Corporate Truth


Book Description

In the corporate jungle inhabited by Enrons and WorldComs, a lack of transparency is the root of all scandal. Yet delivering transparency seems immensely difficult, with the oftencompeting interests of shareholders, corporate boards, government regulators and other stakeholders to be taken into account. Drawing on a vast wealth of real-life examples from the commercial world, this lively business book goes in search of the appropriate limits of transparency. From commercial confidentiality and the ethics of marketing to lobbying and corporate corruption, the author addresses the position, significance and limits of transparency in modern corporate life, working through the dilemmas presented by the increasing calls for transparency. From the secrets of the boardroom to the struggles of NGOs, transparency is a persistent challenge. How much is enough? How much do we need? And how do companies actually report on their impacts?




Troubling Transparency


Book Description

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.




Democracy More or Less


Book Description

This book studies how American political reform efforts often fail because of the unrealistic ideal of a fully informed and engaged citizenry.




Transparency in Government Operations


Book Description

Transparency in government operations is widely regarded as an important precondition for macroeconomic fiscal sustainability, good governance, and overall fiscal rectitude. Notably, the Interim Committee, at its April and September 1996 meetings, stressed the need for greater fiscal transparency. Prompted by these concerns, this paper represents a first attempt to address many of the aspects of transparency in government operations. It provides an overview of major issues in fiscal transparency and examines the IMF's role in promoting transparency in government operations.




Transparency, Society and Subjectivity


Book Description

This book critically engages with the idea of transparency whose ubiquitous demand stands in stark contrast to its lack of conceptual clarity. The book carefully examines this notion in its own right, traces its emergence in Early Modernity and analyzes its omnipresence in contemporary rhetoric. Today, transparency has become a catchword outplaying other Enlightenment values like empowerment, sincerity and the notion of a public sphere. In a suspicious manner, transparency is entangled in the discourses on power, surveillance, and self-exposure. Bringing together prominent scholars from the emerging field of Critical Transparency Studies, the book offers a map of the various sites at which transparency has become virulent and connects the dots between past and present. By studying its appearances in today’s hyper-mediated economies of information and by linking it back to its historical roots, the book analyzes transparency and its discontents, and scrutinizes the reasons why it has become the imperative of a supposedly post-ideological age.




Open Budgets


Book Description

Explicates political economy factors that have brought about greater transparency and participation in budget settings across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This title presents the strategies, policies, and institutions through which improvements can occur and produce change in policy and institutional outcomes.




Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI


Book Description

This volume tackles a quickly-evolving field of inquiry, mapping the existing discourse as part of a general attempt to place current developments in historical context; at the same time, breaking new ground in taking on novel subjects and pursuing fresh approaches. The term "A.I." is used to refer to a broad range of phenomena, from machine learning and data mining to artificial general intelligence. The recent advent of more sophisticated AI systems, which function with partial or full autonomy and are capable of tasks which require learning and 'intelligence', presents difficult ethical questions, and has drawn concerns from many quarters about individual and societal welfare, democratic decision-making, moral agency, and the prevention of harm. This work ranges from explorations of normative constraints on specific applications of machine learning algorithms today-in everyday medical practice, for instance-to reflections on the (potential) status of AI as a form of consciousness with attendant rights and duties and, more generally still, on the conceptual terms and frameworks necessarily to understand tasks requiring intelligence, whether "human" or "A.I."




Employees First, Customers Second


Book Description

Imagine a management philosophy based not upon serving a company's customers, but on serving the company's employees. Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies in India, has put such a philosophy into practice with remarkable results. His "employee first, customer second" mantra has been recognized globally as an example of organizational innovation, and was deemed a "new and radical management philosophy" ripe for the picking in the Western world by Business Week. In this book, Nayar himself describes his blunt refusal to treat the flesh and blood of HCL--its people--as "human resource" or as "intellectual capital" or even as an asset like all its other assets-and how his unique perspective led to an holistic transformation of his organization. By putting employees on top of the organizational pyramid, he argues, your company can fully realize the value created in the interface between customers and employees. This book leads managers and executives through the five core aspects of Nayar's approach, demonstrating how to create a sense of urgency, overhaul incentives and reporting structures, foster transparency in communications and feedback, provide platforms for achievement and personal growth, and finally recognize the potential of every individual in the organization. The "Employee First" philosophy should be the fulcrum of the transformation journey of any organization.




Democracy Transformed?


Book Description

This text assembles the evidence of how democratic institutions and processes are changing and considers the larger implications of these reforms for the nature of democracy. The findings point to a new style of democratic politics that expands the nature of democracy.




Transparency in International Law


Book Description

While its importance in domestic law has long been acknowledged, transparency has until now remained largely unexplored in international law. This study of transparency issues in key areas such as international economic law, environmental law, human rights law and humanitarian law brings together new and important insights on this pressing issue. Contributors explore the framing and content of transparency in their respective fields with regard to proceedings, institutions, law-making processes and legal culture, and a selection of cross-cutting essays completes the study by examining transparency in international law-making and adjudication.