Section: Organisational and Strategic Communication
TRANSPARENCY AND THE PROBLEMS OF REPRESENTATION IN VERBAL, VISUAL AND NUMERICAL REGIMES
* *Lars Thøger CHRISTENSEN, The University of Southern Denmark
George CHENEY, Kent State University
Transparency and the Problems of Representation in Verbal, Visual and Numerical Regimes Trust in official data – what we call “the facts,” official accounts, and standardized measures – is an essential and defining feature of modernity (e.g., Garsten & de Montoya, 2008). Modernity is based in part on the idea that an effective, efficient, and just society is a society where the availability of information reduces opacity and uncertainty, increases knowledge, and thus helps reduce the potential for superstition, hypocrisy, power abuse, fraud, corruption, as well as corporate and governmental evil (Strathern, 2000). Driven by its foundational values of reason, rationality and emancipation, one ambition of modernity, accordingly, is to make society and its organizations more legible, more readable, through the use of comparable (or reliable) forms of measurement, representation and objectification (Vattimo, 1992) .
The growing emphasis on organizational transparency and accountability – prompted by corporate scandals and financial crises as well as inquisitive media, critical investors and other engaged stakeholders – has intensified this reliance on key summarizing symbols, both verbal and numerical, often to the exclusion of consideration of the context in which those measures are developed or employed. Although rarely defined beyond commonsense understandings of the term as “openness,” “insight” or “clarity” (Henriques, 2007), transparency is a growing concern for orga-nizations and societies – a concern that stimulates the quest for new regimes of global visibility and comparability (e.g., Lord, 2006). Interestingly, numbers prompt an illusion of transparency. Numbers of transparency are found in numerous fields and practices, including areas such as corporate finance, restaurant hygi-ene, nutritional labelling and patient safety, etc. where financial analysts, environmental advocates, political advocates, investigative reporters and other experts play a central role in map¬ping out precise discloser targets and metrics (Fung, Graham & Weil, 2007). Such numbers and their impli-cations, however, are rarely transparent to the outsider or nonexpert. What do they stand for? What do they mean? What do they take for granted? What are their consequences? What do they conceal? In this paper and presentation, we explore the limitations of the current transparency discourse and its implied notion of moving behind appearances and representations. We show how transparency ideals and practices are essentially representational and as such produce certain types of visibility and insight while obscuring other dimensions of organizational practice.
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