Negotiating Social Cohesion in Multicultural Urban Indonesia: Interaction and Adaptation
Keywords:
Intercultural communication, Social adaptation, Social cohesion, Community engagement, Multicultural citiesAbstract
Continuous interactions among diverse ethnic and cultural groups shape multicultural cities. Social cohesion is thus a negotiated and relational outcome. This study conceptualizes cohesion as emerging from everyday interaction and adaptive social practices, rather than as a product of formal integration. It examines the roles of intercultural communication and social adaptation in shaping social cohesion and ethnic relations in an urban Indonesian context. Using survey data from 206 residents in Makassar, Indonesia, the study employs PLS-SEM to analyse relationships among intercultural communication, social adaptation, social cohesion, and community-based engagement. The model explains 72.9% of the variance in social cohesion and 82.7% of the variance in community-based engagement, indicating strong explanatory capacity. Intercultural communication is positively associated with both social cohesion and community engagement, while social adaptation demonstrates a substantially stronger association with social cohesion. This highlights the central role of adaptation in embedding intercultural experiences in shared norms over time. The results reveal differentiated pathways linking intercultural processes to engagement. Social cohesion mediates the relationship between social adaptation and community engagement, but does not mediate the relationship between intercultural communication and engagement. This finding indicates that participation may emerge through both pragmatic interactional coordination and cohesion-based relational processes. Social cohesion functions as a contingent rather than universal mediating mechanism, distinguishing between interactional effectiveness and longer-term adaptive integration in multicultural urban contexts. These findings provide a refined process-oriented framework for understanding how multicultural coexistence can be sustained through differentiated interactional and adaptive mechanisms.
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