A critical necessity for effective competitive selection is that the procurement process must be clear and visible to all stakeholders. This transparency is crucial as it fosters confidence among ...potential bidders across different levels, ultimately enhancing procurement performance. This research aimed to assess how transparency impacts the procurement performance of local government institutions. The study utilized a case study design and employed purposive and simple random sampling methods to select 80 respondents from Moyo District Local Government (MDLG). Qualitative data was analyzed through content analysis, while quantitative data was assessed using descriptive statistics and a multiple regression model. Findings indicated that publication of procurement plan and budget was significant to at β=0.258, P<0.05. Access to key procurement information was significant at β=0.193, p<0.05. Open communication was also significant at β=0.169, p<0.05. The study concluded that ensuring transparency while conducting procurement processes improves performance in terms of cost optimization and purchase of quality products which are delivered on time. The study recommended MDLG to provide timely and sufficient information to the public and other stakeholders most especially about upcoming contracts and status of ongoing procurement processes through publication on public notice boards and online government procurement portals for easy accessibility.
Consumers abandon their online purchases at an e-commerce website partly due to the lack of information transparency of the website. We identify the antecedents of consumers’ perceived information ...transparency of an e-commerce website and its effects on consumers’ online purchase intention. We collected data through a scenario-based survey conducted in a laboratory setting. We found that (1) product transparency, vendor transparency, and transaction transparency significantly influence perceived information transparency; (2) perceived information transparency significantly increases consumers’ online purchase intention; and (3) perceived risk partially mediates the effects of perceived information transparency on purchase intention.
"This book discusses contemporary accountability and transparency mechanisms by presenting a selection of case studies. The authors deal with various problems connected to controlling public ...institutions and incumbents’ responsibility in state bodies. The work is divided into three parts. Part I: Law examines the institutional and objective approach. Part II: Fairness and Rights considers the subject approach, referring to a recipient of rights. Part III: Authority looks at the functional approach, referring to the executors of law. Providing insights into increasing understanding of various concepts, principles, and institutions characteristic of the modern state, the book makes a valuable contribution to the area of comparative constitutional change. It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and policy-makers working in the areas of constitutional law and politics."
Pay transparency is quickly ascending to the forefront of human resources compensation issues. Employees—especially younger employees—at organizations and society in general are seeking fairer ...outcomes and more transparency with compensation falls in line with those expectations. Governments are responding by drafting and passing new pay transparency legislation. Based on the research conducted, pay transparency can yield benefits such as helping to close pay gaps, reducing employee turnover, and elevating trust with management and others, but can also create confusion and negative outcomes. This article provides a summary of what pay transparency is, why it is gaining in importance, how it impacts organizations and where the trend may be heading. A list of strategic recommendations is offered for organizational leaders to consider when navigating through an environment with greater pay transparency.
Over a decade since transparency was introduced as a first-class concept in computing, transparency is still an emerging concept that is quite poorly understood. Also, despite existing research ...contributions, transparency is yet to be incorporated into the software engineering practice, and the promise it holds remains unfulfilled. Although there is evidence of increasing stakeholders' demand for software and process transparency, the realization of such demand is yet to be fully witnessed within the software engineering practice. There is a need to uncover transparency and how it has so far been conceptualized, operationalized, and challenges faced. We applied a systematic literature review method in search of articles published between January 2006 and March 2022. This study reports a systematic review of the explicit conceptualization and application of transparency in 18 articles out of a total of 162 selected for review. Our study found that transparency remains an under-researched non-functional quality requirement concept, especially as it impacts information and software systems development. Of the 18 articles reviewed, only three studies representing 16.67% conceptualized transparency in software development and focused on the transparency of software artifacts. The remaining 83.33% of studies conceptualized transparency in information systems, focusing on general information and fully functional information systems. Transparency is yet to be fully explored from a theoretical gathering point of view and as a non-functional indicator of software quality hence its slow adoption and incorporation into mainstream software practice. Apart from providing a catalog of transparency factors that stakeholders can use to evaluate transparency achievement, the paper proposed a roadmap to enhance transparency implementation and also provides future research directions.
In recent years, with the global proliferation of fake news, fact-checking has emerged globally, and transparency has become the consensus of global fact-checkers. Based on the three transparency ...commitments signed by fact-checkers and IFCN, this article compares the transparency of source, funds, and methodology of fact-checking news in six countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Brazil, and Australia) on six continents. The study found that South Africa and the United States are more transparent than other countries. Moreover, transparency is not only related to the social environment, but also related to the subject of verification and the news writing habits of each country. This article also compares the fact-checkers of the NGO model with the newsroom model and finds that the transparency of the fact-checkers of the NGO model is much higher than that of the newsroom model. Through these, this article broadens the perspective of global comparison of fact-checking, and explores the more complicated reasons behind the differences in the transparency of fact-checking across countries.
•Theory suggests that transparency interventions are less likely to succeed when corrupt actors are politically influential and the victims of corrupt acts confront large obstacles to collective ...action.•We investigate a transparency treatment in just such a setting, looking at the behavior of large and politically connected contractors who supply school meals in Colombia.•A treatment that combines two interventions, informal audits of the meals provided and a series of text messages to parents informing them about their options for registering concerns, significantly reduces contractor shirking.
Can transparency interventions reduce corrupt behavior when corrupt actors are politically influential and the victims of corrupt acts confront large obstacles to collective action? These conditions describe the pervasive phenomenon of grand corruption and potentially render corrupt actors less vulnerable to transparency interventions. We present the first evidence that, despite these theoretical obstacles, a transparency intervention in the Colombian School Meals Program significantly changed the behavior of powerful operators. The intervention consisted of informal audits and text messages to parents. It affected behavior through two channels. A survey of parents reveals greater bottom-up mobilization to oversee operators in treated schools; the pattern of operator responses to the informal audits over time and across departments indicates that operators were concerned that systematic evidence of corrupt behavior would trigger top-down enforcement actions by high-level enforcement agencies.
Transparency is a key emerging requirement in modern businesses and their information systems. Transparency refers to the information which flows amongst stakeholders for the purpose of informed ...decision-making and taking the right action. Transparency is generally associated with positive connotations such as trust and accountability. However, it has been shown that it could have adverse effects such as information overload and affecting decisions objectiveness. This calls for systematic approaches for transparency to ensure its cost-effectiveness and avoid such adverse side effects. This is especially true considering that the relatively few works in the literature on transparency requirements have focused mainly on making information available and accessible and have paid little focus on the information receivers’ side and making it meaningful for them. In this paper, we reflect on our previous research on transparency and its multi-faceted constructs and review multi-disciplinary conceptualisation and propose four reference models which are meant to form a holistic conceptual baseline for transparency requirements in information systems. These reference models cover transparency actors, transparency meaningfulness, transparency usefulness, and information quality in transparency. We also discuss the interdependencies amongst these four reference models and their implications for requirements engineers and information system analysts. As a proof of concept, we analyse a mainstream transparency document, the United Kingdom Freedom of Information Act, in the light of our reference models and demonstrate the need to consider transparency more holistically and the need to include the information receiver’s perspective and the inter-relations amongst various properties and constituents of transparency as well. We then highlight areas of improvement informed by our analysis.
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