Abstract
Secrets are a pervasive organizational phenomenon and secrecy is a common practice at work. We sign non-disclosure agreements when we start new projects, we read about broken secrets in the news—just think of VW’s emission scandal or Apple’s fights over patents—and we practice secrecy when we speak about certain things during lunch breaks (the last office party) and not others (our salaries). However, despite its pervasiveness, the phenomenon of organizational secrecy has rarely been explicitly and systematically studied by organizational scholars so far. In a new book, Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life, Jana Costas and Christopher Grey address this void by ‘develop[ing] an understanding of how secrecy organizes social relations and thus can be constitutive of organizations’ (p. 154). The result is a thought-provoking, book-length essay that deviates from conventional takes on corporate concealment and, instead, perceives ‘secrecy’ as a complex and dynamic social process. It is not the concealed information, the actual content of secrets, which Costas and Grey write about, but the daily practices or ongoing social accomplishments that result in secrets. This is a view of secrecy that draws on a definition borrowed from Sissela Bok (1989): the intentionally applied methods of concealing certain information, something that the authors distinguish from ‘privacy’ (no hiding involved), ‘anonymity’ (narrow focus on personal identity), ‘taboos’ (not secret but widely known), and ‘silence’ (one practice of concealment).
The perspective taken by Costas and Grey allows them to fathom traditional, information-focused forms of concealment such as trade secrecy, intellectual property rights, and confidentiality, as well as phenomena such as corruption, window dressing, and deception—the former mostly considered good or justifiable, the latter bad or dubious. However, their standpoint enables them to see more than this: they can also capture the social aspects of secrecy, that is, interactions inherently intertwined with the aforementioned forms of concealment, yet much more fluid and not as easily labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Drawing on Erving Goffman (1990 [1963]), Costas and Grey call this kind of secrecy ‘inside secrecy’. It is a kind of secrecy that relates to something shared and concealed at the same time, establishes connections and boundaries between people, and structures social relations. Therefore, the two authors claim—this being the main point of their book!—ultimately organizations can be constituted and brought into existence in and through practices of secrecy.
To illustrate this idea, the authors draw, among other things, on Christopher Grey’s extensive research on Bletchley Park. This is the site in Britain where signal intelligence was located during World War II and the German Enigma ciphers were broken by a team around Alan Turing. Employees at Bletchley Park got to know highly sensitive data, for example, about the D-Day landings, hence they felt like an elite of sorts; the chosen few within the inner Enigma-secret circle even as an elite within an elite (p. 128). It was not walls or contracts that gave the organization contour but the various practices carried out by the Bletchley Park people to keep and share these secrets.
What I found particularly interesting is one manifestation of inside secrecy discussed by Costas and Grey, namely, ‘public secrecy’ (here, they start out from Michael Taussig, 1999). This is a subtle, more complicated form of inside secrecy, something that is generally known but cannot be acknowledged. Thus, it resembles taboos, but with a lower diffusion rate. Public secrets need to be ‘picked up’ in a socialization process and they are protected through a ‘conspiracy of silence’ among those in the know. Violation consists of saying what should not be said to insiders [sic], so that this form of secrecy is very conducive to the re-production of the dominant social order. For instance, public secrecy was at play in a professional service firm studied by Jana Costas, insofar as business consultants needed to develop an understanding that ‘satisfactory’ performance appraisals really meant ‘not good enough’, or that there was a difference between the official hours reported to HR and the actual hours worked on the project (pp. 105–106).
Costas’ and Grey’s book is a stimulating read, not only because of its fresh outlook on the subject but also because of the examples they use to illustrate their argument. The two authors provide an abundance of them—not only from their own research but also from literature, news, and pop culture. My brief mentioning of Bletchley Park and Costas’ consultancies is an attempt to provide a flavor of the always-illuminating illustrations to be found between the covers of Secrecy at Work.
Costas’ and Grey’s endeavor can be described as a twofold epistemic one: on the one hand, regarding their object of study, and, on the other, regarding the way in which they study their object. First, the authors conceive of secrecy as the hidden epistemic architecture of organizational life. Epistemic in this context means that ultimately, the architecture is concerned with the barriers and conduits of knowledge. Conceiving secrecy this way also sheds a different light on diverse phenomena—including, and probably of particular interest to the readers of Organization, power relations. From a traditional viewpoint on concealment, a person who possesses information and hides it from another is powerful insofar as he or she has a strategic advantage in terms of making better decisions compared to the latter, or because he or she can influence the latter’s decisions by reducing the information available. A view of concealment that puts a premium on the social aspects of secrecy, as proposed by Costas and Grey, goes beyond this ‘Baconian’ account. It regards knowledge not as an independent resource for power but as its outcome and medium. Depending on the way knowledge is distributed among organizational members in and through practices of secrecy, they construe and enact very different realities. Groups of insiders and outsiders with distinct worldviews come into being, who potentially engage in forms of discrimination and ‘othering’ to assert themselves.
Second, the perspective shift undertaken by Costas and Grey is also epistemic in nature—albeit on a different level. They turn away from the informational content of secrets and secrecy as social process comes to the fore. By bringing ‘the workings of secrecy into the light’ (p. 154), Secrecy at Work presents the condition of possibility to study new phenomena or old ones in new ways, to integrate secrecy into established organization theories (e.g. systems theory or CCO), and to question existing organizational orders, such as group identities or status hierarchies. This means that although the book is not written from a decidedly critical standpoint—it is not concerned with challenging certain forms of secrecy or engaging in ethically charged debates of transparency—it is based on a progressive logic and can be used for emancipatory purposes.