New work with Transparency International

Following up on previous collaboration and shared activities on the theme of anti-corruption, the Public-Private Platform (led by professor MSO from the PPP clusters LEAF and Internet, Business and Society Hans Krause Hansen) visited the international headquarter of Transparency International in Berlin, Germany in early 2016.

Two days of interviews, dialogue and observations with the staff at TI International were on the program for the tour, which held the purpose of collecting data for new research on the political effects of governance performance assessments, i cluding scores of levels of corruption between countries. Much has been written about Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and other governance indices in the fields of International Relations and Political Sociology and even in the area of Organization Studies. It is now standard practice to refer to the CPI as the epitome (alongside the OECD PISA and university rankings) of the power of numerical performance assessments. The PPP is supporting Krause Hansen and colleagues in their attempts to add nuance and potentially challenge some of the assumptions behind the idea that numbers have a particular force. The group wishes to do this by looking into the repertoires and phases through which performance indices and the associated narrati es achieve their effects, something which as far as we know has not been studied in much detail before.

Collecting data at TI and engaging in dialogue contributed to the project idea of tracing and systematically analysing some of
the global communication that occurs as the CPI and related governance indices travel through the media and is recontextualized/ translated and responded to by various stakeholders.

The PP platform is looking much forward to developing this project with Hans Krause (Picture below)