The Many Uses of the Concept of Transparency
Transparency belongs to those terms, concepts and ideas that have been all-present and powerful in contemporary public debates. In scientific discourse, across many disciplines, it appears to be a âkey concept of the presentâ, 1 that often acquires a âquasi-religious significanceâ and that is âmystic in essenceâ. 2 Transparency appears alternatively as âone of the fundamentally distinctive traits of contemporary Western cultureâ, 3 or âdefining principle of contemporary societyâ, or as âa taken-for-granted ideal and explanation of how society and its organizations must functionâ. 4
This ubiquitous term that seems to have been referenced exponentially in recent years is in danger of being âoverusedâ and âsometimes misusedâ. 5 Demands for greater transparency can be found in politics, administration, economy, the finance sector, in education, in the health service, in the sciences, in the churches and in sports. A range of social movements and their media have been in the forefront of such demands, although they have also been mainstreamed for many years now. Transparency International is arguably the most well-known NGO that has been founded with the explicit aim of pushing for more transparency at all levels of society. By now transparency is widely regarded as solution to a whole range of political, social, economic and cultural problems. In particular it is often seen as a cure-all against the abuse of political and economic power, including corruption, finance scandals, and company crises. It is quite generally perceived as âthe vanguard of the open societyâ. 6 At the same time, however, those worried about increasing social control and surveillance, power concentration in the hand of the few, and an erosion of democracy, trust, social cohesion, freedom and individuality have warned against the dangers of an all-transparent society, in which the individual would have no privacy left. 7 While organizations and institutions, including the state, have to be made transparent in order to be democratically accountable, the individual has to be protected against being made transparent as a means of social control.
Overall then, the concept of transparency is characterized by much ambiguity and complexity. Its contours are often opaqueâit can be used in different contexts with diverse, even contradictory political intentions and meanings. And it can be applied to entirely different subjects and institutions. As âtravelling keywordâ 8 and âmagic conceptâ 9 transparency is, at one and the same time, an expectation, a demand, a prescription, a value, a norm, an attitude, a perception and a principle. It can be applied to structures, functional procedures, achievements and the impact of organizations, actions and their consequences, but it can also be related to the inner self of the individual, relationships between human beings and the process of human cognition. It can also be directed towards the past: being transparent vis-Ă -vis the past can be a means of coming to terms with that past, of working through a problematic past, especially where it involves dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, wars and genocides. 10
The term transparency tends to be used in strongly normative ways and is associated most frequently with information access, openness, disclosure and accountability, but also with clarity, predictability, fairness, public scrutiny or participation. Its opposites are most frequently âsecrecyâ and âconcealmentâ. 11 Moreover, the term has many other connotations, 12 some of themârelated to literary studiesâare discussed by Jens Gurr in this volume (Chapter 4). The semantic contexts of its usage play an important role for the diverse meanings it can take. Relational concepts that are either complementary or contrasting determine its normative direction. Such diverse conceptual fields have given transparency very different meanings in diverse contextual debates, for example regarding openness and freedom, trust and acceptance, control and security or secrecy and privacy. In each of these contexts it is understood and interpreted differently.
Hence, as a concept transparency appears to be a kind of Wittgensteinian âfamily resemblance conceptâ, where the manifold individual usages cannot be brought together under one umbrella concept, so that it can only be explored in its relations and overlaps with a whole bundle of other concepts with which it interacts. 13 In a similar way transparency becomes a âfloating signifierâ, forever contested, bound to specific historical contexts and associated with a range of distinct political projects. 14 Yet aside from its discursive opaqueness and its tendency to be part and parcel of âlanguage gamesâ, 15 the concept of transparency is also related to practices that develop over time and are related to different societal contexts and actors. The subsequent contributions to this volume deal with bothâdiscourses and practices surrounding transparency, and they do so by taking into account diverse disciplinary perspectives and historical contexts.
The Ambivalences of Transparency in the Literature on Transparency
Research on transparency has been booming and expanding in line with the increasingly omnipresent discourses on transparency in the public sphere. Specific disciplinary perspectives often prevail, although a range of interdisciplinary handbooks, anthologies and edited collections have also become available in recent years. 16 Yet, overall, each discipline has developed its own disciplinary understanding of transparency and each has put special emphasis on specific aspects and problems of transparency. Each has also developed its own methodological and theoretical arsenal with which to investigate transparency.
The historical sciences have so far focussed on transparency as access to information and knowledge sharing, primarily discussing transparency in the context of semantic fields such as openness, public sphere, publicity, secrecy and privacy. 17 What has been revealed and what has been hidden are key aspects investigated by historians in relation to transparency. Research has examined the tensions between the stateâs need for secrecy and the normative demands of democratic control and a democratic public sphere. What border has been drawn between what is public and what is private. Especially within the sub-field of media history, the history of the public sphere has played a major role in recent decades. 18 Within the fields of intellectual and cultural history, the emergence and development of concepts of the public sphere 19 and of ideas of transparency itself have also been investigated. 20
The social sciences and economics have been more interested in the meaning of transparency for governance. This includes the relevance of transparency for the functioning of political systems, institutions and organizations. Transparency is here often closely related to ideas about the access to information. It becomes synonymous with the ability of an actor to access information about other actors or processes, institutions and organizations. In other words, transparency is seen as a mirror opposite of secrecy. 21 Transparency is about the accessibility of information for citizens who are being helped through transparency to better understand and comprehend decision-making processes. Transparency helps their opinion formation regarding a wide diversity of political issues. 22 It is also widely seen as a value that has become a human rightââthe right to knowâ. 23
Especially in the field of economics the âprincipalâagent modelâ has played an influential role in transparency studies. 24 Here transparency is regarded as absence or reduction of information asymmetries between interacting subjectsâdefined as âsenderâ and âreceiverâ. 25 Hence much research in economics, as well as in political sciences, focusses on functional aspects of transparency, such as how much transparency is necessary in order either to ensure the optimal performance, efficiency and acceptance of institutions or the mastering of communication between institutional and non-institutional actors. Any diversion from the right measure of transparency is interpreted as being dysfunctional with regard to the overall aim of performance optimization. 26 How useful transparency is, depends vitally on the values and normative orders that are posited as desirable. It becomes an instrument with which it is possible to achieve a desirable norm, for example efficiency, prosperity, participation, trust or acceptance. 27 Transparency itself then has no intrinsic value of its own. However, it may be more correct to perceive transparency as a value interrelated with a range of other values that have to be defined vis-Ă -vis transparencyâin their specific chronological, spatial and social contexts. ...