Understanding modern transparency

Abstract

Proponents and opponents fiercely debate whether computer-mediated transparency has a positive effect on trust in the public sector. This article enhances our understanding of transparency by presenting three perspectives: a premodern, modern and post-modern perspective, and analyzing the basic assumptions of these perspectives about transparency. The analysis shows that the proponents of computer-mediated transparency have a modern perspective on societal change: computer-mediated transparency gives people better information and thus contributes to the rationalization of society. Opponents argue from a premodern perspective that unidirectional, structured and decontextualized forms of transparency will result in a loss of societal trust. Postmodernists focus on the esthetics of transparency and argue for varied and diverse forms of computer-mediated transparency. The value of these three perspectives is illustrated by using them to analyze debates about the need for making school performance in the Netherlands transparent. On the basis of this analysis, the author argues for diversity in systems of transparency to maximize effects on societal trust. Points for practitioners This article evaluates transparency through the Internet from different perspectives. Premodernists see computer-mediated transparency as a threat to traditional mechanisms of trust such as face-to-face contacts, modernists praise computer-mediated transparency for its contribution to trust by providing objective information to the general public and postmodernists value the esthetic value of computer-mediated transparency. The ambivalent relation between trust and openness is at the heart of debates about the new transparency. This article argues that it is imperative that we understand these controversies, and debate which forms of computer-mediated transparency we want in the public sector.