Caring Words, Silenced Voices: Paternalistic Discourse and Benevolent Gaslighting in an Indonesian Education Service Company

Abstract

Background: Education service companies in Indonesia project an identity as agents of national development while subjecting employees to communicative practices that undermine well-being.
Objective: This study investigates how paternalistic discourse and benevolent gaslighting operate as mutually reinforcing verbal strategies in supervisor-subordinate communication. It further documents the psychosocial consequences employees report. The study proposes an integrated analytical framework that adapts existing concepts rather than introducing a wholly new one, developed from a single site and offered for testing elsewhere.
Method: A qualitative single-site case study anchored in Fairclough's (2003) Critical Discourse Analysis framework was employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty current and former employees of one Indonesian education service company, eliciting verbatim supervisory utterances and reported effects.
Results: Four benevolent gaslighting strategies were identified: trivializing, diverting, countering, and blocking, each operating through distinct mechanisms including inclusive pronoun misuse and institutional access restriction. Paternalistic discourse constructed a discursive precondition of deference, enabling gaslighting to function unrecognized. Together, both strategies are interpreted as forming a quadrilateral discursive trap constraining employees through hierarchical authority, cultural deference, mission ideology, and internalized self-doubt. Six psychosocial impacts were documented: chronic self-doubt, moral disorientation, communicative withdrawal, silent resignation, psychosomatic symptoms, and difficulty re-trusting leadership.
Conclusion: These findings are interpretive and drawn from one organization, so they are not statistically generalizable; they offer evidence for HR practitioners and policymakers relevant to SDG 8 Target 8.8 and SDG 4.7.