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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of organizational culture on open government reforms by developing a theoretical framework bridging the theory and practice gap.

An exploratory qualitative study consisting of a document analysis and a case study was conducted.

An open organizational culture is a precursor to effective open government. A network strategy as a facilitator for developing an open culture was used in one US federal agency, breaking across boundaries within the organization, creating greater symmetrical horizontal and vertical openness.

Much of the focus in both theory and practice has been on the use of technology as a vehicle to increase government openness. This study argues that a movement toward openness is beyond the technical. Organizational culture is a key to openness and may need to be changed. A networks strategy may be one way to facilitate a transformation to a more open culture.

Stakeholder paradigm has been gaining currency over the past few decades and technological breakthroughs have been influential in building its momentum. Hyper-Transparency is emerging as a building block and as an indispensable concomitant of stakeholder paradigm. The crux of a Hyper-Transparent organization is trust. The new paradigm requires substituting translucent and opaque business practices with fully transparent ones under which lasting trust can be built between the organization and its stakeholders. However, the nub of the stakeholder paradigm is the changes inside the organizations as well as changes in relation to their external environment, and transparency is both a driver and a resultant of these changes. Transparency is an integral part of corporate social responsibility debate and an eristic issue for the stakeholders. Moreover, Hyper-Transparency empowers the stakeholders to considerably influence the decision making sphere. In this chapter, transparency, its drivers and tools as well as the power of stakeholders in the new age of Hyper-Transparency alongside a number of case studies are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the level of transparency of the libraries of Catalan universities that are members of the Consortium of University Services of Catalonia (CSUC).

The analysis involved reviewing the information available on the websites of the ten libraries belonging to CSUC. For each library’s website, the presence of 18 indicators was explored. These indicators had been defined by the Commitment and Transparency Foundation (Spain).

There is a notable difference between the level of transparency of Catalan universities and their libraries. Moreover, the universities’ culture of transparency is not reflected in that of the libraries. Four of the libraries can be considered transparent because they have accomplished from 12 to 18 indicators; three can be considered “translucent”, due to their indicators ranging from 11 to 7 points; and three are considered opaque as a result of obtaining from 1 to 5 indicators.

There is a need to review the volume and quality of information that can be consulted on library websites, considering that all services and entities funded with public money must inform citizens of the principles that govern their management and the results obtained.

The information regarding transparency is incomplete and should be organised with parameters that make it easier to find. Libraries that occupy the lowest positions in the ranking all belong to private universities. Their poor results are due to the lack of information justifying their management or providing information on how the service is organised. Some conclusions of this study are very similar to those of the study on Madrid’s Madroño Consortium (Pacios Lozano, 2016) which has been taken into account in this paper.

The study aims at examining the level of financial transparency of local governments in a sub-Saharan African country and how financial transparency is affected by democracy in the sub-region.

The study applied a panel regression model to data collected from public accounts of 43 local authorities in Ghana from 1995 to 2014. Financial transparency was measured using a transparency index developed based on the Transparency Index of Transparency International and the information disclosure requirements of public sector entities under the International Public Sector Accounting Standards.

The study finds the low level of financial transparency among the local governments in Ghana, creating information asymmetry within the agency framework of governance. Further, evidence from the study suggests a strong positive relationship between democracy and financial transparency in the local government.

Deepening democracy is necessary for promoting the culture of financial transparency in local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps in entire Africa.

There is a need for the local governments and governments, in general, to deepen democracy to ensure proactive disclosure of the financial information to the citizens to improve participation trust and eventual reduction in corruption. Effective implementation of the Right to Information Act would also help promote financial and other forms of transparency in the sub-region.

The study contributes to the public sector accounting literature by linking democracy to financial transparency in the local government. Hitherto, studies concentrate on how entity level variables impact on the level of financial information flow in the local government without considering the broader governance infrastructure within which local governments operate.

The experience of Mexico's 2002 transparency reform sheds light on the challenge of translating the promise of legal reform into more open government in practice. An innovative new agency that serves as an interface between citizens and the executive branch of government has demonstrated an uneven but significant capacity to encourage institutional responsiveness. A “culture of transparency” is emerging in both state and society, although the contribution of Mexico's transparency discourse and law to public accountability remains uncertain and contested.

The need for accelerating innovation is exacerbated as organizations struggle to either adapt or perish in this unforgiving condition due to the COVID-19 disruption. To address this issue, many organizations have embraced employee-driven participatory innovation to survive and thrive albeit the uncertainties. This study aims to investigate the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in supporting and facilitating these efforts.

This study first identified the underlying mechanisms that allow ESM use to foster and maintain participatory innovation and then reexamined how these mechanisms played out during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The data was collected through a questionnaire in two phases, before and during work-from-home mandates, and the results were analyzed and compared to capture similarities and differences.

The results revealed that innovation culture and management support mediated the effects of ESM use on three measures of innovation productivity in both conditions. Interestingly, the effect of ESM use was more prominent in driving innovation in the work-from-home condition. This effect was not limited to the direct effect of ESM use on innovation productivity but on innovation culture and management support as well.

The results suggest that ESM offer a potentially useful path to support and enable employees to participate in the innovation processes, especially when they work remotely or in a distributed team. More generally, this paper should be of interest to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, implementing and evaluating enterprise social software applications and encouraging employee-driven participatory innovation.

The excessive accumulation of pollutants in the world’s oceans is urging all stakeholders to take swift action. Ecocoast is a Dubai-based organization that makes an impact by carving a niche for itself to overcome this predicament. The organization’s range of sustainable solutions offered at each stage of the coastal and marine development lifecycle focuses on protecting the marine environment. Founded in 2009, Ecocoast has since proven its robust positioning as an industry leader, winning over 15 industry awards. The drivers that influenced Ecocoast’s success were analyzed based on interviews with the founders and employees, as well as secondary data resources. Customer centricity, transformational leadership, research orientation, adaptive culture, corporate transparency, cross-functional specialization, and sustainable corporate thinking were found to be what shaped its success. The case proposes a strategic question for future research: Was it the desire for customer centricity that led to a transformational leadership style, or was it the other way around?

Wide differences in response rates to the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP’s) climate change program between countries have been explained by legal origins and the varying extent of environmental regulation. This paper seeks to enhance the explanation by examining the relevance of two dimensions of “democratic capital” – both the influence of countries’ experiences with democratic government recruitment are considered, as well as experiences with civil liberties. In addition, it is examined whether these forms of democratic capital are mediated by environmental regulation.

The authors draw upon the literature on the relationship between political regime form and environmental policy and the environmental disclosure literature debate. Hypotheses are based on institutional and stakeholder theory. Methodologically, multilevel regression analysis is used.

Results show that the history of democratic government recruitment is a relevant factor to explain firms’ disclosure decisions. The amount of freedom in civil society seems to also matter, but results are less clear in this regard. The hypothesis concerning the mediation effects of environmental regulation could not be corroborated. Findings, thus, corroborate the claim that standards of informational transparency flourish best in countries with a pluralistic political culture.

The results imply that voluntary carbon transparency may thrive as democratization advances, but its success may also be endangered by the recent revitalization of authoritarianism.

The authors deliver the first paper which tests the hypotheses on the influence of the “democratic capital” on the countries-of-origin on the firms’ carbon disclosure decisions, based on a multilevel analysis.