Transparency regimes and management by content in global organizations. The case of institutional currency trading

Argues that informational arrangement may make an organization less of a cumbersome machine by exteriorizing organizational processes on screen, making them transparent, witnessable and (reflexively) self‐changing. The platform organization addresses how some organizations – global investment banks engaged in institutional currency trading and big science collaborations engaged in high energy physics knowledge production – implement a transparency regime of information that extends to local and implicit knowledge. In other words, through being exteriorized, knowledge is kept current, alive and distributed in the respective organizations; to a significant degree, it is effectively precluded from becoming implicit and embodied in places and persons. Corresponds to a form of coordination that is content‐driven rather than social authority based. “Management by contact” is a knowledge‐enhancing, specialist activity closer to mediating and coaching than to “governing” and deciding.