Doing Leadership through Signswitching in theIndonesian Bureaucracy

Abstract

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 monolingualEnglish‐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 whileIndonesian is used to do much transactional work,Javanese 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.