Global Leadership Talk (PDF)

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.