Varieties of Open Governance: How Openness Projects Organize and Make Decisions

• Author: Alex Ingrams
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12651
• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Date: 01 November 2016

982 Public Administration Review • November | December 2016

Alex Ingrams is a doctoral candidate

at the School of Public Affairs and

Administration at Rutgers University–

Newark. His research interests are in

organizational theory, Web 2.0 technology

in public administration, and open

government initiatives.

E-mail: alex.ingrams@rutgers.edu I n Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness , Nathaniel

Tkacz has carved out fascinating new intellectual

terrain for the organizational theory of openness

in government, which he describes as a “strange and

relatively new political concept” (14). Tkacz is an

associate professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary

Methodologies at the University of Warwick. His

research focuses on network forms of technology,

politics, and culture in organizations. His latest

book investigates the organization Wikipedia, but

it explores the emergence (or “second coming,” as

Tkacz would call it) of openness as a general governing

approach to organizations, starting with Barack

Obama ’ s open government initiative.

By tracing the evolution of the concept of openness,

Tkacz wants to “establish the frame of openness

as a new organizing mechanism, to show how it

functions, what it is allied with, and finally to outline

its limitations” (126). It is thus a timely study of open,

networked, or collaborative forms of governance

in public administration theory. It provides new

conceptual tools for interpreting modern forms of

governance through the lens of classical theories of

Max Weber and Karl Popper (as well as many other

theorists), and is a helpful contribution to a growing

area of public administrative practice and research.

The book begins with a quote from Barack Obama

outlining the 2009 Memorandum on Transparency

and Open Government and its accompanying

concepts of government collaboration and

public participation. Tkacz presents the high-

level promulgation as evidence of a new kind of

organizational logic that is directed inward, inside

the operations of government, making Obama ’ s “a

statement about politics and government in general”

(2). Tkacz argues the Memorandum went beyond

the familiar government rhetoric on the value of

democracy and market efficiency and implied that

those well-worn concepts of governance now actually

relied upon openness so that “openness had become

part of the conditions of possibility of all politics”

(3). This is a striking observation, but, while Tkacz

goes on to show how the language of openness is a

new approach to the logic of organizational rules,

hierarchies, and politics, he does not return to explain

whether this transition is good or bad for government

administration or society in general.

Unfortunately, Tkacz ’ s description does not go

far enough to explain how the logic of openness

in Obama ’ s presidential context differs from non-

governmental organizations like Wikipedia, where

his analysis is focused. This is a conspicuous absence

in a thesis that clearly intends to extend the logic of

openness in Wikipedia to public governance and other

organizations. When Tkacz says that “this book offers

a consideration of political development that operates

under the notion of openness” (3), he is actually

talking about political development of the public

sphere rather than only inner politics of a corporate

kind.

Despite missing an explanation of how

Wikipedia links to politics of the public sphere,

Tkacz correctly argues that concepts such as

transparency, participation, and collaboration in

many organizational contexts have evolved from

the language of Web 2.0 technology and echo

Web 2.0 theories, such as Eric Raymond ’ s ( 2001 )

dichotomy of the cathedral and the bazaar (i.e., the

conventional and hierarchical versus the experimental

and decentralized). Tkacz claims that a central

shortcoming of many Web 2.0 models of participation

and collaboration in general is that they do not

explain how such practices work in real organizational

situations. The benefit of participation, for example,

does not say much in itself because, in an organization

such as Wikipedia, not all edits by users are allowed to

stick. On the other hand, the concept of collaboration

Danny L. Balfour and Stephanie P. Newbold, Editors

Alex Ingrams

Rutgers University–Newark

Varieties of Open Governance:

How Openness Projects Organize and Make Decisions

Nathaniel Tkacz, Wikipedia and the Politics of

Openness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

232 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9780226192277;

$25.00 (paper), ISBN: 9780226192307 .

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 76, Iss. 6, pp. 982–985. © 2016 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12651.