Transparency and Accountability: Causal, Critical and Constructive Perspectives

Abstract

Given the excessive power of Google and other large technology firms, transparency and accountability have turned into matters of great concern for organization scholars. So far, most studies adopt either a causal or critical perspective on the relationship between the two concepts. These perspectives are pitted against each other but share some basic assumptions – a fact which limits organization theory’s ability to fully grasp the management of (digital) visibilities. To address these limitations, we therefore propose a third, constructive perspective on these concepts. A constructive perspective turns transparency and accountability from analytic resources into topics of inquiry, allowing organization scholars to study how people in and around organizations put them to work and with what consequences. We introduce sites of ethical contestation as a new methodological strategy to conduct surprising and unintuitive empirical research from a constructive perspective.

Causes and Consequences of Local Government Efforts to Reduce Risk and Adapt to Extreme Weather Events: Municipal Organizational Robustness

“…To overcome the challenge and increase robustness (the property of being strong to achieve organizational goals), Downs [22] proposes that all organizations should institutionalize some kind of coordination mechanism and procedures. These ideas are close to what is understood in sustainable cities literature as robust institutional arrangements, accountability, and transparency [3,13,[129][130][131]. Robust organizational arrangements may enrich governance outcomes [13].…”

“…Third, compliance with standards of transparency consists of data on municipal compliance with normative prescriptions [178]. Accountable municipal councils, robustness of municipal organization, and transparency may enhance the effects of variables representing capacities and political leadership attributes on Investment [3,16,22,55,[129][130][131]183,184].…”

“…The reviewed literature suggests that accountability practices are important organizational attributes for performance with equitable provision of public goods [3,41,55,130,131,148,159]. In the regression models, municipal council accountability becomes quantitatively relevant in positively moderating the effect of mayoral electoral support for Investment.…”

“Now You See Me, Now You Don’t”: How Digital Consumers Manage Their Online Visibility in Game-Like Conditions

“…operate and the rules they are governed by (e.g., Kudina and Verbeek, 2019 ; Plangger and Montecchi, 2020 ). However, consumers are increasingly demanding that the methods used by organizations that influence and affect their behavior are exposed ( Heimstädt and Dobusch, 2020 ), that organizations or other entities build new systems utilizing the privacy-by-design ethos ( Romanou, 2018 ; see also the Internet Freedom Foundation) and that, subsequently, users gain a greater level of control over their personal information ( Boerman et al, 2021 ). The latter could include taking ownership of one’s own data, although this brings with it its own challenges without an appropriate regulatory support system (see Matz, 2021 for critique of user-owned data).…”

Assessing the Influence of Strategic Resources on the Quality of Life in Spanish Cities

“…Transparency appears to have become a contemporary area of research that also generates a deep debate among scholars [30,[88][89][90], and there is not a single definition of transparency that has been unanimously accepted [24,26,27,91]. Transparency has been linked, for instance, to openness [92], a key element for a good governance [90], open government [28], disclosure [91], public interactions [93], and availability of information to citizens [94,95].…”