Transparency (behavior)
As an ethic that spans science, engineering, business, and the humanities, transparency is operating in such a way that it is easy for others to see what actions are performed. Transparency implies openness, communication, and accountability.
Transparency is practiced in companies, organizations, administrations, and communities.[1] For example, in a business relation, fees are clarified at the outset by a transparent agent, so there are no surprises later. This is opposed to keeping this information hidden which is "non-transparent". A practical example of transparency is also when a cashier makes changes after a point of sale; they offer a transaction record of the items purchased (e.g., a receipt) as well as counting out the customer's change.
In information security, transparency means keeping the arcane, underlying mechanisms hidden so as not to obstruct intended function—an almost opposite sense. It principally refers to security mechanisms that are intentionally undetectable or hidden from view. Examples include hiding utilities and tools which the user does not need to know in order to do their job, like keeping the remote re-authentication operations of Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol hidden from the user.
Wages
In Norway and in Sweden, tax authorities annually release the "skatteliste", "taxeringskalendern", or "tax list"; official records showing the annual income and overall wealth of nearly every taxpayer.[2]
Regulations in Hong Kong require banks to list their top earners – without naming them – by pay band.[3]
In 2009, the Spanish government for the first time released information on the net worth of each cabinet member, but data on ordinary citizens is private. Currently, elected officials have to disclose their net worth on a yearly basis.
An unwritten norm requires that American politicians release their tax returns, in particular those running for the office of president. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump refused to release them, breaking a 47-year-old custom, but still got elected.[4][5][6]
Management
Radical transparency is a management method where nearly all decision making is carried out publicly. All draft documents, all arguments for and against a proposal, all final decisions, and the decision making process itself are made public and remain publicly archived. This approach has grown in popularity with the rise of the Internet.[7] Two examples of organizations utilizing this style are the Linux community and Indymedia.
Corporate transparency, a form of radical transparency, is the concept of removing all barriers to—and the facilitating of—free and easy public access to corporate information and the laws, rules, social connivance and processes that facilitate and protect those individuals and corporations that freely join, develop, and improve the process.[8]
Non-governmental organizations
Accountability and transparency are of high relevance for
The
Media
Media transparency is the concept of determining how and why information is conveyed through various means.
If the media and the public knows everything that happens in all authorities and county administrations there will be a lot of questions, protests and suggestions coming from media and the public. People who are interested in a certain issue will try to influence the decisions. Transparency creates an everyday participation in the political processes by media and the public. One tool used to increase everyday participation in political processes is freedom of information legislation and requests. Modern democracy builds on such participation of the people and media.
There are, for anybody who is interested, many ways to influence the decisions at all levels in society.[14]
Politics
This section needs additional citations for verification. (October 2011) |
The right and the means to examine the process of decision making is known as transparency. In politics, transparency is used as a means of holding
When military authorities classify their plans as secret, transparency is absent. This can be seen as either positive or negative; positive because it can increase national security, negative because it can lead to corruption and, in extreme cases, a military dictatorship.
While a
To promote transparency in
A recent political movement to emerge in conjunction with the demands for transparency is the Pirate Party, a label for a number of political parties across different countries who advocate freedom of information, direct democracy, network neutrality, and the free sharing of knowledge.
Online culture
21st century culture affords a higher level of public transparency than ever before, and actually requires it in many cases. Modern technology and associated culture shifts have changed how government works (see
The concept of "Business Model Transparency" in online services refers to the degree to which companies disclose the nature of data collection and its monetization. While this transparency doesn't directly influence user adoption of a service, research indicates that it becomes a crucial differentiator in the competitive digital landscape.[17][18]
Research
Some
Technology
In the computer software world,
In computer security, the debate is ongoing as to the relative merits of the full disclosure of security vulnerabilities, versus a security-by-obscurity approach.
There is a different (perhaps almost opposite) sense of transparency in human-computer interaction, whereby a system after change adheres to its previous external interface as much as possible while changing its internal behaviour. That is, a change in a system is transparent to its users if the change is unnoticeable to them.
Sports
Criticism
Sigmund Freud, following Friedrich Nietzsche ("On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense"), regularly argues that transparency is impossible because of the occluding function of the unconscious.
Among philosophical and literary works that have examined the idea of transparency are Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish or David Brin's The Transparent Society. The German philosopher and media theorist Byung-Chul Han, in his 2012 work Transparenzgesellschaft, sees transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust. He was criticized for his concepts, as they would suggest corrupt politics, and for referring to the anti-democratic Carl Schmitt.[25]
Anthropologists have long explored ethnographically the relation between revealed and concealed knowledges, and have increasingly taken up the topic in relation to accountability, transparency and conspiracy theories and practices today.[26][27][28] Todd Sanders and Harry West, for example, suggest not only that realms of the revealed and concealed require each other, but also that transparency in practice produces the very opacities it claims to obviate.[29]
Clare Birchall, Christina Gaarsten, Mikkel Flyverbom, Emmanuel Alloa and Mark Fenster, among others, write in the vein of "critical transparency studies", which attempts to challenge particular orthodoxies concerning transparency. In an article, Birchall assessed "whether the ascendance of transparency as an ideal limits political thinking, particularly for western socialists and radicals struggling to seize opportunities for change". She argues that the promotion of "datapreneurial" activity through open data initiatives outsources and interrupts the political contract between governed and government. She is concerned that the dominant model of governmental data-driven transparency produces neoliberal subjectivities that reduce the possibility of politics as an arena of dissent between real alternatives. She suggests that the radical left might want to work with and reinvent secrecy as an alternative to neoliberal transparency.[30]
Researchers at the University of Oxford and Warwick Business School found that transparency can also have significant unintended consequences in the field of medical care. Gerry McGivern[31] and Michael D Fischer[32] found "media spectacles" and transparent regulation combined to create "spectacular transparency" which has some perverse effects on doctors' practice and increased defensive behaviour in doctors and their staff.[33][34] Similarly, in a four-year organizational study, Fischer and Ferlie found that transparency in the context of a clinical risk management can act perversely to undermine ethical behavior, leading to organizational crisis and even collapse.[35]
See also
- Access to public information
- Ethical banking
- Lobbying
- Market transparency
- Open government
- Open science
- Open society
- Public record
- Transparency of media ownership in Europe
- Whistleblower
- Whitewash
References
- ^ "Opening government: A guide to best practice in transparency, accountability and civic engagement across the public sector" (PDF). Transparency Initiative. Transparency & Accountability Initiative. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 18, 2017. Retrieved September 11, 2015.
- ^ "Norway Divided by Citizen Wealth Tables". The New York Times. October 23, 2009. Retrieved 22 November 2009.
- ^ Treanor, Jill (22 November 2009). "Government retreats over naming bank top earners - Top 20 highest paid employees now unlikely to be identified unless they have boardroom roles". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 November 2009.
- ^ Krishnankutty, Pia (2020-09-28). "All about tax returns by US presidents, and how Trump broke a 47-year-old custom". ThePrint. Retrieved 2021-03-14.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-03-14.
- ^ Disis, Jill (2017-01-23). "Presidential tax returns: It started with Nixon. Will it end with Trump?". CNNMoney. Retrieved 2021-03-14.
- ISBN 9781317917908. Preview.
- ^ Bernardi, Richard A.; LaCross, Catherine C. (April 2005). "Corporate transparency: code of ethics disclosures". The CPA Journal. New York State Society of the Certified Public Accountants (CPA).
- ^ ISBN 9789812308313. Preview.
- ^ "Is GRI too much transparency for NGOs?". PRIZMA. March 27, 2011.
- ^ "Our accountability commitments: transparency". INGO accountability charter. Archived from the original on 2015-03-29.
- ISBN 9781554580224– via Google Books.
- ^ "Charte des ONG (NGO Charter)". One World Trust. 1997. Archived from the original on 2011-09-28.
- ^ Moeller, Susan D.; et al. "Openness & accountability: a study of transparency in global media outlets". Studies. International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA). Archived from the original on 2008-05-15.
- ISBN 978-0814798461.
- S2CID 259470328.
- S2CID 239231485.
- PMID 22521137.
- ^ "Wissenschaftsrat: Home". wissenschaftsrat.de. Archived from the original on 2010-04-17.
- PMID 11799051.
- ^ "Mathematica and free software". everything2.com.
- ^ "Free software brings affordability, transparency to mathematics". physorg.com.
- ^ "Transparency in Sport". transparencyinsport.org.
- ^ Kraft, Steffen (7 June 2012). "Klarheit schaffen". der Freitag (in German). Retrieved 3 July 2012.
- ^ Strathern, M. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.
- ^ Hetherington, K. 2011. Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- hdl:1911/79642.
- ^ Sanders, Todd & Harry G. West 2003. Powers revealed and concealed in the New World Order. In H. G. West & T. Sanders (eds) Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 16.
- S2CID 144862855.
- ^ "Gerry McGivern | University of Warwick - Academia.edu". warwick.academia.edu.
- ^ "Michael D Fischer | University of Oxford - Academia.edu". oxford.academia.edu.
- PMID 21155435.
- PMID 22104085.
- S2CID 44146410.
Further reading
- Michael Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1973. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
- Emmanuel Alloa & Dieter Thomä (eds.) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Critical Perspectives, Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2018.
- Emmanuel Alloa (eds.) This Obscure Thing Called transparency. Politics and Aesthetics of a Contemporary Metaphor, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022 ·