Commitment Without Transformation: A Grounded Theory of Integrity Zone Reform in Eastern Indonesia
Keywords:
Anti-corruption reform, Bureaucratic reform, Commitment without transformation, Integrity zone, Institutional changeAbstract
Despite sustained political support and years of organizational investment, many Integrity Zone (ZI) initiatives in Indonesia continue to struggle to achieve their intended anti-corruption and governance outcomes. Existing research predominantly explains reform success and failure through factor-based variables such as leadership, commitment, capacity, and innovation, providing limited understanding of why reform efforts often remain ineffective even when these conditions are present. This study develops a grounded theoretical explanation for this paradox. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with fifteen actors involved in Integrity Zone implementation within the Government of Gorontalo Province, Indonesia. Data were analyzed through iterative cycles of initial, focused, and theoretical coding, supported by constant comparison and theoretical integration. The analysis shows that Integrity Zone implementation was characterized by leadership engagement, organizational commitment, innovation initiatives, compliance management, and formal implementation structures. However, these efforts did not consistently translate into institutionalized integrity practices or measurable governance transformation. The study identifies a core category, commitment without transformation, which describes organizations that consistently demonstrate commitment to reform yet fail to embed integrity values into routine organizational behavior. Unlike reform decoupling, which emphasizes the separation between formal policy adoption and organizational practice, this concept explains how organizational commitment itself may become institutionalized while failing to generate enduring behavioral and governance transformation. This condition is reproduced through three interrelated mechanisms: performative enactment, compliance-oriented implementation, and structural discontinuity. The study contributes to public administration and anti-corruption scholarship by extending institutional accounts of reform decoupling beyond symbolic adoption and showing how evaluation systems may inadvertently reinforce the gap between reform activities and governance outcomes. Rather than offering universally generalizable conclusions, the findings provide an analytically transferable explanation of Integrity Zone implementation in the Indonesian provincial government context. The findings suggest that strengthening integrity reform requires evaluation systems that prioritize the institutionalization of integrity-oriented behaviors, organizational learning, and long-term governance outcomes over procedural compliance.
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