Global Leadership Talk

"This book examines the discursive connections between global flows of ideologies about leadership and good governance, how these ideologies are localized in Indonesia, and how all of this relates to changing political, bureaucratic, and market regimes between 1998 and 2004. It starts with a speech given by the head of the International Monetary Fund about the importance of good governance. It then traces the uptake of shibboleths of this speech within Indonesian government policy documents, within the Indonesian mass-media, and in the everyday talk that occurred in a government office in Indonesia during my five months of fieldwork in that office between August 2003 and January 2004. The book makes the case that in order to formulate nuanced interpretations of connection and processes of localization, researchers need to engage in a type of reflexivity that involves a constant movement between data from different timespaces. Such a practice, it is argued, adds to our understanding of how and why both researchers and those researched come to believe and present themselves in specific ways. In doing so, the book extends contemporary conceptual work in the broad areas of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as it relates to notions of scale, connection, chronotope, leadership talk, and personhood, while sketching how this conceptual work can be operationalized methodologically"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.