Answering without disclosing: How officials under scrutiny compress what they say

How do organisational actors withhold information while continuing to answer under scrutiny? Research on organisational silence has largely treated withholding as a question of whether actors speak. This article examines variation within speech through 1 781 question-and-answer exchanges from 102 recorded interview encounters with senior officials in prison health governance across three studies conducted between 2016 and 2023. Narrative absence was coded across six features and response timing was derived from audio and validated against blinded listener judgements. Higher narrative absence was associated with substantially shorter answers within encounters, and this association held across all robustness checks. Changes in response onset were much smaller, while pausing supported no independent association, and the automated measure of fillers and repairs failed validation. The findings identify controlled compression as a response form through which disclosure contracts while interactional responsiveness continues. Separating responsiveness from disclosure matters because organisational accountability is routinely assessed through visible responsiveness even though meaningful accountability depends on disclosure. An actor may therefore satisfy every observable requirement of cooperation while narrowing what is made available. The article shows that where speaking is expected, withholding does not cease but relocates into the answers themselves.