Bringing Hidden Organizations Out of the Shadows

Background on This Special Issue

This special issue has been shaped by several earlier scholarly efforts to begin highlighting hidden organizations in the fields of communication and management. Each of these not only influenced some of my own thinking about what we should be doing in this emerging area but also linked me to a diverse set of thoughtful scholars with overlapping interests who would ultimately play a role in this special issue. The first of those was a 2011 panel at the annual convention of the National Communication Association titled “Clandestine Collectives and Secret Societies: Communicative Perspectives on Hidden Organizations.” On this panel, I joined several other communication scholars doing work in this space (Cynthia and Michael Stohl at California - Santa Barbara, Angela Trethewey then at Arizona State, and my own colleague Jack Bratich at Rutgers). It was here that Trethewey first suggested the time might be right for an edited publication on this topic. The following year, I organized a second panel on this issue for the 2012 Academy of Management Convention in Boston. Titled “Backstreet Businesses, Covert Collectives, and Beyond: Unmasking Hidden Organizations,” this session linked me to a wider range of management and organization studies scholars whose work I found relevant (Kevin Corley at Arizona State, Paul Godfrey at Brigham Young University, Bryant Hudson at Florida Atlantic, and Dennis Schoeneborn then at Zurich). Those connections would later lead to involvement in Godfrey’s invited summit on the informal economy in 2014 (where I would network with scholars such as Justin Webb, now at North Carolina–Charlotte) and a couple talks I would give about these issues that same year at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) at the invitation of Schoeneborn (now on faculty at CBS) and Hans Hansen (who helped connect me to Mikkel Flyverbom at CBS and Jana Costas at Free University of Berlin).

In the midst of all this, my book on hidden organizations was published (Scott, 2013), which helped to further establish the relevance of this topic for organizational communication and management scholars. For me, that project also revealed the need to not only highlight a wider range of scholarship on this topic but also try and publish more data-based work in this area. That need and the earlier conversations about some sort of edited work in this area led me to pitch the idea of a special issue to MCQ editor Ling Chen. Fortunately, she was very receptive to the proposal, and a call for papers was first announced in spring 2014. In that call, I noted that this special issue seeks to unmask some of these hidden organizations and to initiate a scholarly conversation about these collectives as a way to stimulate additional work on this important part of our society. I also noted that special consideration would be given to submissions reporting original data utilizing any appropriate method (indeed, all five of the pieces published here report their own analysis of data).

The 15 submitted manuscripts revealed some substantial and exciting diversity. The hidden organizations included secret churches, hidden labor by women business owners, prostitution work, hacker groups, gun show collectives, hidden online communities, dormant disaster response organizations, and various terrorist/extremist cells. Methods ranged from experiments, survey questionnaires, and content analysis to a range of more qualitative approaches (including interviews, participant observation, and ethnographic fieldwork). In general, the submitters to this special issue were not the usual suspects; instead, they revealed a next generation of scholars whose work in this area seems poised to now begin emerging from the shadows in which it was previously hidden. The contexts and authors in those submissions represented locations ranging from Singapore and China to Sweden and Pakistan (not to mention cyberspace). Even though all the authors and all but one of the hidden organizations that are actually published here are U.S.-based, this is clearly an emerging area of scholarship with global relevance and substantial room for scholarly growth.

Overview of Special Issue Articles

The selected submissions for this special issue shed some much needed light on a set of hidden organizations and their largely concealed practices by highlighting collectives of a different breed and, perhaps, purpose. The five articles that follow examine a wide range of hidden organizational contexts: the terrorist organization al-Qai’da, legal brothels, a nonprofit shelter for especially marginalized persons who are homeless, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and one of its covert COINTELPRO operations, and hidden organizations within an online crowd-based community. These organizations also illustrate the vast range of public reactions to hidden organizations. Most would view homeless shelters as hiding for appropriate reasons and terrorist organizations as hiding inappropriately, but the organizations examined here also point to more challenging situations: generally respected government agencies (FBI) with generally unaccepted covert operations, problematic brothels that may be far more acceptable than alternative forms of prostitution, and generally appropriate groups of online reviewers that may become problematic as we start to better understand their potential influence and purpose.

Given the emerging nature of this area, it is not surprising that the articles in this special issue are not generally focused on testing established theories. Yet, they are each grounded in theory-based work. The lead piece represents the most explicit example of this through its examination of the four flows model in the communication as constitutive of organizations (CCO) perspective. Some of the other work draws specifically on models of dialectical tension and contradiction in organizations. Several other articles are grounded in literature and frameworks surrounding secrecy, anonymity, transparency, stigmatized organizations, and the communication of organizational and individual identity. Methodologically, they illustrate a diverse range of approaches to acquire what can be difficult to obtain data. Several pieces examine existing traces of the organization’s actual communication that eventually became publicly accessible (e.g., internal memos, typed letters) to directly assess various aspects of these messages as they pertain to hiding. Other research relies on interviews, various degrees of participant observation, and fieldwork as a means to explore communicative strategies for hiding and to better understand such processes as revealed in the talk of organizational members. Considering the nature of the data, it is not surprising that analytic approaches tend to center on various forms of content coding and more thematic analysis using grounded theory.

Collectively, these articles address several key research questions that help us better understand not only these hidden organizations but also the communicative processes at work here. These articles ask about tensions of visibility–invisibility and about the revelation–concealment dialectic for organizations and their members. They examine management of stigma and identity as well as communication strategies for hiding. Some even ask how communication is used to facilitate the dissolution of more problematic hidden organizations. As one might expect, these pieces collectively raise far more questions than they formally ask or answer, but in doing so, they are adding significantly to our scholarly conversation so that research on hidden organizations is itself not quite so hidden.

It is tempting to try and classify each of these organizations using Scott’s (2013) framework, which uses three dimensions (recognized–anonymous organization, expressive–silent member affiliation, and local/limited–global/public audience) to talk about the communication of identity by these organizations and their members to various audiences. For example, the pieces on the nonprofit Assisi House and the Yelp Elite Squad both describe a relatively anonymous organization with a local audience, but whose members are relatively expressive about their affiliation with the organization. Conversely, the other pieces describe organizations that appear much more mixed in terms of organizational visibility with members who are relatively silent about their affiliations (although the relevant audience for each varies). However, one of the key takeaways from these submissions is that hidden organizations can indeed be rather difficult to clearly classify as they manage shifting tensions between visibility and invisibility, as they alter strategies to fit various audiences, and as they conceal certain organizational elements within otherwise recognizable organizational entities.

Let me briefly mention three other broad observations that this collection of articles reveals. First, being hidden requires communicative effort. The organizations examined here use a range of communicative strategies that help conceal themselves and/or their members from various audiences. In some ways, strategies related to misinformation, anonymous sources, or special communication channels may seem to reflect rather elaborate efforts; yet, in other ways, the hiding strategies are also rather administrative, at times mundane, and often not even digital. Although it is possible to be or become hidden without strategic intent, the organizations described in this special issue achieve their concealment largely through their varied communicative efforts. Second, the hiddenness of organizations is usefully understood as a function of identity management. Each of the organizations examined in this issue manages identity through practices such as adjusting who they are to various audiences, having multiple identities, disidentifying with certain identities, or keeping their identity entirely covert. In other cases, the identity management is about individuals linked to the organization and how those persons represent themselves to others within and beyond the collectives with which they are linked. Thus, identity management provides a means of concealment. Finally, it is important to recognize the key ethical challenges suggested by these articles (even if only one of them examines ethics in any sustained way). These articles remind us that hiding may facilitate certain behaviors clearly judged to be unethical (e.g., terrorist attacks, covert operations by government to undermine legal social movement groups). But, they also suggest the complexity of judging the ethicality of concealment when it comes to hidden organizations. Hiding may allow one to better serve marginalized groups in need of support, more effectively conduct covert operations that could be for public benefit, or to protect workers in stigmatized organizations from public backlash. Just as we are beginning to recognize that transparency and openness do not always facilitate appropriate behavior, we must also recognize that concealment can encourage ethical behavior in certain situations. This is clearly an area in need of more attention.

Acknowledgments and Closing

Producing a special issue such as this involves a team of people. I am very grateful to MCQ Editor Ling Chen and several people associated with that journal and SAGE Publications for providing this opportunity and supporting the project along the way. I want to thank Frank Bridges (a doctoral student at Rutgers) for his help in designing the special issue cover. I would also like to thank all the authors who literally answered the call and submitted manuscripts to this special issue; although I could not publish them all, they have exposed me to the diversity of work on hidden organizations and I hope those authors will continue to pursue this important research.

I am especially grateful to those scholars who took the time to review manuscripts for this special issue. As evidence of the interest in this topic, all 30 reviewers I contacted about serving on the editorial board for this special issue responded affirmatively. These included the scholars I mentioned previously as influencing this work (Costas, Flyverbom, Godfrey, Hansen, Hudson, Schoeneborn, C. Stohl, M. Stohl, Trethewey, and Webb) as well as a set of others with expertise broadly relevant to hidden organizations (David Askay at Cal-Poly, Hamilton Bean at University of Colorado-Denver, Steve Corman at Arizona State, Joelle Cruz at Kent State, Daniel Cochese Davis at Illinois State, Leonard Dobusch at Free University of Berlin, and Allison Weidhaas at Rider). A range of organizational communication scholars with expertise on the specific contexts, methods, or theoretical approaches employed by submitting authors were also vital to the reviewing efforts (Boris Brummans at Montreal, Caleb Carr at Illinois State, George Cheney at Utah, Scott D’Urso at Marquette, Andrew Flanagin at California – Santa Barbara, Matt Koschmann at Colorado, Chih-Hui Lai at Nanyang Technological, Laurie Lewis at Rutgers, Steve May at North Carolina, Amanda Porter at VU University Amsterdam, Tracy Russo at Kansas, Erik Timmerman at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Chiara Valenti at Aarhus). The comments from these reviewers have been of value not only to the many authors who submitted to this special issue but also to me as an editor tasked with selecting and developing the pieces included here.

In closing, even though much of our scholarly attention is devoted to those organizations that try to make themselves highly visible to a range of stakeholders, we can no longer pay only minimal attention to clandestine terror organizations, secret government operations, invisible online hackers, underground aspects of the informal economy, and all the other hidden collectives found in contemporary society. Increasing our knowledge about them is essential as these hidden organizations become more common and more consequential. It is my sincere hope that this special issue will spur theoretical/conceptual efforts and additional research studies as we continue to bring these otherwise hidden organizations out from the scholarly shadows.