1st Edition
Cultures of Transparency Between Promise and Peril
This volume addresses the major questions surrounding a concept that has become ubiquitous in the media and in civil society as well as in political and economic discourses in recent years, and which is demanded with increasing frequency: transparency.
How can society deal with increasing and often diverging demands and expectations of transparency? What role can different political and civil society actors play in processes of producing, or preventing, transparency? Where are the limits of transparency and how are these boundaries negotiated? What is the relationship of transparency to processes of social change, as well as systems of social surveillance and control? Engaging with transparency as an interrelated product of law, politics, economics and culture, this interdisciplinary volume explores the ambiguities and contradictions, as well as the social and political dilemmas, that the age of transparency has unleashed.
As such it will appeal to researchers across the social sciences and humanities with interests in politics, history, sociology, civil society, citizenship, public policy, criminology and law.
1. Introduction: Transparency and Society
Stefan Berger and Susanne Fengler
Part 1: Transparency as Ethics and Politics
2. Transparency in Public Affairs: The Doctrinal Roots of a Successful Political Metaphor
Sandrine Baume
3. Transparency, the Public Sphere, and the Privatisation of Human Interests
Thomas Docherty
Part 2: Economics and Transparency
4. Varieties of Transparency as Analytical Tool
David Heald
5. Transparency and Economic Development
Jens Forssbaeck
Part 3: Law and Transparency
6. Transparency and its Limits
Padideh Ala’i
7. Political Economy of Judicial Data: Transparency, Openness and Access to Records of War Crimes Prosecutions
Elma Demir
Part 4: Transparency and the Digital World
8. Transparency and the Rise of Populism
Mark Fenster
9. Whistleblowers, Media, and Democracy in Latin America
Rogério Christofoletti
Part 5: Trust and Transparency
10. The Two Faces of Transparency? How Much Transparency is Beneficial? How Much is too Much?
Stefan Hornbostel
11. Does Transparency Endanger Trust?
Michael Hartmann
Part 6: Transparency and Subjectivities
12. Stainless Subjects: Transparency Imaginaries of the Avantgardes
Vincent Kaufmann
13. Anonymity and Transparency: Reconfiguring Cultural Modes of Social Interaction
Nils Zurawski, Michi Knecht and Daniela Silvestrin
14. Transparency, Privacy, and Civil Inattention
Emmanuel Alloa
15. Conclusion
Stefan Berger and Susanne Fengler
Biography
Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He is the co-editor of Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives and The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective.
Susanne Fengler is Professor of International Journalism and Director of the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism at TU Dortmund University. She is the co-editor of Journalists and Media Accountability, Mapping Media Accountability in Europe and Beyond, and the European Handbook of Media Accountability.
Dimitrij Owetschkin is a Permanent Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He is the co-editor of Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives.
Julia Sittmann is Research Associate at the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum, and a writer and editor at Deutsche Welle Akademie, Germany.