Cross-Cultural (mis)Communication in IS Offshoring: Understanding through Conversation Analysis
Authors: Avison, David; Banks, Peter
Journal: Journal of Information Technology (2008)
DOI: 10.1057/jit.2008.16
<jats:p>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 particip…