The Nexus of Transparency and Secrecy

Transparency has become a buzzword of our modern times, denoting the idea of making social actors - especially organizations - visible and thus accountable to external audiences, which, in turn, is supposed to increase their legitimacy and efficiency. While most research on transparency takes an affirmative stance and puts all the effort into refining existing concepts, critical studies focus on the performativity of transparency. My presentation I add to the latter by drawing attention to the nexus of transparency and secrecy. Conceptually, I use Erving Goffman’s frontstage/backstage-theory according to which actors vie to maintain boundaries of visibility between these two types of social situations. Against this backdrop, the emergence of new types of secrecy in reaction to the implementation of transparency measures can be interpreted as efforts to create and/or resurrect boundaries of visibility between front- and backstage. This perspective is applied empirically to an extreme case: The Pirate Party of Germany, a political party that tries to render itself as open as possible to the public and vows to uphold such standard once elected. A qualitative case study on the parliamentary group in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia demonstrates that an organization deprived of boundaries of visibility between frontstage and backstage runs into problems and thus subsequently introduces such boundaries.