Search results

Gunungkidul Public Library in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, provides not only reading materials, but also a place to develop the community to produce various products to sell. The librarians in Gunungkidul have been holding various training sessions for the community – from how to make food and beverages to online marketing and preserving and reviving tradition and culture in their community. The librarians train the community to practice making various local products in the library and then the community and the librarians make and sell the products in the library and other places, including online markets. The products they make vary from cassava crackers to herbal medicine and from batik clothes to t-shirts. They also revived traditional choirs that had never been conducted for years. The librarians sometimes also invite experts or any skillful persons to train the community. Within the last two years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the training programs were moved to some rural libraries. The librarians hold the training in rural libraries instead of the county library in order to avoid the crowd during the pandemic. Luckily the moving from the county public library to rural libraries has made more people engage in the library activities. The communities are enthusiastic to take part as they do not need to go too far away from their homes and they feel excited to learn and practice making products in the library as they can have more income.

Organizational studies fail to examine organizations in terms of the several environments in which they operate, both internally and externally. That is, studies tend to focus on climate, or time, or trust, or leadership. This chapter builds on academic research that discusses organizational environments in ways that show all of these environments are important for organizational understanding, especially for organizational leadership. In particular, this chapter offers a paradigm of understanding organizational leadership realities through multi-level understanding of the organizational environments of climate, knowledge, ethnos, and time.

The chapter first discusses five enviroscapes – climate, knowledge, ethos, time, and leadership. Each of these enviroscapes has two phenotypes – business and commerce. Each of these enviroscapes, with its concomitant phenotypes, is used differently at multiple levels of management and leadership by senior managers, middle managers, and entry-level managers. The scope of organizational reach, in terms of global, regional, and local levels of analysis, provides additional context for the use of enviroscapes. After a review of the theoretical bases for each enviroscape, the chapter applies appropriate theory and models to an extended time case study of land purchase in Indonesia.

‘Javanese culture’ often is associated with ‘patrimonialism’ at its worst, that is, as a prelude to predation. Yet a closer look at some of the well-known court-centred serat (mystical songs) and babad (chronicles) written in Central Java during the late 18th and the 19th centuries provide us with a very different picture. Pujangga (court-poets) crafted sophisticated imaginings of the negara: the State, or rather the domain of both moral and political authority. In territorial terms, they made a distinction between what the ruler could freely dispose of and what he could not alienate. Moreover, the very process of the imperial expansion of the negara under the reign of Sultan Agung (r. 1613–1646) led to the birth of a group of ‘government specialists’: the service nobility of the priyayi. This group held a view of legitimate authority running contrary to any despotic temptation: for the priyayi, exercising power was an art, a craft involving skills that had to be learnt, whereas for the para bangsawan (members of the blood nobility), power was something to be possessed by virtue of the fame of a family name. Yet, during the colonial period, Dutch Orientalists, colonial administrators and high-ranking Javanese Regents came to give a wholly distorted view of this old priyayi conception of power, turning it into the cultural alibi of imperial authoritarianism.

Consider two images of gender and power in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia: the market seller and the king.¹ These images, stereotypical and contradictory, represent the pervasive antinomies that have served to organize analysis of male and female roles within the household and beyond in Java. Careful attention to the lives of women and their movements through the dense urban neighborhoods known as kampung on the central island of the Indonesian archipelago reveal both the limits of these characterizations and some of the interesting reversals that occur based on class and community, especially the community as organized by the Indonesian government.

Describing and explaining the interface between organizational culture and community culture necessitate an exploration into assumptions, expectations, beliefs, symbolism, and behaviors. This commentary examines the successful integration of an expanding US pharmaceutical firm into Indonesia's multicultural environment, a context marked by the interweaving of market exchange and reciprocity exchange. It directs attention to the interactions occurring among key leaders within the firm, and between those in the firm and those in the peasant and governmental communities. By focusing on the cultural processes of partnering, the contribution of cooperative, healthy relationships in achieving the firm's business goals is revealed.

Conceptualizing trust alone or as the starting point for understanding both trust and distrust is insufficient. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the construction of phenotypic trustscapes and distrustscapes that permit an abstract exploration of the concepts of trust and distrust using societal and dyadic relationships and perceptions of the individual as the units of analysis. For theoretical understanding of trust and distrust, it uses social and evolutionary biologic multi-level theory. This chapter builds on the existing trust literature in three ways: (1) by triangulating on trust and distrust through the use of a number of research methodologies; (2) by placing trust and distrust in value orientation theory and models; and (3) by extricating trust and distrust from reciprocity constructs, and placing them into separate phenotypes: trustscapes and distrustscapes. These efforts show that both trust and distrust are naturally occurring phenomena, with one or the other predominant in specific contexts. The chapter includes scenarios in Japan, Bulgaria, and Indonesia to demonstrate how micro- and macro-level examples of trustscapes and distrustscapes function.

Geertz is well known for his methodology. Many Symbolic Interactionists refer to his notion of “thick description.” They may not know his work on Indonesia in general, but they often know his famous essay on the Balinese cockfight: “Deep Play” (Geertz, 1972, 1973). That essay is often held up as an exemplary “model” of ethnographic fieldwork. But we need to examine what he calls “thick description” more carefully. After the first few pages of the essay there is actually very little “idiographic description” per se. Much of the paper concerns general description and analysis. We do not get a blow-by-blow account of a cockfight as viewed by Geertz. Instead we get an analysis that is based on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism (Parekh, 1998). There is a good deal missing from the broader analysis as well. Much of that can be found in other work (Geertz, 1959, 1966, 1980, 1995). Students who only read “Deep Play” often form a superficial impression of the method of “thick description” and a distorted sense of Balinese culture (Howe, 2001; Vickers, 1996 [1981]; Warren, 1993). This essay supplements Geertz’s essay with a discussion of a religious ceremony of far more importance than the largely secular cockfight. I touch on a central feature of Balinese society not emphasized by Geertz: the temple anniversary festival. It is called an odalan (Belo, 1966 [1953a]; Eiseman, 1990; Geertz, 2004). But the problem is not just restricted to the “Deep Play” essay. Geertz’s other work is often also not based primarily on ethnographic thick description. It concerns historical and sociological generalizations. Those are often based on archives and general fieldwork. Geertz also benefits from reading of Dutch research not available in English. The celebrations which take place at a temple are “deeper” than more immediate, largely secular games like a cockfight. Geertz’s oeuvre is well worth reading, but his notion of “thick description” needs to be seen in a broader, comparative historical sociological context. That involves Interpretive research paradigms that Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, distanced himself from, including Symbolic Interactionism and Weberian verstehende Soziologie.

To demonstrate how awareness of Neo-Marxist critical theory and Neo-Weberian comparative–historical sociology would have been beneficial to U.S. policy planners and decision-makers, especially Presidents.

This study employs qualitative analysis of available sources rather than quantitative data analysis.

Based on its practical application to a specific historical instance, the heuristic value of Max Weber’s ideal-type model of traditional authority (Herrschaft [domination]) is confirmed, as it is apparent that Henry Kissinger’s interpretation of the meaning of Realpolitik harmed U.S. foreign policy.

There is an imminent need to be critical of claims to expertise by advisors of major decision-makers. The practical relevance of possessing an adequate grasp of a given situation as the context in which actors must make choices is evident, as applies with regard to the current crises facing the world, which must be approached and addressed as scrupulously as possible.

Prevailing critiques of Kissinger and American foreign policy have tended to accept the premise that Kissinger was well-informed and giving good advice based on extensive and appropriate scholarship. That was not the case in Vietnam, in Indonesia, or in other regions. There are no available studies that examine Kissinger’s Eurocentric and limited perspective in light of critical theory and comparative–historical sociology.

Willard A. Hanna's astute observation above about the institutionalization of corruption in Indonesia was published in August 1971, five years after President Soeharto assumed power. The origins of corruption in Indonesia can be traced to the Dutch colonial period as bribery was rife among the lowly paid personnel of the Dutch East India Company (Day, 1966, pp. 100–103). However, corruption became institutionalized during President Soeharto's 32-year reign as his cronies and family “made an art form of creaming off many of Indonesia's most profitable ventures … while being protected by monopoly regulations and their relationship to the president” (Kingsbury, 1998, p. 202). Raymond Bonner (1988, p. 80) has used the euphemism “the family business” to describe “the corruption surrounding members of the Suharto family,” which was “a public secret” in 1988.

Despite several similarities, Generation Z in Indonesia has specific characteristics that might differentiate them from their colleagues from other countries. Socio-cultural factors such as national values shape their behaviours in many aspects of their life. Specific significant life events in Indonesia such as inhumanity among minorities and damaging natural disasters are also believed to contribute to the development of the specific characteristics of Generation Z in this country. The aim of this chapter is to describe these characteristics as well as the behaviours of Generation Z in personal and professional contexts, including their consumer behaviours. Based on literature and publications related to the topic, it can be seen that people from this generation are realistic but confident with their abilities, especially in using technologies. However, there is a need for social interaction, especially with experts such as their superordinates particularly during difficult times. These characteristics will lead to specific behaviours from Generation Z in Indonesia.