The politics of transparency and the calibration of knowledge in the digital age

Abstract

This article analyses the complex work of human actors and technologies that goes into producing that which appears to us as 'transparent'. Drawing on studies of governance and surveillance, affordance theory, actor-network theory and sociological work on numbers, we analyse the role played by mediating technologies in the production of transparency and relate it to the question of how knowledge is created, recycled and modified in organizational settings. This perspective is largely absent from existing research on transparency, which construes transparency as unmediated or fails to investigate the organizing properties of specific mediating technologies. We argue that mediating technologies, conceptualized here as disclosure devices, have distinctive organizing properties that are important to scrutinize. They play a central role in attempts to shed light on objects, subjects and practices, and to help build or break up relationships within and across sites and organizations. We focus on three disclosure devices and their respective knowledge creation processes: (a) due diligence, whose emphasis is on qualitative knowledge production; (b) rankings, which is about quantitative knowledge production; (c) big data analysis, which underscores algorithmic knowledge production. We conceptualize the distinct features of these disclosure devices, indicate ways in which they shape organizational processes and discuss some of the ethical and political challenges they pose.

The imperative to protect data and the rise of surveillance cameras in administering national testing in Russia

“…The existing practices of surveillance target nearly everyone by default: everyone is observed from multiple angles and social positions. As Hansen and Flyverbom (2014) attest, this complexity reflects the polycentric character of contemporary social formations in which governing subjects, such as representatives of governments and corporations, are also governed subjects. Thus, the authority of Rosobrnadzor is likewise vulnerable, as a unit that needs to demonstrate its worth within the larger structure of the education ministry, and as accountable for its outcomes to the government in the context of management by results and indicators that make all executive structures potentially legible for intervention.…”

“…This mode of governance through rankings is designed to facilitate alignment with the specific, state-driven agenda (cf. Hansen and Flyverbom, 2014), in our case, this agenda being the marked securitisation and increased surveillance of the education space in the period of standardised testing, as will be shown below.…”

The Transparency–Power Nexus

“…Take the example of the numerical rankings or ratings that often form part of organizational performance reporting. 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 "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).…”

Introduction: Logics of transparency in late modernity

“…As such, it is ephemeral and always in the making. This requires that studies of transparency give attention to the historical 'stand-ins' for transparency, including the devices, operations and proxies that go into its production (Harvey et al, 2012;Hansen and Flyverbom, 2014).…”

“…One notable difficulty for theorizing transparency has to do with the concept itself, which today refers to a wide array of objects, uses, technologies and practices (e.g., Hood and Heald, 2006;Gupta, 2010;Birchall, 2011;Hansen and Flyverbom, 2014). In some fields, including photography, physics and architecture, transparency denotes the physical property of a material and its capacity to allow light to pass through it.…”