Tracing two faces of extended visibility: a bibliometric analysis of transparency discussions in social sciences

Modern governance is the product of constant efforts to make the entire society visible, calculable and manageable. Transparency has emerged as the central ethics to manage public visibility in market and governance. Its celebration or refusal has been associated with technological and political evolution. Using bibliometric analyses of academic literature concerning transparency, this paper traces the interactions of the ethics of transparency with external environments. Guided by historiography and co-occurrence analyses, I map out the major shifts in academic attention and thematic associations related to the ethics of transparency. The modern aspiration of more visibility has been prominent in the finance market, corporate management, public governance, and policy communication. The greater visibility has been associated with accountability, anti-corruption, trust, and participation, as the cure for information asymmetry and power disparity. However, the extended visibility may lessen the human capacity to apprehend reality, which concerns the recent discussions of transparency in higher education, policy communications, and new virtual spaces. By contextualizing the primary themes in transparency discourse, I summarize the three sources of the new risks embedded in extended visibility: the organizational operations decoupled from the intended goals of transparency; the uncovered power relations in the politics of disclosure; and blind reliance on decontextualized digital data.