaries” (p. 361; see also Rawlins, 2009).

Information, however, can flow in several directions, thus complicating the question of whom and what is observed. Although information availability has emancipatory potential by providing insight into the circles of power, it simultaneously allows the rulers to monitor their subjects, as sociologists and social critics frequently point out (e.g., Cohen, 1985; Lyon, 1994, 2001). In this perspective, which often draws on Foucault’s analysis of the penal institution, transparency is tantamount to centrally managed discipline. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a prison in which the inspector is able to see, and thus control, all prisoners at once—a so-called panopticon (pan: all; optic: see)—Foucault (1977) describes discipline in modern society as “panopticism,” noting that the modern body (and soul) is disciplined through numerous means of observation: in the private sphere, in public places, and in the workplace setting. Acknowledging that the very possibility of being observed has self-disciplining effects, Foucault’s notion of panopticism has come to shape many contemporary discussions of the ties between transparency and control. The existence of open office landscapes, surveillance cameras in public domains, and glass in corporate headquarters and buildings has spurred a wealth of critical discussions about the ways in which visibility and observation constitute significant forms of control (Gabriel, 2005; Lyon, 2001; Zyglidopoulos & Fleming, 2011). Even if Foucault’s approach to discipline, in principle, captures the fact that control works in multiple directions and at different levels (Thompson, 2005), his perspective has inspired rather gloomy prophecies and accounts of how transparency empowers the already powerful (Moix, 2010; see also Vattimo, 1992).

The prevalent understanding of transparency in terms of observational control raises a number of important questions. First, there is the question about direction, selection, type, presentation, and legibility of the available information. If information, for example, only flows to those in established power positions or is decipherable only by insiders or experts, openness and information access do not automatically unfold into organizational transparency with the potential to redistribute power (e.g., Fung et al., 2007; Henriques, 2007; Power, 1997). In any case, presenting the organization through the provision of information is not a passive and indifferent act of letting everything be known (Christensen et al., 2011). Moreover, if transparency practices develop, as Oliver (2004) points out, from passive information provision to more active disclosure practices, the question is what the audience really sees. For instance, organizations may release masses of information as a way to distract attention from sensitive issues, in which case there could be more information but no clarity. In many cases, observational approaches tend to overstate the capacity of transparency practices to generate insight and empowerment (Fenster, 2006). Assuming a “knowing subject” who is able to access “truth,” whether institutional, governmental, or corporate, observational approaches take an active reception of information for granted (e.g., Rawlins, 2009). Yet, increased transparency does not necessarily entail power shifts from managers to employees or from corporations to customers, as some writers seem to assume (e.g., Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003).

Second, understandings of transparency as observational control tend to overlook “noise,” resistance, and other types of “blockages” in the communication process. As Weber (1968) makes it clear, information is a form of power and gatekeeping is necessary to shield bureaucracy against the intrusion of outsiders. The practice of gatekeeping is not necessarily a simple one-way or mechanical affair rooted in formal power positions, it also has power consequences in terms of the filtering of information available for scrutiny. Even in societies where open information exchange is extolled as a democratic ideal necessary to stimulate participation and equalize power relationships, organizations and their members have, as Eisenberg (1984) points out, many good reasons for concealment. Obvious examples include bargaining games, conflict resolution, peaceful co-existence, security, trade secrets, and branding where the need to withhold information and protect strategic positions prevails (e.g., Sproull & Kiesler, 1995).

Third, observational approaches to transparency rely on transitive conceptions of power; that is, power understood as “power over,” which focuses mainly on the “who” of power (e.g., Lukes, 2005; Weber, 1968), including the issue of who possesses the relevant resources—in this case, information. But the question as to how power operates in practice, including how specific forms of transparency are manufactured, normalized, and contested, remains out of purview (Clegg & Haugaard, 2009; Haugaard, 2002). Observational control is an important facet of transparency but not the only one. As argued below, transparency involves numerous, largely implicit, dynamics with regularizing potentials, such as those involving framing and negotiation, identity regulation, and, in a wider sense, communication.

Transparency as Regularizing Control

The term regularizing control shifts the attention to more fluid workings of power. Power in this view is not an attribute that discernible social actors possess a priori or mobilize at will within confined sites of observation, like the prison, the factory, the military, or the asylum (Foucault, 1977). Regularizing control is diffuse and part and parcel of social life and the communicative processes through which human subjects are constituted, and meaning is created, normalized, and changed (Clegg & Haugaard, 2009; Goehler, 2000). Through processes of normalization and calculation, control is dispersed and internalized by those who are subjected to its effects and manifested in processes of self-examination, confession, and self-regulation. Where control is regularizing, it has no identifiable source or clear boundaries but shapes the behavior of individuals and organizations that continuously monitor, cultivate, and evaluate themselves according to social performance ideals and standards, as Foucault (1981) describes in the context of bio-politics.

Using these insights to make sense of how transparency relates to power requires that we define transparency as a social process of managing what is visible and present—as well as invisible and absent—a process that produces multiple and extensive kinds of control and ordering (Brighenti, 2010; Flyverbom, 2015). The notion of transparency as regularizing control can be further illuminated with reference to recent literatures using similar conceptualizations. As pointed out by Roberts (2009), transparency can be understood as “performative,” in that it “works back upon those subject to it in ways that are often counterproductive, or at least far exceeds the passive image of a simple making visible” (p. 958). Put differently, transparency has “ordering” (Kendall & Wickham, 2001) properties that potentially shape and generate organizational practices and human subjects. For instance, numbers-based transparency efforts, such as rankings, do more than simply render qualitative phenomena countable. Such efforts also involve an abstraction from specific qualities and thereby reduce complexity. As such, they may improve decision-making and accountability, heighten efficiency, and improve budget decisions (Moynihan, 2008). Simultaneously, however, they have the potential to constitute social reality by making certain aspects of reality visible and turning the latter into comparable objects of knowledge (Hansen, 2015; Sauder & Espeland, 2009). Transparency devices, in other words, not only expose and conceal but also constitute objects, subjects, and relations in particular ways (Weiskopf, 2014). This is true also for qualitative devices such as the rhetorical strategies used to express and disclose information. Language can be used to expose, but it may simultaneously conceal and protect, and language contributes to the normalization of particular ways of acting and thinking. These are the sorts of effects we refer to as the regularizing control of transparency.

Let us briefly summarize our argument so far. Although the dimension of transparency as observational control pervades most debates on transparency, regularizing control is much less researched and understood in transparency literatures. However, connecting transparency to the conception of regularizing control, as we have done in this section, suggests that the effects of transparency practices reach far beyond the observation and discipline made possible through information provision and accessibility. We have to be careful, though, not to discard the force of observation per se, and the imagery of transparency as observational control. As Foucault’s (1977) discussion of the “panopticon” suggested, observation is clearly involved in transparency and surveillance practices. Yet, if we limit focus to the information processes involved in these practices, we end up underestimating the constitutive and institutional forces that establish observation as a social relation in the first place, including the imaginary that surrounds “transparency.” Awareness of the very possibility of being observed has, according to Foucault, self-disciplining potential and effects, something, which comes to serve as an institutional model or paradigm for modern societies. Thus, the two dimensions are not irreconcilable in research on transparency but suggest different analytical strategies, different ways of speaking about transparency, and different ways of seeing the role of transparency in information processes, identity making, relationships, and institutions. However, by insisting on the importance of the second dimension of the nexus, regularizing control, we suggest the usefulness of considering transparency as a productive force, which is both conditioned upon and conditions a host of relations, actions, and norms for conduct.

Varieties of Transparency and Power in Organizational Settings

We opened this article with a brief reference to the fictitious universe of The Circle by Dave Egger, in which transparency is taken to the point of perfection and used as a means to guide and control not only the work routines and social activities of employees but also the conduct of politicians and other parts of the company’s surroundings. Although such extreme versions of organizational commitments to transparency remain fictional, many contemporary organizations are shaped by transparency projects of various sorts. These may include explicit documentation and reporting policies, implicit norms and expectations about information disclosures, institutionalized mechanisms for dialogue and communication with colleagues such as “employee forums,” and information-sharing systems such as intranets (e.g., Neher, 1997; Neyland, 2007; Studer, 2009). Such organizational transparency efforts are increasingly considered vital for employee and customer satisfaction, accountability and legitimacy. In the remainder of the article, we detail how transparency may relate to power and control by scrutinizing the potential power effects of four different types of organizational transparency practices. The first of these corresponds to what we have referred to as observational control, and the other three explore different facets of regularizing control. Although not an exhaustive list, these illustrations highlight significant variations of the transparency–power nexus. Our illustrations derive from (a) empirical research (by the first author) in an organization with an explicit commitment to transparency, for example, Google Inc., which can be viewed as a “critical case” (Yin, 2003) because of its deliberate and explicit attempts to be transparent, and (b) extant research on reporting and similar transparency techniques that currently shape organizational settings.

Disciplining Through Observation

The most immediate and evident type of control via transparency efforts involves, as we have mentioned, physical co-presence or observation through technological means. Attempts to guide conduct in this way are well described in the literature on workplace control, including writings on scientific management and organizational discipline (Barker & Cheney, 1994; Mumby, 2013). To exemplify how transparency efforts may bring about such control in concrete organizational settings, the case of Google is illustrative. Google’s official ambition is to be “open by default” (Hamel, 2007). The company practices this philosophy in a number of ways, including attempts to maintain open dialogues with employees, for instance through information-sharing meetings and Q&A sessions with directors, and through elaborate information-sharing systems and policies for the management of disclosure.

More specifically, employees at Google are invited to weekly meetings called “Thank God It’s Friday” (TGIFs) and asked to bring up questions or concerns they may have. Such forums for information sharing are a relatively new phenomenon at Google but play increasingly central roles in organizations seeking to position themselves as innovative and open (Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003). The underlying assumption is that employees can know and shape the conduct of their superiors through such meetings and that the meetings, therefore, may function as bulwarks against misconduct and secrecy. Also, such efforts to make otherwise opaque information available are seen as a way to empower employees and engage them in decision-making processes (cf. Schmitt, 2010). At the same time, however, employee meetings may have more subtle power effects. For instance, employees may not always be willing to ask the most pressing or sensitive questions, in particular because of the social proximity and mutual visibility that characterize such situations. The institutionalization of relatively formalistic initiatives such as TGIFs inevitably sets limits on the sorts of conversations and disclosures that may actually transpire. As proxies for transparency, they turn what could be a very diverse set of concerns, critiques, and interactions into a public and formalized conversation that limits what can be articulated by those involved. Managers and others rolling out a transparency initiative need to consider not just what information and how much of it they want to share but also the variety of power effects such an initiative may have. As with other types of participation and enrollment, such forums constitute subjects in particular ways: Employees must speak publicly—in the Google case, in a context set up to celebrate the end of the work week—if they want to shape decisions and voice critique.

In addition to meetings and other dialogical forums, transparent organizations install technological systems intended to facilitate the provision, circulation, and storing of information (Studer, 2009). Google has an intranet system known as MOMA, which is designed to provide information about all employees’ projects, affiliations, targets, and possible failures. Although such systems are considered central to disclosure-based compliance, organizational memory, and monitoring, their uses and ramifications are ambiguous. As it is not entirely clear who can access what, when, and for what purpose, employees need to consider carefully the material they enter in such systems and navigate strategically when they formulate goals, describe projects, and otherwise articulate criteria for success. Intentionally or not, MOMA offers a form of observational control that makes the conduct of employees much easier to scrutinize than in organizations relying on more private and less systematic forms of disclosure. With the emergence of technologies for the extraction and circulation of information, employees need to engage in new forms of “online self-management” and “curate” their “digital visibility” very carefully (Barkelaar, 2014).

Regulating Identities

Targets of control are not always (or only) behavior as such but also human subjectivities and processes of identity formation (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Control increasingly works through norms or culture (e.g., Kunda, 1992), and such forms of identity regulation constitute a second way in which we can understand the relationship between transparency and power.

Organizational engagements with transparency often involve attempts to cast transparency as a central feature of the organization’s culture and management style. In the case of Google, internal transparency is considered essential for the organization’s effective knowledge work as well as an important formula for engaging employees (“Passion, Not Perks,” 2011). Indeed, transparency is often presented as a break with the approaches of traditional companies where management is “based on mistrust, command, and control” and where decision processes are usually opaque to most employees (Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003, p. 99). When Google describes its organizational culture and management style, transparency is intimately connected to the cultivation of particular subjectivities. Consider the following quotes from a newsletter titled “Transparency and Voice at Google”:

If you’re an organization that says “our people are our greatest asset,” you must default to open. It’s the only way to demonstrate to your employees that you believe they are trustworthy adults and have good judgment. And giving them more context about what is happening (and how, and why) will enable them to do their jobs more effectively and contribute in ways a top-down manager couldn’t anticipate. (“Passion, Not Perks,” 2011)

Also, the newsletter states,

We regularly survey employees about their managers, and then use that information to publicly recognize the best managers and enlist them as teachers and role models for the next year. The worst managers receive intense coaching and support, which helps 75 percent of them get better within a quarter.

Both examples show how transparency efforts produce subtle forms of control that operate not only through observation but also through the aspirational identities and subjectivities defined for employees in the organization (cf. Thornborrow & Brown, 2009).

The need for careful management of transparency involves other forms of control that operate through the individual employee. Google, for example, states that it seeks to “share everything, and trust Googlers to keep the information confidential” (“Passion, Not Perks,” 2011). This highly equivocal statement calls on members to understand, respect, and carefully balance the boundary between inside and outside, a balance which is all the more delicate because of the way communication is organized. In contrast to many companies with a centralized communication unit, Google’s strategy is to let different projects and initiatives within the organization set up individual blogs and web sites to engage directly with users and interested parties. As the policy director puts it, this decentralized approach to communication—with more than 50 different blogs—means that “lots of people are speaking on behalf of the company” (interview with policy director, 2011). This approach arises from a communication strategy based on a belief in the value of “very little centralized control over information flows.” Furthermore, the approach involves a decision to be “processually transparent,” rather than “substantially transparent,” that is, to encourage transparency broadly without defining a priori what to disclose or how to present things. As a result of this strategy, the responsibilities for managing transparency shift from top managers to team leaders and individual employees.

Such reconfigured responsibilities impose significant self-discipline on employees when handling company-related information. This becomes particularly evident in moments when Google’s commitment to transparency is tested, as when information leaks to unintended audiences. For instance, just as Google was launching its Google+ initiative, a social networking platform intended to produce the sorts of social data that Facebook thrives on, one of its engineers used a blog post to share his frustrations with the initiative. Mistakenly, he posted his critical rant publicly via Google+, making it available for the world outside Google. Instead of firing the engineer, who violated the expectation that employees can be trusted to practice confidentiality, this decentralized approach allowed him to acknowledge his mistake and celebrate the company’s commitment to transparency. In the words of the engineer himself,

Amazingly, nothing bad happened to me at Google. Everyone just laughed a lot, all the way to the top, for having committed what must be the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screw-ups in tech history. But they also listened, which is super cool. I probably shouldn’t talk much about it, but they are already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though. When I claimed in my internal post that “Google does everything right,” I meant it. When they are faced with any problem at all, whether it’s technical or organizational or cultural, they set out to solve it in a first-class way. (Yegge, 2011)

This case may be interpreted straightforwardly to illustrate that Google is a great place to work and that the company really means what it says about transparency. Yet, such instances simultaneously indicate how transparency ideals produce particular cultural and normative conditions for human conduct, including the identities and subjectivities that employees can take on. Although the company handled this mistake in accordance with its official values, it may still be unclear to employees exactly how to manage information flows and navigate the boundary between internal and external information. In organizations that allow for decentralized information control, decisions can no longer be made based on formal organizational policies and procedures but must rely on individual judgment and responsibility. Thus, transparency initiatives at Google imply not only the availability of more information but also more fluid organizational boundaries and a redistribution of the responsibilities of managers and employees. Such ambiguous power effects of transparency are explored further in the following.

Steering Through Ambiguity

Even when organizations officially subscribe to transparency, it may sometimes seem as if they are ambivalent about the ideal when implemented in practice. Eisenberg (1984), for example, argues that organizations, when pressed for more information than they are inclined to divulge, often resort to strategic ambiguity, that is, “use ambiguity purposely to accomplish their goals” (p. 230). As long as messages are less than precise, as Eisenberg explains, organizations and their leaders can deny specific interpretations of their messages as a way to protect confidentiality, avoid conflict, and conceal more specific strategic information (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1997). Although such practice may be questioned on ethical grounds (Paul & Strbiak, 1997), Eisenberg argues that it is necessary for communicators to cultivate ambiguity, especially in complex and turbulent environments, because it allows them at once to express and protect, reveal and conceal. As Weick and Browning (1986) point out, “Vagueness is a source of power, a form of slack, and a means of building consensus” (p. 254).

In this view, however, ambiguity serves deliberately to moderate transparency, not to increase it. Although such use of ambiguity may be quite widespread, this understanding is too limiting for our purposes. First, ambiguity is not simply an instrument of power in the hands of management but a rhetorical resource that may be constructed and exploited by many different actors to enable or constrain collective action (Jarzabkowski, Sillince, & Shaw, 2010). Second, the notion of ambiguity as a strategic tool used deliberately to protect and conceal ignores the possibility that the intent behind its use is more benign, reflecting, for example, that communicators are uncertain about the exact meaning of the terms they use—here, transparency—and seek to navigate uncertainty by appealing in vague terms to different audiences (Sillince, Jarzabkowski, & Shaw, 2012). Such uses of ambiguity make it possible to cope with the existence of uncertainty and also allow for subtle forms of control. Third, sincere attempts to respond to demands for more transparency may sometimes, incidentally, produce its opposite, opacity. Attending to the ambiguous nature of the transparency ideal along these lines allows us to approach transparency as a communicative practice with subtle but significant, power effects (see also Davenport & Leitch, 2005; Leitch & Davenport, 2002; Miller, Joseph, & Apker, 2000).

When organizations like Google commit themselves to transparency, they obviously cannot apply this principle to all parts and processes of the organization. Many things such as upcoming products, the algorithm organizing searches, and a gamut of other sensitive information have to remain secret. Google is therefore selective about its transparency efforts (cf. Heil & Robertson, 1991). On one hand, and as mentioned above, internal transparency is a strong priority, and Google seeks to build and manage its reputation and credibility through transparency efforts. This also involves attempts to enhance peering into the organization by outsiders, something that seems especially important for large iconic companies. Google’s growth and visibility have clearly increased external demands for transparency. As the policy director states, “One of the things we realized is that with size and success comes suspicion. When you are really successful and you grow really quickly, people will be more suspicious. They will want to know more about you” (interview with policy director, 2011).

At the same time, however, lack of transparency may help brand the organization and manage its reputation as an attractive and cutting-edge place to work. Along with many other high-tech companies, Google therefore carefully balances transparency and opacity to create excitement and curiosity about its new products as well as its competencies and abilities to innovate. Realizing that consumers want to believe that something unique and enticing goes on inside, secrecy has become an important branding strategy for contemporary products and organizations (Brown, 2001). Although transparency is the official value, the obsession with non-disclosure agreements in Silicon Valley and among other companies contributes to a degree of mystery that is central to the positioning of such companies as innovative (Garsten & de Montoya, 2008). With full transparency, there would hardly be a market for books such as What Would Google Do? (Jarvis, 2009) or In the Plex—How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (Levy, 2011) that promise us a peek inside the heads and labs of Google.

Ambiguity around the meaning and management of transparency, however, extends beyond such reputation and branding concerns. As a subtle form of power and control, ambiguity promotes “unified diversity” (Eisenberg, 1984), that is, creating a situation where multiple interpretations co-exist among different audiences who all believe that they attend to the same message. Given this quality, ambiguity has the potential to facilitate participation, creativity, and involvement (Sillince et al., 2012) and thus stimulate organizational change without necessarily ruling out specific understandings and interpretations (see also Davenport & Leitch, 2005). In Google, the acceptance of multiple interpretations and ways of navigating in relation to the transparency ideal contributes to the positioning of the company as “an incredible place to work” (Bell, 2011) and bolsters the mythology surrounding it. Facilitating unified diversity, the circulation of multiple fuzzy transparency ideals at Google illustrates how such notions may work to engage, entice, and create commitment in intended or surprising ways.

Transparency projects, thus, do not simply remove secrets and opacities in organizations, or allow for observational control but rely on ambiguity to handle complexity, thereby creating more extensive forms of regularizing control that impinge on spaces, norms, and boundaries for conduct within and across organizational settings. Christensen and Langer (2009), for example, argue that organizations seek to handle the growing pressure for transparency through policies of consistency, that is, by formalizing all communication flows and pursuing uniformity in everything they say and do. Faced with critical audiences looking for gaps and contradictions in corporate messages, organizations interpret transparency requests as a demand for consistency, something that may discipline organizational voices and imply new types of opacity.

The implications for managerial practice are not simply to avoid ambiguity and pursue clarity in everything organizations say or do. Organizations can probably not explore the possibilities and ramifications of transparency without sustaining some openness around the term and its possible meanings. At the same time, however, it is essential that management is aware of the subtle power effects at play when transparency ideals are left open and vague—effects that management may not be able to control to the organization’s advantage. Below, we will address such effects as “normalization.”

Normalizing Through Reporting

Regularizing control is also enacted across organizations, for example, through the growing use of organizational reporting techniques, including numerical ranking systems. Such techniques may be seen as proxies for the direct observation of individual or organizational performance and thus allow for external assessment of (the quality of) various forms of organizational practice. However, their power effects are usually more wide ranging and subtle. First, they contribute to “action at a distance” by permitting actions and calculations established in one place to shape actions elsewhere (Miller & Rose, 1990). Second, they facilitate continuous self-assessment and self-regulation according to social principles, norms, or standards. As such, they have regularizing control effects by shaping the constitution, ordering, and normalization of social relations and identities.

In recent years, reporting has attained growing importance in many types of organizations, involving new types of ambiguity and boundary management between what is revealed and what remains out of sight. One example is Google’s so-called “Transparency Reports,” which are posted online and used to aggregate and disclose data about the state of the Internet, including how and when the Internet has been blocked, where outages have happened, if governments have filtered or asked for the removal of content. Such efforts not simply deliver information that can be used for purposes of control but may also lead to an interlocking of organizations around particular standards, regimes, or issue areas. At Google, the decision to disclose how governments are seeking to control the Internet, for example, certainly creates tensions and has led some governments, including China, to refuse to share such information.

Reporting practices provide powerful examples of how the transparency ideal is adopted and reengineered into a form of action at a distance with regularizing control effects (e.g., Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2007; Garsten & Jacobsson, 2011; Hansen & Porter, 2012). The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), for example, which has pioneered the development of world’s most widely used sustainability reporting framework, defines transparency as the “full disclosure of the processes, procedures, and assumptions” of the reported information. Rather than encouraging a free or unlimited flow of information between organizations and their stakeholders, however, GRI defines and promotes standardized principles and indicators that organizations can use to measure and report their economic, environmental, and social performance. According to GRI’s website, “More than 1,500 companies, including many of the world’s leading brands, have declared their voluntary adoption of the Guidelines worldwide” (www.globalreporting.org). Reporting as a mechanism to regulate and control also lies at the heart of other significant transnational organizational forms such as the United Nations Global Compact. Launched as a “strategic policy initiative for business” in 2000, the Compact stresses market-based initiatives in the global economy, positioning business as a key actor in the implementation of 10 principles that revolve around human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption. Businesses can sign up to the initiative voluntarily and report about their progress in terms of implementing these principles. This way, GRI and the Compact not only shape and regularize operationalizations of transparency but also help normalize conduct within and across organizational settings in ways that generate meaning and constitute organizations and their employees as members of a responsible world community.

At the same time, new barriers for insight and participation are erected. Although the accounts that organizations produce—to comply with either legal requirements or voluntary, soft law arrangements such as GRI and UN Global Compact—contribute to the development of standards for openness and responsibility, they may simultaneously exclude more open debate and deliberation about what transparency is or should be. This resonates well with Power’s (1997) observation that reports and auditing statements are typically constructed as “labels” or one-way signals that must be trusted and, therefore, rarely form a basis for public communication and dialogue. Something similar can be said about the production of performance information via transnational initiatives such as GRI and the Compact, even though their proclaimed intention is the exact opposite, namely to enhance public communication and dialogue.

The ways reporting makes things observable are inevitably shaped by political orientations, social institutions, and organizational strategies which are simply taken for granted. Take the example of the numerical rankings or ratings that often form part of organizational performance reporting. Numerical indices are based on systems of classification and categorization that are invisible or opaque to most people (Hansen, 2015). As such, they “selectively mask or reveal” (Drucker & Gumpert, 2007, p. 495), as is demonstrated by an expanding body of research looking at reporting practices in public and private sector organizations, including universities (e.g., Espeland & Sauder, 2007). The conceptualization of the transparency–power nexus we offer highlights that rankings and similar transparency devices do not simply produce interpretations in a highly abstract and decontextualized form. They are also sources of social, political, and organizational ordering as they travel with great ease across boundaries, facilitating action at a distance and normalizing particular ways of creating knowledge and visibility (Hansen & Flyverbom, 2014). As such, they produce and reconfigure power in ways that extend far beyond observational control.

Conclusion

For centuries, it has been a fundamental assumption that transparency helps prevent or reduce illegitimate forms of power. By facilitating insight and stimulating knowledge and participation among citizens, consumers, and organizational members, transparency is seen as a democratic practice with great emancipatory potential (Christensen & Cheney, 2015). However, the growing opportunities for transparency driven by digital communication technologies and globalization have stimulated worries about increased surveillance that may instead centralize control, reinforce entrenched power positions, and encroach on privacy. Although these worries describe essential features of contemporary society, their implied notion of power is constrained by a rather narrow understanding of transparency as observational control.

In this article, we have proposed that the relationship between power and transparency is best understood in terms of both “observational control” and “regularizing control.” In many cases, these facets of the transparency–power nexus overlap and operate within and across organizational boundaries. On this backdrop, and in contrast to research that equates transparency with information access, we argue that transparency simultaneously produces and reconfigures power relations in ways that are far more manifold and subtle than usually assumed. The main contribution of the article, therefore, is that transparency is essentially productive, ambiguous, and regularizing. It works not merely as observational control, but activates power through definitions of what transparency means, how it is framed, displayed, distorted, or ignored, as well as through the ordering of social expectations and the shaping of social conduct, including processes of self-examination and self-regulation. In such processes, power is more diffuse and relational, constituted in interaction and mobilized in discourse. This is how transparency becomes entangled with broader political regimes or management trends, which some scholars discuss under labels such as neoliberalism (Garsten & de Montoya, 2008), corporate social responsibility (Christensen et al., 2011), or visibility politics (Zyglidopoulos & Fleming, 2011).

Highlighting the regularizing side of the transparency–power nexus helps us understand the ambiguities of transparency and the unrecognized ways in which power is at play, as evidenced in the examples from Google Inc. Moreover, the project of making organizations and other phenomena transparent through specific transparency techniques, such as reporting, is not merely about facilitating insight for the general public with a view to observational control but also about the creation of a space for communication in which multiple interpretations about what is transparent and opaque and what is right and wrong can co-exist and struggle for hegemony. In this process, the “who” of power is difficult to pinpoint, in particular because such efforts take the shape of “action at a distance.” That is, processes where calculations developed in one site, for example, a government office or the headquarters of a non-governmental organization (NGO), come to shape actions in other places through the communication and resources that flow in the networks and that link up the actors (Miller & Rose, 1990). The power effects of such processes are multiple and varied, and create spaces where organizations and their members can (re)produce boundaries, establish and confirm norms for conduct, and protect organizational identities. Even when different actors disagree and challenge each other’s understandings of specific transparency definitions and practices, their interaction on this particular issue contributes to a normalization of transparency as a significant principle of organizing. Transparency, in other words, is a productive power practice that conditions organizational conduct in manifold ways.

All of this has implications for management practitioners. As we have sought to articulate, transparency does not limit or do away with power inequalities or solve problems related to control through the provision of information but produces new forms of power effects. Thus, managers and organizations aspiring for transparency need not only focus on the amount and quality of the information they disclose but also on more complex issues and effects, such as how transparency reconfigures boundaries, responsibilities, identities, and standards for conduct. One central message that emanates from our conceptualization and illustration of the transparency–power nexus is thus that all transparency initiatives have ambiguous and far-reaching power effects that need to be reflected on and taken seriously.

As noted above, our illustrations of how transparency generates subtle forms of regularizing control are not exhaustive but do represent an attempt to carve out a new terrain for studies of the transparency–power nexus. Future research may study the varieties of power effects produced by transparency by exploring in more detail the forms and variations of observational control and regularizing control that we have outlined. Such work may start from the four varieties we have highlighted but would also need to push beyond these to look at, for instance, other forms of action-at-a-distance, such as advocacy and regulation in the name of transparency, or carry out more situated, empirical studies of how transparency ideals shape concrete, organizational power and control initiatives such as peer-reviewing (Rennstam & Kärreman, 2014), team work and concertive control (Barker, 1993), consistency policies (Christensen & Langer, 2009), or new horizontal or vertical divisions of labor (Mintzberg, 1989).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Mikkel Flyverbom, PhD, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, is an associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on the Internet domain, transparency, corporate advocacy, and sociological questions about data.

Lars Thøger Christensen, PhD, Odense University, Denmark, is a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His main research interests include transparency, CSR, talk action, relationships, and organizational identity.

Hans Krause Hansen, PhD, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, is a professor at the Copenhagen Business School. His main research interests revolve around corruption, corruption control, transparency regimes, and the role of business in transnational governance.

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