Hidden in full view: the organization of public secrecy in Miéville’s The City and the City

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore China Mieville’s novel The City and the City as a literary experiment for analyzing the dynamics of public secrecy. We explore public secrets as an intrinsic part of organizational life and as a framework for paying attention to the politics of organizing. First, we focus on the novel’s invention and use of the verb ‘unseeing’ to bring out the embodied and sensuous aspects of public secrecy as part of organizational processes. Second we unfold how, although the content of public secrets may turn out to be less spectacular than expected, it is exactly their mundaneness which is key to their political importance. This is important because in an increasingly disorganized and uncertain world, secrecy proliferates and the visibility of secrecy is often a strategic move to justify certain hidden actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational secrets
• public secrecy
• China Mieville
• The City and the City
• fiction in organization studies
• embodied unseeing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use the notions of ‘open secret’ and ‘public secret’ interchangeably.

Additional information

Funding

Parts of this work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) [grant number FOR 2161].