Pursuit Of Transparency Research Articles

Transparency Short‐Circuited: Laughter and Numbers in Costa Rican Water Politics

Between 2006 and 2009, a group of Costa Rican NGOs, a Spanish aid agency, and local residents were entangled in the pursuit of transparency as a means to allocate funding for their “human right to water” project initiatives. Designed as a series of pedagogical activities to “build” local knowledge about water management, the aid agency conditioned their funding to the honest and correct implementation of the project as revealed by a system of indicators. Against orthodoxy, project leaders were put in charge of designing and implementing the auditing system, an arrangement that short‐circuited the foundational separation between observers and observed that is customary in transparency‐creation projects and gave the whole initiative an experimental quality. This article examines the building of that indicator system, my informants’ own fascination with producing “speaking numbers,” and the punctuated but constitutive role that laughter played in the process. I suggest that numeric indicators and laughter make the audit speak about intensity and emphasis rather than about the exclusive and discrete categories on which transparency is usually predicated. Here, the audit allowed political actors to rework the potential of water governance technologies, rather than limiting them to their explicit possibilities, in order to constitute what project participants imagine as an integral form of political agency. I argue that paying attention to the in‐between process of creating the audit, before its final results are disclosed, highlights the self‐referential, short‐circuited, and productive uses of transparency as a political device.

The role of design values in information system development for human benefit

PurposeThis paper appropriates the value sensitive design (VSD) framework to examine the role of design values in the development of an information system designed to increase transparency and reduce corruption within the context of a large‐scale e‐governance project in India.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative case study was conducted and data were collected through interviews with system designers, observations of system design and implementation, and walk‐through of designed systems. Data analysis followed an interpretive approach intended to understand informants' meaning‐making. Analysis occurred iteratively both during and after the field study.FindingsThe study reveals the complexity of the role of values in the design of information technology wherein the designers in their pursuit of transparency and reduced corruption have to continuously balance their idealistic and pragmatic values.Research limitations/implicationsThis study tests the VSD framework in the context of developing an e‐government system thereby highlighting its usefulness but also outlining ways in which the framework can be expanded to make it more relevant to diverse contexts.Practical implicationsThis study extends the VSD framework, particularly in contexts where designers' values are primary drivers of design decisions. A greater understanding of the role of design values across the design process can prove crucial in inculcating and reinforcing design values that lead to a more contextually relevant product.Social implicationsThis research provides valuable lessons on how to approach design of systems that can benefit humans with implications for designers and for public policy.Originality/valueThis is one of the first studies that utilizes the VSD framework to study information system design in a human development context with novel implications for both research and practice.

The pursuit of transparency and quality improvement in cost-effectiveness analysis - a case study in disease-modifying drugs for the treatment of multiple sclerosis.

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) can be a powerful analytic tool for assessing the value of health care interventions when used in conjunction with efficacy, safety, and other supporting data in an evidence-based decision making environment. CEA is commonly defined in terms of the comparison of costs, expressed in monetary units, with outcomes that may be expressed in a variety of ways. One of the most common forms of CEA compares costs in monetary units with outcomes quantified in nonmonetary units (e.g., cancer avoided, death avoided, or successfully treated patient). Cost-utility analysis (CUA) is a form of CEA that compares costs in monetary units with outcomes quantified as a multidimensional measure of effectiveness (e.g., utilities that are used to estimate quality-adjusted life-years [QALYs]). Cost benefit analysis (CBA), another form of CEA that is used less frequently, compares costs and benefits (i.e., outcomes) both of which are quantified in monetary units. Overall, there has been an increasing trend in the use of CEA (CEA, CUA, and CBA) to inform decision making. This trend can be implicitly measured by the frequency of published CEAs over time.

Honoring (Recollecting) Our Memory of Peter McHugh as Social Theorist

The recent death of Peter McHugh becomes an occasion for the remembrance and recollection of the distinctive form of reflexive or analytic social inquiry, which framed his work and that of his longtime friend and collaborator, Alan Blum. Following dual appointments at York University, Toronto, Canada in 1972, Blum and McHugh’s partnership formed the basis for a community of scholars and students throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. A brief review of McHugh and Blum’s works shows theoretical roots in social constructivism and a deep appreciation of the linguistic turn, which in turn lead to the development of a form of social analysis that meets the stringent requirements of a reflexive sociology by repudiating any claim to a privileged exemption of theoretical speech (practice) from the hermeneutical circle of speech and language. Blum and McHugh are shown to embrace and not to evade the hermeneutical circle by a form of social inquiry that subverts the inherent possibilities available within speech and social convention to make available an encounter with the (moral) authority or form of life for that self-same speech. With each example of everyday life or conventional usage, McHugh (and Blum) move from theorizing which formulates the complexity of a particular instance of social interaction through its rules, to the question of the form of life that make that particular instance of the rules possible. It is the pursuit of transparency between speech and its roots in language that informed and continues to inform the distinctive style of social theory fostered at York-Toronto under the orchestration of McHugh and Blum.

Professions and the Pursuit of Transparency in Healthcare: Two Cases of Soft Autonomy

Contemporary professions are increasingly challenged to open up to scrutiny from the outside. Earlier research is focused on two main types of responses and consequences: colonization by a managerial logic of self-monitoring and decoupling of auditing and professional practice. This paper describes a different type of response which implies that professionals get actively involved in monitoring their own activities, without losing their professional autonomy. Two cases from Swedish healthcare were investigated: accreditation at a hospital laboratory and the national quality registries. In both cases, professional involvement took the form of translation and negotiation in expert networks, restrained by a certain resistance towards external monitoring, but driven by an interest in legitimizing and developing professional work. The resulting situation is characterized as a `soft autonomy' which combines professional internalization of originally non-professional auditing ideas with maintained professional control over evaluation criteria.

What happens when transparency meets blame-avoidance?

This article explores what happens when the much-discussed doctrine of transparency as a key to good governance meets the widely observed behavioural tendency of blame-avoidance in politics and public administration. It begins by discussing transparency as an idea and distinguishing different strains of the doctrine, proceeds to discuss blame-avoidance and to identify three common types of blame-avoidance strategy, and then explores what can happen when a widely advocated governance doctrine meets a commonly observed type of behaviour. The article identifies ways in which that conjunction can produce nil effects, side-effects and reverse-effects in the pursuit of transparency. It concludes that the tension between the pursuit of transparency and the avoidance of blame is at the heart of some commonly observed problems in public management, and suggests that something other than the ‘bureaucratic’ strain of transparency may be called for when those problems are serious.

Imitation, Indwelling and the Embodied Self

In this paper I argue that recent developments in higher education presuppose a conceptual framework that fails plausibly to account for indispensable aspects of educational experience—in particular that a university education is fundamentally a project of personal transformation within a particular social order. It fails, I suggest, primarily because it consists of mutually supporting but erroneous conceptualisations of knowledge and the human subject. In pursuit of transparency and codification we have seemingly forgotten education's existential dimension: that education is closely tied to questions of personal identity and the formation of character and that this is an embodied project.