Who Is Community Engagement For?: The Endless Loop of Democratic Transparency

Abstract

This article approaches college and university community engagement as a publicity practice responding to complex pressures in the U.S. higher education field. Democracy initiatives in American academia encompass a range of civic activities in communities near and far, but the forces driving their production are decidedly nonlocal and top-down. Good intentions are no longer enough for colleges and universities facing crises on a number of fronts. Today’s community collaborations must be intensive, reciprocal, deliberative, and appreciative. This mission of democratic transparency pursued by institutions involves extensive efforts to certify civic empowerment for public audiences and funders, trade and professional associations, state legislatures, and federal regulators. A promotional perspective on community engagement in higher education shifts attention from the authentic grassroots transformations that are its putative focus to the larger processes driving this activity and its outcomes: not least, the pursuit of legitimacy through increasingly elaborate self-assessment strategies. This endless loop—and its demands that engagement be ever more democratic and transparent, in its practice and in its evaluation—demonstrates not only the reach of promotional transparency, but its characteristic shape and reflexive organizational routines.

Transparency, Publicity, Democracy, and Markets: Inhabiting Tensions Through Hybridity

“…Once invoked and made public, transparency has disciplinary effects. To publicly claim transparency is to claim a status that must already exist; it therefore acts as a form of Foucauldian governance, constituting organizational culture and practice through observation (openness inevitably engages scrutiny) as well as regulation (transparency requires specific structures of interaction between organizations and their stakeholders) (Flyverbom et al 2015; see also Lee 2020 for an example of this in the university context). Struggles over transparency relate to this double-edged productivity of publicity, offering on the one hand, the potential to gain legitimacy and on the other, the risk of inviting new forms of scrutiny and governance.…”

“…From a promotional perspective, this makes transparency desirable, something to be co-opted and instrumentalized as “transparency capital” (Birchall, 2011a, p. 8) to benefit from social and political opportunities and build trust with stakeholders (Kim & Lee, 2018). Hence, claims to transparency, as well as the information revealed by transparency acts, need to be circulated through publicity not only to ensure audiences can access the information they require but also to demonstrate the virtuous character of the organization (Broad, 2020; Lee, 2020; Kantola, 2016). From this perspective, the presentation of transparency is never neutral; on the contrary, as Garsten and Montoya (2008b) argue, it is part of a normative neoliberal order that promotes the performance of ethical, responsible governance.…”