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Doing Leadership through Signswitching in the I ndonesian Bureaucracy
Author(s) -
Goebel Zane
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12048
Subject(s) - transactional leadership , indonesian , reciprocity (cultural anthropology) , sociology , situated , boss , public relations , focus (optics) , empirical research , bureaucracy , social psychology , media studies , linguistics , political science , psychology , epistemology , social science , computer science , law , philosophy , materials science , physics , artificial intelligence , politics , optics , metallurgy
In recent years the study of the relationship between talk and the doing of leadership has gained increasing attention from linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists. Even so, as with much research on organizational talk, typically these studies focus on the micro analysis of situated talk in monolingual E nglish‐speaking settings. In this article I start to fill this gap by looking at how a boss moves between Indonesian and Javanese to do leadership. The empirical focus is on recordings of meetings made during five months of fieldwork in a government bureau in Semarang in 2003–2004. I show that while I ndonesian is used to do much transactional work, J avanese does both relational and transactional work, often in ways that differ from earlier accounts of Javanese usage. In interpreting this usage I draw upon work on reciprocity to suggest that the use of Javanese fragments—along with other leadership practices—help build a locally emergent system of reciprocity.