Encountering a multidimensional assemblage: The case of Norwegian corporate social responsibility activities in Indonesia

Abstract

A vociferous debate on socio-spatial formations is ongoing between those advocating a geography of scales and those advocating flat ontologies and assemblages, yet a middle ground has not been properly addressed. The author argues for an empirically driven, multidimensional assemblage approach whereby the processes constituting an assemblage and the different socio-spatial organisation of heterogeneous entities form the analytical basis for geographical analyses of particular empirical events. He shows how Norwegian companies in Indonesia encounter different stakeholders constituting a multidimensional (situated, scaled, and networked) ‘assemblage of national interests’ with multitudinous motivations and drivers but quite specific converged influence. He examines the territorialising forces employed during such encounters, the de-territorialising forces challenging the assemblage, and how the evolution of the ‘assemblage of national interests’ resulted in 2012 in the world's first law on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has more or less forced Norwegian companies to make social investments in local communities within a CRS framing. The findings are that assemblages are scaled and networked, but also uncoordinated and ‘chaotic’. Norwegian companies in Indonesia are subject to a joint but dispersed, multidimensional assemblage of national interest, where stakeholders on different scales, with multiple motivations, mobilise to persuade them to run social investment programmes.