The Paradoxes of Transparency

The Paradoxes of Transparency
Author: Douglas Clyde Wilson
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9089640606

"The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) is the central scientific network within the massive set of bureaucracies that is responsible for Europe's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). While spending the past 25 years failing to sustain Europe's fish stocks, this management system also became adept at making the lives of its scientists miserable. Now it is being confronted by the complex challenge of an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management. If this combination of a multi-national bureaucracy, hard politics, and scientific uncertainty has made it impossible to maintain many individual fish stocks, how are decisions going to be made that consider everything from sea birds to climate change? The old political saw that "if you can't solve a problem, make it bigger" has never been put to a test like this! Yet ICES has begun to rise in an impressive way to the scientific challenge of providing advice for an ecosystem approach within the world's most cumbersome fisheries management system. This book lays out the results of extensive sociological research on ICES and the decision making systems into which it feeds. ICES is finding ways to provide effective advice in the many situations where scientific advice is needed but a clear, simple answer is out of reach. In spite of the difficulties, scientists are beginning to help the various parties concerned with management to deal with facts about nature in ways that are more useful and transparent"--Publisher's description.

The Transparency Paradox

The Transparency Paradox
Author: Ida Koivisto
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0192667904

Transparency has become a new norm. States, international organizations, and even private businesses have sought to bolster their legitimacy by invoking transparency in their activities. This growth in popularity was made possible through two interconnected trends: the idea that transparency is inherently good, and that the actual meaning of the term is becoming harder and harder to pin down. Thus far, this has remained undertheorized. The Transparency Paradox is an insightful account of the hidden logic of the ideal of transparency and its legal manifestations. It shows how transparency is a covertly conflicted ideal. The book argues that counter to popular understanding, truth and legitimacy cannot but form a problematic trade-off in transparency practices.

The Paradox of Openness

The Paradox of Openness
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004281193

The ‘open society’ has become a watchword of liberal democracy and the market system in the modern globalized world. Openness stands for individual opportunity and collective reason, as well as bottom-up empowerment and top-down transparency. It has become a cherished value, despite its vagueness and the connotation of vulnerability that surrounds it. Scandinavia has long considered itself a model of openness, citing traditions of freedom of information and inclusive policy making. This collection of essays traces the conceptual origins, development, and diverse challenges of openness in the Nordic countries and Austria. It examines some of the many paradoxes that openness encounters and the tensions it arouses when it addresses such divergent ends as democratic deliberation and market transactions, freedom of speech and sensitive information, compliant decision making and political and administrative transparency, and consensual procedures and the toleration of dissent. Contributors are: Ainur Elmgren, Tero Erkkilä, Norbert Götz, Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Johannes Kananen, Lotta Lounasmeri, Carl Marklund, Peter Parycek, Johanna Rainio-Niemi, Judith Schossböck, Ylva Waldemarson, and Tuomas Ylä-Anttila.

Troubling Transparency

Troubling Transparency
Author: David E. Pozen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231545800

Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.

The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility

The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility
Author: Øyvind Ihlen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 792
Release: 2011-08-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 111807873X

This book represents the definitive research collection for corporate social responsibility communication, offering cross-disciplinary and international perspectives from the top scholars in the field. Addresses a gap in the existing CSR literature Demonstrates the relevance of effective CSR communication for the management of organizations The 28 contributions come from top scholars in public relations, organizational communication, reputation management, marketing and management

Spandrels of Truth

Spandrels of Truth
Author: Jc Beall
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2011-04-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191613738

Among the various conceptions of truth is one according to which 'is true' is a transparent, entirely see-through device introduced for only practical (expressive) reasons. This device, when introduced into the language, brings about truth-theoretic paradoxes (particularly, the notorious Liar and Curry paradoxes). The options for dealing with the paradoxes while preserving the full transparency of 'true' are limited. In Spandrels of Truth, Beall concisely presents and defends a modest, so-called dialetheic theory of transparent truth.

Sleight of Mind

Sleight of Mind
Author: Matt Cook
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0262542293

This “fun, brain-twisting book . . . will make you think” as it explores more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, philosophy, physics, and the social sciences (Sean Carroll, New York Times–bestselling author of Something Deeply Hidden). Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician’s purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn’t require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind, Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts—and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world—and much more.

NGOs and Corporations

NGOs and Corporations
Author: Michael Yaziji
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1139478400

We live in a period marked by the ascendency of corporations. At the same time, the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – such as Amnesty International, CARE, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Save the Children, and the WWF – has rapidly increased in the last twenty years. As a result, these two very different types of organization are playing an increasingly important role in shaping our society, yet they often have very different agendas. This book focuses on the dynamic interactions, both conflictual and collaborative, that exist between corporations and NGOs. It includes rigorous models, frameworks, and case studies to document the various ways that NGOs target corporations through boycotts, proxy campaigns, and other advocacy initiatives. It also explains the emerging pattern of cross-sectoral alliances and partnerships between corporations and NGOs. This book can help managers, activists, scholars, and students to better understand the nature, scope, and evolution of these complex interactions.

Paradoxes

Paradoxes
Author: Roy T. Cook
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2013-04-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0745665519

Paradoxes are arguments that lead from apparently true premises, via apparently uncontroversial reasoning, to a false or even contradictory conclusion. Paradoxes threaten our basic understanding of central concepts such as space, time, motion, infinity, truth, knowledge, and belief. In this volume Roy T Cook provides a sophisticated, yet accessible and entertaining, introduction to the study of paradoxes, one that includes a detailed examination of a wide variety of paradoxes. The book is organized around four important types of paradox: the semantic paradoxes involving truth, the set-theoretic paradoxes involving arbitrary collections of objects, the Soritical paradoxes involving vague concepts, and the epistemic paradoxes involving knowledge and belief. In each of these cases, Cook frames the discussion in terms of four different approaches one might take towards solving such paradoxes. Each chapter concludes with a number of exercises that illustrate the philosophical arguments and logical concepts involved in the paradoxes. Paradoxes is the ideal introduction to the topic and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students in a wide variety of disciplines who wish to understand the important role that paradoxes have played, and continue to play, in contemporary philosophy.

The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox

The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox
Author: Wendy K. Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019106937X

The notion of paradox dates back to ancient philosophy, yet only recently have scholars started to explore this idea in organizational phenomena. Two decades ago, a handful of provocative theorists urged researchers to take seriously the study of paradox, and thereby deepen our understanding of plurality, tensions, and contradictions in organizational life. Studies of organizational paradox have grown exponentially over the past two decades, canvassing varied phenomena, methods, and levels of analysis. These studies have explored such tensions as today and tomorrow, global integration and local distinctions, collaboration and competition, self and others, mission and markets. Yet even with both the depth and breadth of interest in organizational paradoxes, key issues around definitions and application remain. This Handbook seeks to aid, engage, and fuel the expanding interest in organizational paradox. Contributions to this volume depict how paradox studies inform, and are informed, by other theoretical perspectives, while creating a resource that enables scholars to learn about and apply this lens across varied organizational phenomena. The increasing complexity, volatility, and ambiguity in our world continually surfaces paradoxical dynamics. Thus, this Handbook offers insights to scholars across organizational theory.