Organizational Secrecy Research Articles

Organizational Secrecy and Digital Innovation: Moderating Role of Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Hiding

This quantitative study explores the moderating influence of organizational secrecy and digital innovation on knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding within IT departments of French SMEs, employing the Social Exchange Theory as a theoretical framework. A sample comprising 300 employees from IT departments in French SMEs was gathered for a longitudinal research design, with data collection facilitated through snowball sampling. Smart PLS was employed to analyze survey data at two distinct time intervals. In Time 1, demographic information and organizational secrecy were assessed, while Time 2 focused on measuring knowledge hiding, knowledge sharing, and digital innovation one month later. The results reveal organizational secrecy's significant impact on knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding. The Social Exchange Theory plays a moderating role in the relationship between organizational secrecy and knowledge hiding, as well as in the relationship between digital innovation and knowledge sharing. This study sheds light on how organizational culture and innovation can influence knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding among employees in IT departments of French SMEs, offering practical insights for managers aiming to cultivate a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Future research can delve into identifying the most effective digital tools and platforms for facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration within IT departments of French SMEs.

STREAMLINING ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGEABILITY THROUGH SCALABLE DECISION MAKING

In modern organizations, decision-making processes are critical to effectively managing business operations. However, as organizations grow more complex, decision-making becomes more challenging and time-consuming, leading to a lack of agility, bottlenecks and decreased productivity. One of the assumptions in the article is that excessive complexity and uncontrolled secrecy in organizations lead to lack of understanding of how they work. This can be detrimental to decision-making processes, resulting in misinterpretations of data, misunderstandings of organizational objectives and ultimately, poor decision-making and results. These factors can create a wall of ignorance and irresponsibility within organizations. To address this issue, we propose the hypothesis that simplifying decision-making processes and making them more scalable and this will increase employee involvement and trust in the organization. Implementing scalable decision-making processes can create a framework for making consistent decisions across teams and departments, streamline the decision-making process, encourage critical thinking and enable the organization to respond more quickly and rationally to changing market conditions. The conclusion of the article is that applying scalable decision-making in organization can unlock new levels of manageability, improving the ability to make complex decisions and navigate dynamic situations. This model may be applicable to transportation and logistics companies, production units and plants and construction and manufacturing industries seeking to improve their performance and competitiveness in today's fast-paced business environment.

Staying with the Secret: The Public Sphere in Platform Society

Investigating the structural transformation of the public sphere should reckon with the secret and its modes of organization. The expansion of secrecy effected by the infrastructures, platforms, and applications of media technology is constitutive for the emergence and transformation of ‘digital publics’. Offering a rereading of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that is attuned to the organizational principle of secrecy, this paper discusses current notions of mediated publics in juxtaposition with the redoubling of media-technological and organizational secrecy at work in platform society. How are illegibility, opacity and unavailability organized? Instead of assuming accountability, publicity and transparency as epistemological a priori, investigating the transformation of the public sphere would benefit from adopting epistemes of secrecy and opacity.

The “Supermen” Club: Organizational Secrecy and Masculine Identity in an Israeli National Security Organization

How does secrecy shape narratives of militarized hegemonic masculinity? This article assesses a gap at the intersection between theories of masculinities and organizational secrecy. Supported by 15 interviews with current and former male workers of a covert section of an Israeli national security organization, it argues that secrecy is experienced as both an external hurdle and a central component to the way that men internalize masculinity. Unable to access social capital outside the security organization, the respondents of the study construct a social field inside it through which they can assert their masculinity. They do so by conceptualizing their jobs, themselves, and the organization through a prism of sacrificial warriorhood, and actively incorporate secrecy’s constraints into a narrative of “super-men”. This study thus examines secrecy in the context of a militarized environment, showing the experience of masculinity and a perceived lack of power-access among members of a dominant group.

Managing Secrecy-Transparency Tensions: The Communicative Role of HR Managers During M&As

During change communication, HR Managers constantly balance the competing requirements of organizational secrecy vis-à-vis employee needs for transparent communication to help to deliver the desired outcomes of M&As. Yet, relatively little attention has been paid to these tensions faced by HR Managers during M&As. Hence, drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews with international HR Managers who have considerable experience in integrating companies and M&As, this study qualitatively examines the experiences of HR Managers on the contradictory demands of change communication during M&As. The findings first reveal the pressures for organizational secrecy and its workforce implications during M&As. The findings then highlight the communicative role of HR Managers to provide transparency, amidst the secrecy, and its contributions to organizational change during M&As. This study then discusses the important theoretical and practical implications of recognizing this communicative role performed by HR Managers to contribute to the literature of change, human resource management, and the human side of M&As literature.

Organizational secrecy as viewed by the agents of a multinational corporation: A Case Study

abstract: Only a limited number of theoretical studies have been conducted with regards to the issue of organizational secrecy. This study examines similar and different views about secrecy within three executive levels of an industrial multinational organization named Motores. This is achieved through a case study for which the data has been collected by using a survey-like questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The different maturity levels and process structures in the enterprise account not only for different stages, concerns, and types of knowledge involved in addressing secrecy, but also for the role boundaries among the agents surveyed. Furthermore, while these agents are well acquainted with suppliers and customers, whereby confidentiality is ensured through confidentiality agreements (NDAs) and patent protection, their relationships with institutions and organizations appear to be areas of little or no knowledge, especially when it concerns competitors, class entities, and government relations. Leaks of classified information occur, and the places and situations where they may take place are identified. No potential mitigation situations were identified in our case study, and no systemic protocol exists for dealing with classified topics in the different areas where secrecy is involved, including business strategies. Transparency is recognized and desired; however, its risks and consequences require evaluation.

Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies

This essay sets out the case for regarding confidential gossip as a significant concept in the study of organizations. It develops the more general concept of gossip by combining it with concepts of organizational secrecy in order to propose confidential gossip as a distinctive communicative practice. As a communicative practice, it is to be understood as playing a particular role within the communicative constitution of organizations. That particularity arises from the special nature of any communication regarded as secret, which includes the fact that such communication is liable to be regarded as containing the ‘real truth’ or ‘insider knowledge’. Thus it may be regarded as more than ‘just gossip’ and also as more significant than formal communication. This role is explored, as well as the methodological and ethical challenges of studying confidential gossip empirically.

Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics

Secrecy and ethics are often seen as opposing forces within organizations. Secret work is viewed as unethical, as it excludes others from knowing and is associated with self-interested behavior. We contend that this view does not account for the dynamic inherent to secrecy and to the fact that ethics is embedded in social relations. This paper suggests an alternative view. We consider secrecy as a social process which allows employees to maintain their ethics when faced with managerial policies that affect the quality of their work. Building on an in-depth case study of a team of journalists who worked in secret after their managers decided to prioritize the interests of shareholders and advertising firms, we show how these journalists managed to maintain collective ethics through secrecy and to do their work according to their own moral principles. This paper offers two primary contributions. First, we show a mutually beneficial relationship between ethics and secrecy in organizations, wherein secrecy helps maintaining ethics in everyday work. Second, the paper shows how secrecy can lead to ethical resistance, via a transformation of the power relationship with managers.

Everyone loves a secret: Why consumers value marketing secrets

Everyone keeps secrets, and organizations are no exception. The current literature on secrecy in organizations is centered on the managerial perspective of secrets as competitive resources. In contrast, this conceptual article takes a consumer-centric approach and presents a detailed explanation of why and how marketing secrets create value for consumers. First, a discussion of agency highlights three consumer roles in the marketing of secrets: Insiders, who know the secret; Aspirants, who know of the secret; and Outsiders, who do not know of the secret. Second, based on two mechanisms of awareness and primacy, a value chain of secrecy is proposed that presents four types of value that consumers can extract from secrets: acquisition value, acknowledgment value, leverage value, and dissemination value. Lastly, secrecy is revisited as a strategic marketing tool for creating value for consumers.

Organizational Secrecy and the FBI’s COINTELPRO–Black Nationalist Hate Groups Program, 1967-1971

In this article, we explain how secrecy influenced the communication and decision-making processes within COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist Hate Groups, the FBI’s covert program to disrupt left-leaning Black political organizations between 1967 and 1971. Memos exchanged between the FBI Director and field offices reveal how the organization strategized to conceal its identity as the source of anonymous communication. The Bureau developed explicit techniques for managing the content of their messages, the materials used to construct print messages, and the distribution of those messages. The Bureau’s techniques suggest that organizational secrecy involves a high degree of coordination between members, but it may also endanger the organization’s longevity and the public welfare.

Bringing Secrecy into the Open: Towards a Theorization of the Social Processes of Organizational Secrecy

This paper brings into focus the concept of organizational secrecy, defined as the ongoing formal and informal social processes of intentional concealment of information from actors by actors in organizations. It is argued that existing literature on the topic is fragmented and predominantly focused on informational rather than social aspects of secrecy. The paper distinguishes between formal and informal secrecy and theorizes the social processes of these in terms of identity and control. It is proposed that organizational secrecy be added to the analytical repertoire of organization studies.

An organizational culture of secrecy: the case of Bletchley Park

This paper draws on a major study of the organization of Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking centre in the Second World War, to analyse the particular issue of organizational secrecy. Through detailed empirical examples, the key processes of organizational secrecy are identified as being ignorance, silence and surveillance. Organizational consequences, both positive and negative, are also identified.

Removing Knowledge

Removing Knowledge

Suppressing research data: Methods, context, accountability, and responses

Research data can be suppressed in various ways, including organizational secrecy, defamation law and refusal to reply to queries. In a broader sense, methods of suppression include pressures not to do research in the first place and attacks on scientists who produce unwelcome data. The context of this sort of suppression includes individual self‐interest, vested interests, and paradigms. Suppressing research data can be either compatible with or contrary to accountability, depending on the constituencies involved. Ways to challenge suppression of research data include individual requests, exposés, refusal to suppress, publicity, creating new data, and social movements.

Organizational secrecy: some proposals for a way forward

(1996). Organizational secrecy: some proposals for a way forward. European Journal of Information Systems: Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 195-197.