Abstract
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”, US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said. This adage, now the mantra of openness activists, has reshaped management and organization in all sectors: openness, transparency, and inclusion have since been hailed as universal cures for such challenges as scandals and racial and gender discrimination. Who still wants to voluntarily work in a secretive, opaque, and exclusive organization these days? Nevertheless, openness is far from universal among organizations. Being transparent about one’s environmental, social, and community impact and including clients and constituents in management decisions is no longer a rarity reserved by the likes of the Wikimedia Foundation or what MIT economic sociologist Cat Turco calls ‘radically open’ tech ventures, but rather an expectation for all organizations. This imperative is all the more evident when scandals rock our trust in nonprofits – be it the Mutuelle Nationale des Étudiants de France (MNEF) embezzlement scandal or reports of toxic work culture at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation – and show the downsides of shady management. Our study exploring the transformation of nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2005 and 2015, recently published in Organization Studies in collaboration with Woody Powell and Aaron Horvath of Stanford University, illuminates how organizations have opened up to become “glass houses” and why some have stayed in the shadows.