Cross-cultural (mis)communication in IS offshoring: understanding through conversation analysis

Abstract

The offshoring of information systems (IS) work has seen phenomenal growth in the past 5 or more years. This has resulted in IS professionals, interacting with workers from vastly different cultural backgrounds, in order to deliver IS project and support services. This cultural ‘barrier’ has been highlighted in the IS literature as a key challenge for offshoring; however, the attention given to research in the field has in the main been restricted to surveys or interviews, often reliant on reductionist national culture models. Within the fields of linguistics and anthropology, the ethnographic research technique of conversation analysis (CA) has been successfully applied to cross-cultural communications. However, there have been no concerted research efforts to apply CA to IS research in general and to IS offshoring in particular. Our research aims to address that gap by analysing naturally occurring recordings of telephone conferences between offshore vendor staff in India and UK/US employees of a major pharmaceutical company. The research has identified and analysed two important phenomena observed within these communications. Firstly, evidence of asymmetries of participation across cultural divides has been documented, and analysed for underlying causes, such as different attitudes to hierarchy and a lack of shared understanding of expected responses. Secondly, differences in the rhetorical organisation of conversation by participants have also been observed and clearly documented within transcribed specimens of these conversations. These phenomena led to seven findings that are aimed to stimulate further research. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this paper demonstrates how the methodological approach of CA can be applied to IS offshoring research, producing key insights into culturally loaded conversations with clear applications for practice. We hope that this evidence of the potential of CA in IS research will inspire IS researchers to use the approach in other domains as well as in further work in offshoring situations.

Appendix

Transcription conventions

The following is a summary of the transcription conventions developed for use within CA. Their purpose is to clearly identify all the features of the talk. The following table is taken from Ten-Have (1999), and based on the original conventions developed by Gail Jefferson (see also Sacks et al., 1974).

Sequencing

[:

A single left bracket indicates the point of overlap onset.

]:

A single right bracket indicates the point at which an utterance or utterance-part terminates vis-a-vis another.

=:

Equals signs, one at the end of one line and one at the beginning of a next, indicate no ‘gap’ between the two lines. This is often called latching.

Timed intervals

(0.0):

Numbers in parentheses indicate elapsed time in silence by tenth of a second, so (7.1) is a pause of 7 s and one-tenth of a second.

(.):

A dot in parentheses indicates a tiny ‘gap’ within or between utterances.

Characteristics of speech production

word :

Underscoring indicates some form of stress, via pitch and/or amplitude.

:::

Colons indicate prolongation of the immediately prior sound. Multiple colons indicate a more prolonged sound.

-:

A dash indicates a cut-off.

↓↑:

Arrows indicate marked shifts into higher or lower pitch in the utterance part immediately following the arrow.

WORD:

Upper case indicates especially loud sounds relative to the surrounding talk

°:

Utterances or utterance parts bracketed by degree signs are relatively quieter than the surrounding talk.

〈 〉:

Right/left carets bracketing an utterance or utterance-part indicate speeding up.

.hhh:

A dot-prefixed row of hs indicates an inbreath. Without the dot, the hs indicate an outbreath.

w(h)ord:

A parenthesized h or a row of hs within a word, indicates breathiness, as in laughter, crying, etc.

Transcriber's doubts and comments

( ):

Empty parentheses indicate the transcriber's inability to hear what was said. The length of the parenthesized space indicates the length of the untranscribed talk.

(word):

Parenthesized words are especially dubious hearings or speaker identifications.

(( )):

Double parentheses contain transcriber's descriptions rather than, or in addition to, transcriptions.