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We live in times of transparency. Digital technologies expose everything we do, like, and search for, and it is difficult to remain private and out of sight. Meanwhile, many people are concerned about the unchecked powers of tech giants and the hidden operations of big data, artificial intelligence and algorithms and call for more openness and insight. How do we - as individuals, companies and societies - deal with these technological and social transformations? Seen through the prism of digital technologies and data, our lives take new shapes and we are forced to manage our visibilities carefully. This book challenges common ways of thinking about transparency, and argues that the management of visibilities is a crucial, but overlooked force that influences how people live, how organizations work, and how societies and politics operate in a digital, datafied world.

With an ever-growing number of users, the Internet is central to the processes of globalization, cultural formations, social encounters and economic development. These aside, it is also fast becoming an important political domain. Struggles over disclosure, access and governance are only the most visible signs that the Internet is quickly becoming a site of fierce political conflict involving states, technical groups, business and civil society. As the debate over the global politics of the Internet intensifies, this book will be a valuable guide to anyone seeking to understand the emergence, organization and shape of this new issue. In this vivid study, Mikkel Flyverbom captures how questions about the digital divide and the information revolution, dialogues with stakeholders, and networked forms of organization have become key features of the global politics of the Internet. Tracing the making and stabilization of this transnational issue in and around the United Nations over almost a decade, this book demonstrates how multi-stakeholder networks make new political domains accessible and unsettle established ways of organizing transnational governance. The Power of Networks offers a rich account of the practices and effects of organizing global politics and governance through dialogues and collaborations among governments, business and societies the world over. Offering a novel analytical vocabulary for the study of ordering, governance and organization in global politics, and its relationship to the growth of the Internet, this innovative ethnographic study of hybrid organizations and entangled forms of power in global politics shows how insights from actor-network theory and the Foucauldian governmentality literature can reinvigorate studies of transnational governance and organizational processes. It will appeal to anyone interested in

This article challenges the view of transparency as a matter of providing openness, insight, and clarity by conceptualizing it as a form of visibility management. We tend to think of transparency as a process of ensuring accountability through the timely and public disclosure of information. But with the ubiquity of digital technology and data, transparency efforts have more elaborate and complex effects. To conceptualize these, this article discusses the technological and mediated foundations of transparency and the dynamics of visibility practices resulting from efforts to make people, objects, and processes knowable and governable. This implies that we shift our attention away from the provision of information and consider the wider social processes and dynamics at work in transparency efforts. Using empirical illustrations from organizations with an explicit commitment to transparency, this article articulates the complexities and dynamics of visibility management and highlights a set of critical questions about the politics, technologies, and power effects of contemporary transparency regimes.

The ubiquity of digital technologies and the datafication of many domains of social life raise important questions about governance. In the emergent field of internet governance studies, most work has explored novel governance arrangements, institutional developments and the effects of interactions among public and private actors in the emergence of the internet as a matter of concern in global politics. But the digital realm involves more subtle forms of governance and politics that also deserve attention. In this paper, I suggest that the 'ordering' effects of digital infrastructures also revolve around what I term the 'management of visibilities'. Drawing on insights from science and technology studies and sociologies of visibility, the paper articulates how digital technologies afford and condition ordering through the production of visibilities and the guidance of attention. The basic tenet of the argument is that there is an intimate relationship between seeing, knowing and governing, and that digitalisation and datafication processes fundamentally shape how we make things visible or invisible, knowable or unknowable and governable or ungovernable. Having articulated this conceptual argument, the article offers a number of illustrations of such forms of ordering.

While we witness a growing belief in transparency as an ideal solution to a wide range of societal problems, we know less about the practical workings of transparency as it guides conduct in organizational and regulatory settings. This article argues that transparency efforts involve much more than the provision of information and other forms of 'sunlight', and are rather a matter of managing visibilities than providing insight and clarity. Building on actor-network theory and Foucauldian governmentality studies, it calls for careful attention to the ways in which transparency ideals are translated into more situated practices and become associated with specific organizational and regulatory concerns. The article conceptualizes transparency as a force that shapes conduct in organizational and socio-political domains. In the second section, this conceptualization of transparency as a form of 'ordering' is substantiated further by using illustrations of the effects of transparency efforts in the internet domain.

AbstractThe rapid growth of internet users and the importance of networked technologies for most spheres of life raise questions about how to foster and govern the digital revolution on a global scale. Focusing on internet governance and the use of ICTs for development purposes, I provide a multi‐sited, ethnographic exploration of two UN‐based multi‐stakeholder arrangements – comprising governments, business and civil society groups – that have contributed to the construction of the digital revolution as an object of global governance. In this article I show how analytical insights from governmentality studies and actor‐network theory can be used to capture how objects of governance and organizational arrangements are constructed and consolidated. Conventional approaches to networks and governance tend to treat organizational arrangements and issue areas as bounded, separate and fixed. By contrast, I demonstrate the merits of a practice‐oriented, relational and agnostic research strategy, which foregrounds the governmental techniques and moments of translation involved when new objects and modes of governance are assembled and negotiated.

Digital transformations have significant consequences for organizational attempts to shape their environments. Our focus is on how corporate political activity evolves in ways that require us to pay more attention to how information gets structured in digital spaces, and on how information ecosystems operate and shape strategic communication activities in organizational settings. We outline these digital transformations, offer a focus on corporate political activity as informational and develop a typology of datafied corporate political activity techniques to illustrate how the workings of digital spaces shape political issues more concretely. This serves to highlight the necessity of extending the focus of informational corporate political activity beyond the contents of overt and direct messages to include the more covert and subtle forms of influence made possible through the strategic structuring of information itself. This also contributes to our understanding of the political significance of corporate political activity, which is less about influencing political issues by composing appealing messages and distributing them to relevant audiences, and more about influencing political issues by organizing digital information and feeding algorithms. We suggest that such datastructures and algorithmic forms of sorting will become as important as message contents, and that datafied advocacy will become a central component of corporate political activity and other organizational activities.

Digital transformations have significant consequences for organizational attempts to shape their environments. Our focus is on how corporate political activity evolves in ways that require us to pay more attention to how information gets structured in digital spaces, and on how information ecosystems operate and shape strategic communication activities in organizational settings. We outline these digital transformations, offer a focus on corporate political activity as informational and develop a typology of datafied corporate political activity techniques to illustrate how the workings of digital spaces shape political issues more concretely. This serves to highlight the necessity of extending the focus of informational corporate political activity beyond the contents of overt and direct messages to include the more covert and subtle forms of influence made possible through the strategic structuring of information itself. This also contributes to our understanding of the political significance of corporate political activity, which is less about influencing political issues by composing appealing messages and distributing them to relevant audiences, and more about influencing political issues by organizing digital information and feeding algorithms. We suggest that such datastructures and algorithmic forms of sorting will become as important as message contents, and that datafied advocacy will become a central component of corporate political activity and other organizational activities.

Digital transformations and processes of "datafication" fundamentally reshape how information is produced, circulated and given meaning. In this article, we provide a concept of "datastructuring" which seeks to capture this reshaping as both a product of and productive of social activity. To do this we focus on (1) how new forms of social action map onto and are enabled by technological changes related to datafication, and (2) how new forms of datafied social action constitute a form of knowledge production which becomes embedded in technologies themselves. We illustrate the potential of the datastructuring concept with empirical examples which also serve to highlight some new avenues for research and some empirical questions to explore further. We suggest a focus on datastructuring can ignite scholarly debates across disciplines that may share an interest in the technological configurations, sorting activities, and other socio-material forces that shape digital spaces, but which are rarely brought together. Such cross-disciplinary conceptualizations may give more attention to how information is structured and organized, becomes "algorithmically recognizable", and emerges as (in)visible in digital, datafied spaces. Such a concept, we suggest, may help us better understand the novel ways in which "backstage datawork" and "data sorting processes" gain traction in political interventions, commercial processes, and social ordering.

This article analyses the complex work of human actors and technologies that goes into producing that which appears to us as 'transparent'. Drawing on studies of governance and surveillance, affordance theory, actor-network theory and sociological work on numbers, we analyse the role played by mediating technologies in the production of transparency and relate it to the question of how knowledge is created, recycled and modified in organizational settings. This perspective is largely absent from existing research on transparency, which construes transparency as unmediated or fails to investigate the organizing properties of specific mediating technologies. We argue that mediating technologies, conceptualized here as disclosure devices, have distinctive organizing properties that are important to scrutinize. They play a central role in attempts to shed light on objects, subjects and practices, and to help build or break up relationships within and across sites and organizations. We focus on three disclosure devices and their respective knowledge creation processes: (a) due diligence, whose emphasis is on qualitative knowledge production; (b) rankings, which is about quantitative knowledge production; (c) big data analysis, which underscores algorithmic knowledge production. We conceptualize the distinct features of these disclosure devices, indicate ways in which they shape organizational processes and discuss some of the ethical and political challenges they pose.