Final Report Summary - ORGSEC (The "Hidden Architecture" of Organizations: A Study of Organizational Secrecy) Secrecy is a fundamental part of organizations and his has profound social, economic and political implications. During the fellowship at one of the leading organization theory research environments – the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), this project conducted a systematic investigation of the significant, yet still widely neglected topic of organizational secrecy. The aim of the project has been to bring organizational secrecy into research focus and discuss its wide-ranging implications. The project takes an innovative multidisciplinary approach, including organization theory, sociology and philosophy, and empirical approach to secrecy, drawing on a variety of illustrative empirical examples. The project contributes to European research excellence by establishing lasting collaborations between high profile researchers. These serve to produce first insights on this timely topic of organizational secrecy that is not only foundational to the field of organization theory but also of great socio-economic relevance given the increasing push towards transparency, openness and knowledge-based activity in society and economy.One objective of the project has been to bring organizational secrecy into research focus through a systematic investigation. For this, the concept of secrecy has been traced in theoretical writings in the social sciences and particularly in the works of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Elias Canetti, Michael Taussig and others. These writings show how secrecy is a multi-faceted phenomenon that deeply shapes our lives. In everyday social interactions, relations of power, elite groups, situations of competition, diplomacy, totalitarian dictatorships and liberal democracies secrecy is present in some form or other. This variety highlights not just secrecy’s pervasiveness but that is neither inherently good nor bad. Simmel’s assertion of secrecy as a universal sociological form underscores the redundancy of making a priori ethical judgments about it: it is present as a basic category of social experience. Appreciating the wide-ranging ways in which secrecy is intimately linked to the fundamental “stuff” that makes up social life allows us to see its significance for the making, remaking and unmaking of groups, networks and organizations.A detailed study of secrecy in organizations, drawing on existing research and a variety of illustrative empirical examples, has revealed how secrecy fundamentally shapes the hidden architecture of organizations. By regulating what is said and not said, by and to whom, secrecy organizes social relations. At the same time as it brings about organizational structures and cultures, secrecy is embedded in them. Rather than constituting a singular phenomenon that an organization does or does not exhibit, secrecy is deeply interwoven into the very social fabric that knits together organizations in the first place. This means that it both cuts across and is directly relevant to a variety of organizational phenomena. The approach the project developed seeks to establish secrecy not as a property of organizations but as a core characteristic and process of organization itself.This approach to secrecy and the insights developed in the project have various implications for research and organizations, policy-making and society at large. In relation to the formal-legal ways of enforcing and keeping secrets, the project draws attention to the issue of the indeterminacy of what needs to be kept secret and the related dilemma of the need of organizational compartmentalization for reducing the risk of revelation versus the need to share secrets for the effective functioning of organizations. Moreover, the apparently obvious idea that formal secrecy is somehow stronger in terms of a better protection of knowledge than informal secrecy has been questioned as the codification of knowledge produces vulnerabilities. Thus precisely when strategic matters deemed as highly important are involved people may prefer to engage in informal secrecy which is less traceable. The project’s insights are also directly relevant to debates about knowledge-sharing and hiding. The attractions of secrecy may help to explain why organizational silos remain stubbornly resistant to organizational endeavors to enhance knowledge-sharing. Moreover, whereas secrecy in the form of knowledge hiding is often seen as stifling creativity and innovative processes, the analysis shows how the reverse may also be the case. Secrecy is not only about knowledge hiding, but also about sharing knowledge in particular social formations, such as groups, cliques and networks. Such social formations can foster creative thinking to the extent that they develop separate rules and norms and provide members with a sense of autonomy vis-à-vis the existing organizational hierarchy and structure. The social psychological dimensions of secrecy the project draws attention to are also relevant for understanding situations where it is deemed important for commercial or other reasons for an organization to guard secrets, whether internally or externally. They shed light on the ways in which people may gain a sense of importance by hinting at, and thus potentially compromising, their possession of secrets. Moreover, the core idea of the special nature of secret knowledge can make people prone to treat it differently, potentially believing that it is more relevant and real than other knowledge. This can mean that there is a greater risk that insiders of secrecy, such as leaders in public and private organizations, become overconfident in their strategic decisions; they feel themselves to know better and more than outsiders and thus refrain from consulting others. Similarly, it can mean that outsiders of secrecy-sharing groups and organizations place too much trust in the insiders’ apparently superior knowledge and therefore ability to make the right decisions. In drawing attention to why and how people can be so strongly invested in the keeping of secrets, why transparency measures may not only be difficult to enforce but also be based on an illusory understanding of organizational dynamics can be explained. This can create dilemmas, especially in public organizations, where transparency needs to be particularly strongly espoused in public, yet daily organizational life itself might be deeply bound up with secrecy. Indeed, under the veil of transparency initiatives, which usually focus on very specific organizational issues, informal secrecy may foster and/or organizations may introduce even stricter and intricate forms of formal secrecy, thus circumventing the transparency efforts. This may occur precisely as actors seek to maintain a sense of being in control as opposed to being controlled through externally imposed transparency programs. Secrecy is an inherent feature of social life that will not entirely disappear, no matter which transparency and public accountability measures are taken. We need to be cautious about the dualistic categorization of transparency and public accountability as ethically desirable as opposed to secrecy as problematic. Such a categorization fails to see how secrecy and transparency overlap. Secrecy can involve forms of organizational surveillance, that is attempts to make transparent members’ actions. Furthermore, it does not sufficiently account for the political and normative nature of transparency discourses and practices. Transparency in terms of the striving towards informational control is what defines total institutions. In such cases, engaging in secrecy can provide a space of autonomy. It is this politically desirable aspect of secrecy, that the project seeks to bring into debates of transparency and accountability that are typically primarily focused on secrecy’s undoubtedly existing dark sides. Indeed in the current climate of debates about big data, secrecy may have become a necessary form of resistance and protection. Beyond such issues of individual autonomy and resistance, there are good arguments for organizations, including the state, to engage in secrecy. There are legitimate issues of commercial confidentiality and state security which are not helped by approaching secrecy and transparency/accountability as binaries. The key issue is what things, for what reasons and within what groups secrets are kept or revealed. For more information on the project and its results, see ‘Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life’ (Stanford University Press, forthcoming in 2016, with Grey, C.) these implications have been discussed in great detail. For further details, please contact: Jana Costas, jana.costas@fu-berlin.de or jco.ikl@cbs.dk.
