Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Organization
This Article
Right arrow Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Neyland, D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
 Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

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

Daniel Neyland

Said Business School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, daniel.neyland{at}sbs.ox.ac.uk

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.

Key Words: accountability • audit • democracy • responsibility • transparency • universities

Organization, Vol. 14, No. 4, 499-516 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1350508407078050


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?