social opacity

Foundation Transparency - Opacity: It’s Complicated
Abstract

Private philanthropy has been referred to as one of the least transparent and accountable social institutions in the United States.  Accordingly, private foundations are being challenged to become more transparent.  Like other charitable institutions, private foundations already disclose extensive information about their activities in federal tax returns, which the public can easily access.  Yet, a widely held presumption is that private foundations remain intensely and uniformly opaque.  Research findings confirmed that private foundations are generally opaque, but also found that they selectively engage in situational transparency, which is not generally observed in the literature.  This article makes three contributions.  First, it uses specific indicators to assess the existence private foundation opaque practice, resulting in important insights regarding the contexts in which each may occur.  Second, it reports findings that, under certain circumstances, private foundations have intentionally relaxed their opaqueness in favor of greater transparency with certain grantees in furtherance of philanthropic objectives.  Third, several questions are posed to help guide foundations in deciding for themselves how and with whom they might wish to engage in greater transparency.  Research findings discovered that the matter of transparent/opaque practice in private philanthropy is less than straightforward.  As it turns out, transparent/opaque practice among private foundations is a nuanced and complicated matter.

This piece is an extract from a recent publication entitled "Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: The Extended Relational Field of the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico." I provide an overview of current research on Theory of Mind (ToM), with a focus on " social opacity ideologies " —local ethnotheories which claim that others' inner affective, cognitive, and motivational states are unknowable, or at the very least, difficult to access. In much of the literature on social opacity, these ethnotheories are taken at face value as descriptions of how people actually think, relate, and regard others. I argue that these hypercognized local understandings of mind often exist against a background of many everyday forms of " mind reading, " suggesting that mind is rarely viewed as uniformly opaque, even in cultural settings which highlight this particular understanding of relationality. In the Highland Maya context, interpersonally attuned cultural forms exist in tension with, and against a background of, social opacity—one which is experienced with some ambivalence, and which gives rise to countermeasures designed to circumvent the studied circumspection of everyday life. Here, where local language ideology posits a disjuncture between underlying motivation-intentionality and the speech act, one of the primary vehicles for coming to know the dispositional states of others is recast as largely irrelevant as a source of meaningful information. As a result—at least among the Tzotzil—people tend to look elsewhere in order to gain an ''intersubjective'' understanding of the motivational contours of their social world. On a methodological level, it is important to note that these " everyday forms of mind reading " can often only be accessed obliquely, by tapping into domains in which the social proscriptions against making over claims about the inner cognitive and affective states of others are minimized (or inoperant).