This paper re-examines how transparency and opacity are understood in Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM). Rather than treating opacity as a failure or absence of transparency, we frame them as co-produced and relational phenomena.
This conceptual paper reviews the literature of OSCM and adjacent fields to identify how reporting infrastructures, digital platforms and governance mechanisms co-produce opacity and transparency. It develops the 5 Who’s framework to analyze the competing demands, definitions, benefits and costs that shape transparency-opacity regimes in practice.
The framework clarifies significant analytical challenges: visibility demands accumulate but rarely align, evidentiary thresholds shift across audiences, infrastructures encode selective disclosure and the benefits and burdens of transparency are unevenly distributed.
A research agenda, structured around the 5 Who’s, is outlined that focuses on analyzing contradictory visibility demands, tracing evidentiary thresholds, examining staged and strategic opacity within reporting infrastructures and exploring institutional designs that accommodate differentiated forms of disclosure.
This paper reframes transparency and opacity as intertwined governance processes, shifting analysis away from static measures towards negotiated visibility. The 5 Who’s framework provides an organizing lens for integrating fragmented literatures and opens space for new OSCM research on how regimes of transparency-opacity are constructed, mobilized and enforced.
