Summary of “Navigating Timeliness: Decoupling in Corporate External Reporting by Indonesian State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs)” (Widhiyani et al., 2025, Public Money & Management)
This paper examines how Indonesian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) navigate the growing demand for timely and transparent external reporting, including financial, sustainability, and Program Kemitraan dan Bina Lingkungan (PKBL) or community development reports. Despite strict regulatory requirements, many SOEs struggle to meet reporting deadlines due to internal inefficiencies, data fragmentation, and limited resources.
The study aims to understand how and why delays persist in SOE reporting and how managers strategically respond to these challenges. It uses institutional theory to explain how SOEs face pressures from regulators, stakeholders, and society, and how these pressures lead to decoupling—a separation between formal compliance and actual practice.
The central research question is:
How do institutional pressures influence the timeliness of corporate external reporting in Indonesian SOEs, and what strategies do managers use to cope with conflicting demands?
State-owned enterprises (SOEs) play a vital role in Indonesia’s economy, acting as agents of both economic growth and public service delivery. As such, they are expected to demonstrate transparency, accountability, and good governance through timely reporting.
The Financial Services Authority (OJK), the Ministry of SOEs, and the Supreme Audit Board (BPK) have introduced regulations requiring SOEs to publish annual, sustainability, and PKBL reports within specific timeframes. These reports are designed to ensure that financial information and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures are communicated effectively to investors, regulators, and the public.
However, in practice, reporting timeliness remains inconsistent. Many SOEs continue to submit reports close to or beyond deadlines, reflecting difficulties in internal coordination, fragmented data systems, and insufficient human resources. This context highlights a gap between policy intentions and organisational capabilities, motivating the authors to explore how institutional pressures are interpreted and enacted in real reporting processes.
The study draws on institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) to explain how organisations conform to external expectations to maintain legitimacy. In this framework:
When these pressures become excessive or conflicting, organisations often engage in decoupling—a process where formal structures (such as policies or reports) symbolically comply with external demands, while internal operations remain only partially aligned.
In the SOE context, decoupling helps explain why companies appear compliant on paper yet continue to face operational delays and inefficiencies. It reveals how organisations maintain legitimacy in the eyes of regulators while coping pragmatically with resource and structural constraints.
The research employs a qualitative design based on 18 semi-structured interviews with managers responsible for external reporting in various Indonesian SOEs.
Participants represented multiple sectors—energy, telecommunications, banking, logistics, tourism, and manufacturing—ensuring a diversity of perspectives. Interviews, conducted between June and August 2023, explored how reporting deadlines were managed, what obstacles were faced, and how organisations balanced compliance and practicality.
Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns in managerial responses, revealing both technical bottlenecks and institutionalised coping mechanisms that shape reporting timeliness.
(a) Persistent Internal Inefficiencies
Many SOEs experience chronic delays in collecting, validating, and consolidating reporting data.
Complex hierarchical structures, fragmented information systems, and limited skilled personnel slow the process.
“We meet the deadline only because of overtime and shortcuts, not because our system works efficiently.” – Interviewee 3
These inefficiencies undermine report quality and create heavy time pressure during closing periods.
(b) Coordination and Communication Barriers
Reporting processes involve multiple departments—finance, CSR, audit, and corporate secretary offices—each operating independently.
Lack of integration results in data silos and inconsistent reporting formats. Some SOEs mitigate this by establishing cross-departmental task forces and shared data portals, but implementation remains uneven.
“Every division uses a different system; integrating data is always a race against time.” – Interviewee 7
(c) Conflicting Stakeholder Expectations
SOEs face multiple, and sometimes contradictory, pressures:
These competing demands force managers to choose between speed and accuracy, creating institutional tension.
“Timeliness is non-negotiable for regulators, but accuracy cannot be compromised. We’re always in between.” – Interviewee 12
(d) Resource Constraints and Competing Priorities
Limited budgets and staffing mean that financial reports take precedence over sustainability and PKBL reports, which are often delayed.
This prioritisation reflects managerial pragmatism but also reinforces symbolic compliance, as sustainability disclosures are treated as secondary rather than integral to corporate accountability.
“Financial reporting is our main focus—sustainability reports can follow later.” – Interviewee 5
The study finds that SOEs adopt decoupling as a way to balance legitimacy and efficiency.
Externally, companies showcase compliance by meeting formal deadlines and submitting polished reports. Internally, however, reporting teams adjust timelines, simplify data, or use provisional estimates to keep pace with regulatory requirements.
This symbolic conformity allows SOEs to maintain reputational legitimacy and avoid sanctions while continuing to operate under internal constraints. Decoupling thus functions as a strategic adaptation, enabling organisations to survive in a context where ideal compliance is often impractical.
Rather than viewing decoupling as mere dishonesty, the authors interpret it as a pragmatic negotiation—a coping mechanism that reflects the institutional complexity and resource pressures within Indonesia’s state-owned enterprises.
Using institutional theory, the paper argues that SOEs’ timeliness challenges are not simply managerial failures but manifestations of institutional contradictions. Regulations demand Western-style accountability and speed, but the internal structures of many SOEs remain bureaucratic and rigid.
Decoupling therefore represents a hybrid practice—an institutional compromise that reconciles the logic of compliance with the logic of capacity.
This finding contributes to broader debates on accountability in developing economies, showing that timeliness in reporting should be interpreted within the institutional realities of public-sector governance, not judged solely by formal metrics.
The study’s insights are drawn from a qualitative, Indonesia-specific context, limiting generalizability to other national settings.
Interview data reflect managerial perspectives, potentially overlooking the views of auditors, regulators, or operational staff.
Finally, while the study highlights organisational coping strategies, it does not measure the quantitative impact of decoupling on report quality, stakeholder trust, or financial outcomes.
Future research could: