Global Leadership Talk: Constructing Good Governance in Indonesia

Zane Goebel

Feb 2020 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

How do certain ideas and practices become socially valued in particular times and places? Why do we see some countries as having better governance or leadership than others? In Global Leadership Talk, Zane Goebel addresses these questions through a study of leadership language in the uniquely diverse post-colonial nation of Indonesia. This book examines global flows of ideologies about leadership and good governance, how these ideologies are localized in Indonesia, and how all of this related to changing political, bureaucratic, and market regimes in Indonesia between 1998 and 2004. Drawing on five months of fieldwork and a corpus of hundreds of online newspaper articles regarding the Indonesian bureaucracy, Goebel analyzes how leadership ideas expressed in the early twenty-first century have been re-used and redefined in the media-and most importantly, how and why these ideas were received and believed in local face-to-face talk in the Indonesian civil service. Deftly engaging with decades of theoretical innovation, from indexicality to enregisterment, from globalization to superdiversity, Goebel moves beyond his empirical analysis to argue for a new methodology that constantly moves between data from different times and places. Both concretely and conceptually, Goebel shows how communicative events are connected, how this impacts the gathering and interpretation of data, and how this approach is key for understanding the sociolinguistic complexity of today's world.

About the author

Zane Goebel is Associate Professor of Indonesian and Applied Linguistics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He works on language and social relations in Indonesia and has published two monographs: Language, Migration and Identity (2010) and Language and Superdiversity (OUP 2015). His work in Indonesia has also lead to international collaborations culminating in three edited volumes: Reimagining Rapport (forthcoming from OUP), Rapport and the Discursive Co-Construction of Social Relations in Fieldwork Encounters (2019), and Contact Talk (2019).