Who sees what, why and how? Rethinking transparency and opacity in OSCM

Purpose – 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. 

Design/methodology/approach – 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. 

Findings – 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. 

Research limitations/implications – 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. 

Originality/value – 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.