Year
2008
Authors
AVISON David, BANKS P.
Abstract
The offshoring of Information systems (IS) work has seen phenomenal growth in the past five 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. The ethnographic research technique of conversation analysis (CA) has been applied by analysis 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 evidence of asymmetries of participation and secondly, differences in the rhetorical organisation of conversation by participants.
AVISON, D. et BANKS, P. (2008). Cross-cultural (mis)communication in IS Offshoring: Understanding through Conversation Analysis. Journal of Information Technology, 23, pp. 249-268.