Laying the Theoretical Foundations

IN HIS 1925 NOVEL THE TRIAL, Franz Kafka describes how after his unexpected arrest for an unspecified offence, Josef K. enters the secret world of the court system with its own laws, proceedings, and dynamics — a world that is unknown and nonsensical to him, yet at the same time increasingly absorbing. As Josef K. seeks to gather information and confront the court, he faces only closed doors: documents related to cases remain locked in the advocate's drawer because "official secrets were involved." The entire proceedings are "kept secret not only from the public but from the defendant too," placing him in a continual state of worry, uncertainty, and distrust. Even within the "endless" hierarchical structure of the court, "beyond comprehension even of the initiated, court proceedings were in general kept secret from minor officials and only those higher up the hierarchy followed them." Despite his various efforts, until the end this organizational world full of secrecy remains an absurd "theatre" to Josef K. that, however, takes complete control over him.

Kafka's novel parallels the observations of the German sociologist Max Weber, who, writing at around the same time as Kafka, points to the prevalence of "official secrets" in bureaucracies. One can also read in Kafka's novel the fear of the existence of a secret powerful elite working behind the scenes — such a link between secrecy and power underlies the writings of Elias Canetti. The Trial provides a powerful description of how, as theorized by Georg Simmel, another German sociologist and Kafka contemporary, a separate reality can be created through secrecy with boundaries between the initiated and outsiders. This entails the creation of a dramaturgical reality, as described in the writings of the American social psychologist Erving Goffman on social interactional practices.

So The Trial not only constitutes one example of how secrecy is deeply ingrained in our social and cultural imaginations; it also points to different aspects of its various theorizations in social science. These theorizations of secrecy are the focus of this chapter. We trace secrecy in the works of in particular, Max Weber, Elias Canetti, Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Michael Taussig, and Eviator Zerubavel. Although secrecy is not central in all these writings, together they provide complementary insights on the diverse nature of secrecy as well as its varied social dynamics, conditions, and consequences. We do not give a detailed discussion of the work of these authors but rather draw out the key insights from what they write about secrecy and also introduce some of the conceptual terminology we use. From this, we develop seven "foundations" that guide our subsequent analysis of organizational secrecy.

SECRETS AND POWER: BEYOND FUNCTIONALITY

Let us begin by turning to one of the fo