Categories and Dimensions of Organizational Transparency

Transparency is a distinctive area of research across disciplines and presents significant importance for organization studies. However, transparency is rarely subject to structured and critical scrutiny and as a result its relevance for organizational analysis is underestimated. In an attempt to foreground the value of transparency studies, we offer an overview of the existing research and indicate two paradigmatic positions underpinning the transparency literature, namely what we term non-performative and performative approaches. The main contribution of the paper lies in this ground-clearing effort: we set out to problematize current assumptions that shape the literature on transparency in important ways, but are rarely addressed in a structured
manner. On the backdrop of this review, we point to the value of conceptualizing transparency as a dynamic, performative and paradoxical phenomenon, an approach which remains underexplored. Finally, we discuss some avenues for future studies of the organizing properties of transparency: the secrecy-transparency interplay, the power-transparency nexus and the transparency ‘family tree’ (i.e., intersections between multiple forms of disclosure).