ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how transparency efforts in organizations may obscure rather than achieve clarity, and how such a process may set an administrative spiral in motion. We discuss self-reporting quality control systems, with a focus on “incident reports.” This is a type of documentation that members of staff are supposed to produce when something has happened outside the routines and should be documented—to make improvements for the client or patient. We show how such efforts evoke new questions and an intense “interpretation work” regarding how, when, and why one should write an incident report. The chapter demonstrates how incident reports are used in more or less strategic ways that induce more meetings and new guidelines in order to clarify the purpose. We outline three such strategies below: reporting en masse, so that decision makers are almost drowned in a deluge of reports; strategically using value-loaded concepts so that managers have no choice but to consider a specific type of incident; and reporting “everything” in an overly meticulous and detailed manner to “keep your back free.”
