ORIGINAL PAPER Transparency in business and society: introduction to the special issue Antonino Vaccaro Æ Peter Madsen Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 The last decade has witnessed an increasing use—and sometimes abuse—of the term ‘‘transparency’’ in very dif- ferent contexts such as business, political affairs and edu- cation. It has rapidly become a key consideration in the question of whether or not organizational decision making is good decision making. Likewise, the concept of transpar- ency has become an indispensable ingredient in social accountability and is considered necessary for preserving and guaranteeing ethical and fair processes that are carried out within the private, public and non-profit sectors. The centrality and importance of transparency was recently acknowledged, for example, by the new President of the US, Barack Obama, who published an important memorandum on the White House’s website titled ‘‘Transparency and Open Government.’’ This document says in part: ‘‘…my Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transpar- ency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government…’’ (available online at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Transparency andOpenGovernment/). At the same time, arguments on behalf of transparency in business are proliferating. In popular business books like The Naked Corporation, in newspaper or magazine articles and in blogs around the Internet as well as in academic journals, one can find the idea of transparency being pro- moted as the road that businesses need to traverse if they are to become consumer friendly and successful. Even the business practitioner literature itself has recently been enhanced with articles and books that offer advice on how to implement transparency in human resource management and in corporate strategy. All of this activity involving the incorporation of transparency might be well summarized in the motto ‘‘Be transparent! and then you are a good citi- zen’’ (Capurro 2005). But, what does organizational and corporate transparency really mean? Recent scholarly research suggests that the term corporate transparency is actually volatile and impre- cise (Williams 2005), and, in several cases it is associated merely with standardized reporting (see e.g., Vaccaro and Madsen 2009). However, this particular conceptualization of transparency as a function of reporting is very limited in terms of current social understanding and societal expecta- tions. It misses the mark in providing an accurate picture of the role and the scope of what transparency actual means in business and organizational practice. This special issue analyzes the issue of corporate and organizational transparency and introduces a new defini- tion of this concept that is dynamic and interactive. It is a collection of select papers originally presented in Lisbon, November 2007, during the ‘‘Information and Communi- cation Technologies, Transparency and Social Responsi- bility Conference’’ organized by the Center for Ethics, Business and Economics (CEBE) at the School of Business and Economics of the Catholic University of Portugal and Carnegie Mellon University. The idea underlying the conference—and consequently this special issue—was to create a locus of discussion where scholars and practitioners of two different disciplines, A. Vaccaro (&) FCEE, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: vaccaro@andrew.cmu.edu A. Vaccaro EPP, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, PA, USA P. Madsen Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, PA, USA 123 Ethics Inf Technol DOI 10.1007/s10676-009-9197-7