Transparency is an increasingly prominent area of research that offers valuable insights for organizational studies. However, conceptualizations of transparency are rarely subject to critical scrutiny and thus their relevance remains unclear. In most accounts, transparency is associated with the sharing of information and the perceived quality of the information shared. This narrow focus on information and quality, however, overlooks the dynamics of organizational transparency. To provide a more structured conceptualization of organizational transparency, this article unpacks the assumptions that shape the extant literature, with a focus on three dimensions: conceptualizations, conditions and consequences. The contribution of the study is twofold: a) on a conceptual level, we provide a framework that articulates two paradigmatic positions underpinning discussions of transparency, verifiability approaches and performativity approaches; b) on an analytical level we suggest a novel future research agenda for studying 2 organizational transparency that pays attention to its dynamics, paradoxes and performative characteristics.

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It is widely established that social media afford social movement (SM) organizations new ways of organizing. Critical studies point out, however, that social media use may also trigger negative repercussions due to the commercial interests that are designed into these technologies. Yet empirical evidence about these matters is scarce. In this article, we investigate how social media algorithms influence activists’ actualization of collective affordances. Empirically, we build on an ethnographic study of two SM organizations based in Tunisia. The contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we provide a theoretical framework that specifies how algorithms condition the actualization of three collective affordances (interlinking, assembling, augmenting). Specifically, we show how these affordances are supported by algorithmic facilitation, that is, operations pertaining to the sorting of interactions and actors, the filtering of information, and the ranking and aggregation of content. Secondly, we extend the understanding of how social media platforms’ profit-orientation undermines collective action. Namely, we identify how algorithms introduce constraints for organizing processes, manifested as algorithmic distortion, that is, information overload, opacity, and disinformation. We conclude by discussing the detrimental implications of social media algorithms for organizing and civic engagement, as activists are often unaware of the interests of social media-owning corporations.

Texts and conversations are central to the constitution of organizations. Through the use of social media technologies, organizational members and nonorganizational members alike have the capacity to author organizational texts that co-constitute an organization as an entity with a specific identity in a situational space and time. The implications of this ability are underexplored. This study focused on how two organizations used the social media technology Twitter to interact with their constituents. The article adopts communication-centered and sociomateriality perspectives to illustrate how Twitter interactions (hashtags) become hypertexts that simultaneously coproduce an organizational actor and act as a pastiche of the organization (i.e., a vehicle of contestation for the specific identity they were designed to bring into existence). The findings provide a novel understanding of hypertextuality as the process through which an organization is temporarily co-constituted by both inter-and intraorganizational discursive-material interactions across spaces and times.

Corruption is a global systemic problem causing detrimental effects to both social and economic progress. Predominant research typically offers solutions that are based on the assumption that corruption is a problem originating in, and endemic to developing countries, an assumption that disregards corruption's production within a global system of economic power relationships and international regulatory institutions dominated by Western countries and multinational corporations. The anti-corruption discourses and accounting measures initiated by both international and local actors in their fight against corruption have not frequently been critically investigated in developing country contexts, especially not in the Arab region, despite the widely observed links between authoritarianism, corruption, and political upheaval. This study illustrates the struggle over the nature of corruption and the measures taken by multiple stakeholders to combat it in Tunisia, before and after the Jasmine Revolution of 2011. By using ethnographic material and critical discourse analysis, the study shows how Western global actors such as the World Bank and associated nongovernmental institutions such as Transparency International, account for and discursively (re)construct corruption in ways that defend and reconstitute postcolonial relationships of domination embedded within the neoliberal global order. The study contributes to existing literature by providing a conceptual framework that indicates the highly fungible character and the different emergent cycles of corruption. Based on its findings, the study offers novel research avenues that promote reflexive theoretical and methodological steps that aim to enrich anticorruption scholarship and practice. *Manuscript (with Author Details removed) Click here to view linked References