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WK ORG - Secrecy and Openness
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| Präsentationen | ||
Bulletproofing futures: Pnpacking practices of concealment and revelation in organizations’ future-making Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Deutschland Recent research has focused on how organizations grapple with alternative versions of the future and craft preferred ones. This paper investigates how managers imagine and protect their preferred futures vis-à-vis different audiences within the organization. We draw upon the secrecy literature to explore the role of concealment and revelation practices in future-making. In organizational settings, secrecy has been found to foster creativity and innovation by circumventing corporate norms and to be useful in situations that are contested and subject to power games. Adopting a process perspective, we examine a large firm in the industrial goods sector to understand how near and distant futures are sustained. Our findings reveal that managers face a visibility dilemma. Over time, they use different varieties of concealment and revelation to protect their preferred futures from the reactions of different organizational audiences. Our study holds implications for emerging research on future-making in large corporations and for research at the nexus of secrecy and transparency in organizations. WORKING WITH A NAKED EMPEROR: MANAGING PUBLIC SECRETS IN OPEN INNOVATION 1Ludwig Maximilian Universität München; 2Copenhagen Business School, Dänemark; 3Kopenhagen Universität, Dänemark The present study is based on a netnography of the development of “HackerToy”, an ready-to-use physical hacking device, which can be purchased and used by lay-people to reveal and tinker with the hidden wireless signals that penetrate the world all around us. We find that this open source development process is based on the public secret of the potentially illegal affordances of the device , which organises the crowds activities. It protects the crowds development processes from regulatory constraints and interference, while at the same time attracting new developers as members of the crowd thereby pushing innovation boundaries. More specifically we discuss how public secrecy contributes to crowd cohesion and ambiguity, both of which enables and maintains the ongoing development. We do so by engaging with debates on the performative effects on secrecy, which moves beyond an understanding of secrecy as value protection or hiding misconduct, but reconsiders the intricate and productive relationship between publicity and secrecy. This also challenges the functionalist premise of secrecy deployed in the open innovation literature. | ||