In its 2018 advertisement for ABSOLUT Vodka1 the opening statement is that “Around here we do things a little differently. Don’t believe me? Let me show you”. The portrayal is humorous but the message is serious: its aim is to portray the Swedish company as totally transparent about itself, its brand, and its product.
The story opens with a spokesman for the company (who is an actual employee) as narrator, seemingly standing naked (“nothing to hide”) behind bales of straw in a newly mowed field in the open countryside. As he moves away we see that he is, indeed, wearing only work boots. Sitting on top of a large straw bale, pitchfork in hand, he proclaims that “Unlike other vodkas, we only use…”, referring to locally grown ingredients in the product, “and we know each farmer by name.” A farmer (supposedly one of the company’s actual producers of the ingredients), similarly naked, joins the spokesman, with harvesting machinery seen working in the field in the background.
The story moves to the “famous purity” of Sweden’s water used in the vodka, the spokesman now in a traditional wooden fishing boat on a local lake, with a (supposedly) actual local fisherman, also naked except for a life jacket, fishing line in hand.
The story continues with the line: “Everybody at our distillery is a local commuter…” shown arriving at the factory on their bicycles – naked, of course, but for their helmets and work boots. The daily production volumes are stated: “… each [unit] needs to be flawless”. Naked floor sweepers and other naked factory staff imply, visually, how the “VERY high standards” are met – the distilling process being a century-old legacy from the founder. Sustainability, “CO2 neutral distillation… No Waste”, is also highlighted in this “nothing is hidden” proclamation of ABSOLUT transparency.
“But the most important ingredient” in the product “is our people” – portrayed by the 28 (actual, named) staff, all fully naked, male and female, playing musical instruments, dancing and clowning around in joyful and proud celebration of their company, its purity, its legacy, its clarity and its transparency – “everything the company stands for”. The advertisement ends with the slogan “Create a better tomorrow, tonight. ABSOLUT”.
The advertisement makes the point, with humour and not a little irony, that the company is ‘Absolutely’ trustworthy because of the lengths to which it is prepared to go (voluntarily, far beyond that mandated, and what other companies would dare, or even contemplate doing) to convince the public of their authenticity and accountability – all due to their ‘full’ transparency! The question is, though – are they not (perversely) a little immoral (in the eyes of some) in their public nudity? Many would find this degree of public exposure of nudity unacceptable, even unlawful in some jurisdictions. In their willingness to expose themselves (figuratively) to public scrutiny, moreover, are we really shown everything about the company, its product, its governance practices or its moral behaviour? In the end do we know only what they choose to disclose about themselves – just enough to convince us of their complete trustworthiness? Or is it a deception through double innuendo – the product itself is completely clear – visually transparent, yet potentially morally reprehensible.
Thus, in the ABSOLUT spoof we have, perhaps inadvertently, the full irony of the concept of transparency as a proxy for corporate, political and social morality.
The notion of transparency is promoted by the corporate world as a business priority, since it is presented as a central attribute for growth and financial performance. Several professional business journal titles and consultant blogs foster transparency as not only good ethics, but also – and foremost – as good business. The moral message is clear: being transparent equates with being morally good. Transparency as a moral imperative has emerged with concerns about corporate issues such as environmental pollution and degradation, financial performance, firm diversity, and treatment of workers. Such issues are gaining increasing attention from stakeholders both within and outside the management community (Christensen et al. 2014).
Public and regulatory responses to recent waves of corporate scandal, malfeasance and failure have pinpointed a lack of transparency in corporate decision making as lying at the heart of this systemic problem, where arcane board processes and opacity in decision making have led to poor board governance and have fostered unethical corporate behaviour. The solution has been apparently clear: full transparency as the regulatory antidote to “restore public trust” in the capital market system, based on the assumption that greater transparency will lead to, or at least underpin, higher standards of ethical behaviour and accountability by corporations, and, in the end, a better society.
In contemporary management and corporate governance literature, and in international corporate governance regulations, transparency appears as a key word. Seen as both part of the problem and the solution to the many issues faced by our modern society, transparency is a concept in corporate governance that has been widely adopted by academics and regulators as a crucial requirement in building and sustaining trust in the capital markets. Besides efficiency and effectiveness, trust is also typically conceptualised in the literature as a consequence of transparency. Many streams of literature, especially in the finance field, regard transparency as having positive consequences, such as increased trust and better corporate performance. Greater transparency is thus understood to coincide with good governance.
In this book, we contend that transparency can engender an organisational culture that does little to cultivate the characteristics of corporate morality. Rather, we assert that transparency, while desirable in itself, is not the tool to enhance corporate moral awareness and thereby direct business actions towards creating a better world. It is not our aim to address the negative consequences of transparency; instead we make a strong case for eliminating, at the outset, the concept with normative connotations as a moral motivator. This is needed, we believe, because the underlying thesis (in the corporate reporting context) is that being transparent is (morally) courageous, honourable and good, which is assumed in the wider literature to be an unquestionably positive concept (Oliver 2004). Yet considerable critique in a wide range of literature has pointed out the illusion of the concept as a stimulus for moral behaviour.
In the following chapters we explain our position on why the emphasis on transparency is problematic in corporate governance. We then present what we believe is actually called for when corporations are asked for greater, and full, transparency. Against a philosophical background we build on the idea of self-knowledge and the notions of full responsibility for developing true moral behaviour in corporations.
In ancient Greek philosophy ethics or ἔθος (éthō) was understood as a way of being, where self-knowledge was related to “the care of oneself” – so that both self-knowledge and self-care were ethically prioritised over the care for others (Foucault 1997). We define full responsibility as the capacity for self-knowledge, which is a multifaceted concept drawn from the philosophical, psychological and sociological disciplines. The concept of self-knowledge provides a basis for augmenting the legislated minimum standards of corporate governance with the generation of truly moral corporate behaviour...