The Corporate Construction of Transparency and (In)Transparency

Learning Objectives
• Understand the notion of transparency and its relevance for the practice of corporate social responsibility.
• Discuss and illuminate possible limitations to organisational transparency.
• Explain why and how limits to transparency under certain conditions may be advantageous to corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Introduction

In this chapter, we discuss the role of transparency in the context of CSR governance. We elaborate on transparency's increasing importance in contemporary business corporations, emphasising that transparency is often associated with notions of accountability and good governance. Yet, although transparency is an important dimension of CSR, it is often easier to celebrate than to actually implement it. Even with the best intentions, organisations cannot reveal all matters about themselves, but need to select which types of information to disclose. Following these initial reflections, we unpack the notion of transparency, emphasising how conventional understandings of the term are often limited and presuppose simplistic notions of information and communication. With this background, we are able to demonstrate that organisational transparency practices do not always produce expected and desirable results. In fact, transparency may create new types of opacity. The thrust of our argument is that transparency is not neutral; it does things. By making certain organisational matters more visible to stakeholders, other dimensions are inevitably kept in the dark. Think, for example, of the leak of the ‘Panama’ papers in 2016. While these leaks obviously provide much information, they do not necessarily provide more knowledge or insight into matters of international taxation (cf. Roberts, 2012). Consequently, transparency practices do not always serve the interest of immediate stakeholder insight and knowledge. However, instead of condemning this trend altogether, we discuss how opacity may allow organisations to explore, inspire and encourage better practices in the CSR arena. More specifically, we argue that an initial condition of opacity may allow more organisations to talk themselves into better CSR practices – results that were not possible to achieve in contexts of full transparency where critics could detect and point out discrepancies between ideals and practice right away.