Abstract
Modern governance is the product of constant efforts to make the entire society visible, calculable and manageable. Transparency has emerged as the central ethics to manage public visibility in market and governance. Its celebration or refusal has been associated with technological and political evolution. Using bibliometric analyses of academic literature concerning transparency, this paper traces the interactions of the ethics of transparency with external environments. Guided by historiography and co-occurrence analyses, I map out the major shifts in academic attention and thematic associations related to the ethics of transparency. The modern aspiration of more visibility has been prominent in the finance market, corporate management, public governance, and policy communication. The greater visibility has been associated with accountability, anti-corruption, trust, and participation, as the cure for information asymmetry and power disparity. However, the extended visibility may lessen the human capacity to apprehend reality, which concerns the recent discussions of transparency in higher education, policy communications, and new virtual spaces. By contextualizing the primary themes in transparency discourse, I summarize the three sources of the new risks embedded in extended visibility: the organizational operations decoupled from the intended goals of transparency; the uncovered power relations in the politics of disclosure; and blind reliance on decontextualized digital data.
Highlights
Vision has been the most privileged sense in modern civilization
The modern aspiration of more visibility has been prominent in the finance market, corporate management, public governance, and policy communication
By contextualizing the primary themes in transparency discourse, I summarize the three sources of the new risks embedded in extended visibility: the organizational operations decoupled from the intended goals of transparency; the uncovered power relations in the politics of disclosure; and blind reliance on decontextualized data
Summary
Vision has been the most privileged sense in modern civilization. As the term ‘Enlightenment’ demonstrates, the image of light has been celebrated as a sign of truth and liberation and making society more visible has been a significant aspect of constructing modern governance (Cooper 1997). A historiographic analysis ranks an article’s importance by identifying the paths that citations use most frequently to convey ideas over time, presenting the major steps in scholarly attention to the subject (Henrique et al 2018) Reviewing how these cited works are related helps us understand the initiation, extension, and shifts in the discussion of transparency over time. The second cluster of influential articles concerns governance effectiveness, and asks whether revealing and sharing more information necessarily enhances public trust and organizational capacity. The second theme that emerged from the three clusters (green, mint, purple) demonstrates the growing interest involved in corporate information disclosure, in which transparency is realized in the form of such disclosure This is understood as a tool to achieve the goals of liquidity, corporate social responsibility, credibility, reputation, and public trust. The constant flow of abundant personal data dissects the surface of reality into more distinctive dimensions for monitoring and management, which increases the sources of intrusion into private domains
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