For over a year now, I have attached increasing importance to all sorts of
qualities that people seem to connect in phrases like corporate
transaparency and transparent organisation. But when you try to introduce
this philosophy within a professional sphere - two that interest me a lot
being marketing and knowledge management - academics and others ask for a
definition of what Transparency Research is?
I have come up with this possibly provocative attempt to reply. And I
particularly wanted to check this community's opinions because of the case
reference my attempt at definition makes. Would LO people feel positive or
negative if I started trying to popularise this definition? Does anyone
have a better definition? I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel but I am
desperately trying to get Associations of marketing and knowledge
management (both academics and practice) to start Special Interest Groups
where Transparency is the defining characteristic to come to grips with,
and in some cases start debating standards for. Consequently I have need
of a definition.
"Transparency Research takes as it subject a human system and as its theme
of investigative inquiry: what would happen to the value dynamics of this
if completely open information was practiced ? Consequently this is an
exercise in reframing applicable to a business organisation, a whole
industry, a profession, a practice standard, and other systems which
connect human relationships and behaviours. The genre of Learning
Organisation and within that the framing modules provided by Fifth
Discipline and SOL research is one of the most well known examples of the
Transparency Research mode.
Two leading indicators of why the concept of Transparency is emerging as a
critical megatrend - one shaping our communal futures so well worth public
debate - are :
1) The broad arena of valuing Responsibility which involves cultural and
policy debates such as those President Bush refers to in Ushering in a
Responsibility Era
2) Corporate Responsibility connections which seek to reframe business
valuation so that the interdependencies between monetary value and social
values are never again separated in the way that performance is appraised
Economically, it can be said that Transparency is a way of referring to
the major new dynamic force occasioned by an open information age, and the
technological and social revolutions that digital networks bring to the
world viewed at both its most global and local levels"
Chris Macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
www.valuetrue.com
--"chris macrae" <wcbn007@easynet.co.uk>
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