Achieving Transparency: The Visible, Invisible and Divisible in Academic Accountability Networks

Demands for greater transparency form an increasingly prevalent feature of many areas of organizational activity. Through the rubric of transparency, demands are made for organizations to demonstrate recognition of their responsibility for environmental impact, how money is spent, the returns received on money invested and so on. This paper argues that transparency reviews, however, do not straightforwardly open up opportunities for observing the internal dynamics of an organization in order to render the organization accountable and its members aware of their responsibilities. Instead, transparency reviews encourage the adoption of new or re-formatted informational production processes that produce information intended to fit the auspices of the review. In this way, internal aspects of organizations are not `made available' but instead are re-oriented toward the production of specific forms of informational output that will externalize (or make available) a particular version of the internal dynamics of the organization. By studying these production processes in detail we find a series of ad-hoc, uncertain and disconnected processes through which accountability criteria are met and transparency achieved.