Institutionalising the Colonial Imagination: Chinese Middlemen and the Transnational Corporate Office in Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among transnational corporate employees—both expatriate and national—working in Jakarta, Indonesia, I examine the processes through which imagined markers of identity and difference, informed by Indonesia's colonial past, influenced corporate practices. In particular, I explore the persistence of colonial hierarchies within the corporate structure of a company (fictitiously) named TIMBER. I argue that TIMBER is not unique in the locating of Chinese-Indonesian employees in middlemen positions between Western expatriate executives and Indonesian national employees. Further, I examine the historical trajectories that led to the currently acceptable hierarchical orderings seen in Jakarta's transnational corporate offices.

Keywords:

• Jakarta
• Colonial Imagination
• Indonesian Chinese
• Middleman
• Transnational Corporate Class

Notes

1. All names included in this article, both personal and corporate, are fictitious in order to protect those who assisted in this research.

2. The Cultuurstelsel or Culture System, represents an early and significant system of transnational management in Indonesia by an overseas concern. It is with the Cultuurstelsel, a cultivation system through which the Indonesian peasantry were forced to devote a percentage of their land and labour to the production of cash crops for export, that the basic contours of a class-/race-based social structure were established and codified. And though one would be hard-pressed to define the Cultuurstelsel as a management success story, the residue of this system rests like a respected coat of dust upon the structures and practices of today's transnational corporate organisations.

3. By 1795 the Napoleonic Wars of Europe brought administrative change to the colonial enterprise. The British, who—through negotiation and force—acquired several important posts in the Indies, set up a blockade around Batavia that resulted in major losses for the Dutch. The VOC was dissolved in 1800—having gone bankrupt—and, by August of 1811, Batavia and its surroundings were in British hands (Ricklefs 1993: 113).

4. John was one of a significant population of Japanese expatriates working in Jakarta. The number of Japanese expatriates working for American-owned transnational corporations was, however, much smaller. John's position at TIMBER opens up an interesting set of issues beyond the scope of this paper, but it is worth noting that he, like David, served as a significant communicative link between the Western expatriate and the Indonesian national workforces.

5. I have made this argument previously in a slightly different form (see Leggett 2006).