Beyond professional snail races: Contextualizing corporate communication in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This study provides an overview of the current state of corporate communication in some of Indonesia’s largest companies. A cross-cultural survey of senior managers highlights the uniqueness of Indonesia by comparing practitioners’ perceptions with results from two Western countries, namely Austria and Australia. The results reveal the limitations of traditional professionalization theories; embedding corporate communication into the cultural and institutional context has proved to be more instructive. Practitioners in Indonesia employ a comparably critical distance to their own cultural environment. However, at the same time, they are highly adaptive when it comes to the stringently regulated and politicized institutional context of their work. From a normative perspective, we would instead support a self-understanding of professional communicators as societal change agents.

Más allá de las carreras de caracol profesionales: Contextualizando la comunicación corporativa en Indonesia: Este estudio ofrece una visión general del estado actual de la comunicación corporativa en algunas de las compañías más grandes de Indonesia. Un estudio transcultural de los altos directivos destaca la singularidad de Indonesia mediante la comparación de las percepciones de los practicantes con los resultados de dos países occidentales, a saber, Austria y Australia. Los resultados ponen de manifiesto las limitaciones de las teorías tradicionales de profesionalización; incluir la comunicación corporativa en el contexto cultural e institucional ha demostrado ser más instructivo. Los practicantes en Indonesia emplean una distancia semejantemente crítica hacia su propio entorno cultural. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, son altamente adaptables cuando se trata del contexto institucional estrictamente regulado y politizado de su trabajo.

超越专业的蜗牛赛跑：情境化印度尼西亚企业的沟通 这项研究概括介绍了目前印度尼西亚某些大型企业的沟通状态。在一项跨文化调查中，高级管理人员通过比较从业者对西方国家，即奥地利和澳大利亚结果的看法，强调了印度尼西亚文化的独特性。研究结果揭示了传统职业化理论的局限性，将企业传播纳入到文化和制度的语境中，证明了其更具指导意义。在印度尼西亚的从业人员对自己的文化环境利用了相对临界的距离。然而，与此同时，当他们的工作处于严苛监管和政治制度背景下时，他们具有高度的自适应能力。

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate communication
• cross-cultural research
• Indonesia
• professionalism
• survey

Acknowledgments

The paper presents results from the project CCCC – Comparing Corporate Communication Cultures. It is the first project of an informal research network of communication scholars currently spanning five countries: Jochen Hoffmann (Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark; formerly Curtin University, Australia), Diana Ingenhoff (Department of Media and Communication Research, University of Fribourg, Switzerland), Anis Hamidati (Department of Communication and Public Relations, Swiss German University, Indonesia), Kurt Luger (Department of Communication Science, University of Salzburg, Austria), and Ulrike Röttger (Department of Communication, University of Münster, Germany).