Crossing national business borders: ‘doing’ US management consulting in a global context

The subject is international management practice, more specifically the business of taking consulting expertise abroad, from North America to other parts of the world. On this occasion, the site for these face-to-face intercultural exchanges is SE Asia, Malaysia, and traces the development of a three-day workshop designed and conducted by the invited US-based multinational consulting group for Malaysian human resources professionals. Both parties agree that they took away with them, apart from any discernable positive learning experiences, a great deal of discontent and dissatisfaction, and that, a significant part of the interaction was marked by un-cooperation, friction, tension, mutual misconstrual and mismatch of perceptions. A wide range of descriptive and explanatory models and frameworks in pragmatics and interactional talk-in-action analysis potentially inform the dynamics of successful communicative encounters, and by default, the nature of failure. Yet, working in the tradition of ethnomethodology and conversational analysis it is possible to analyse the socially co-constructed, inter-subjective nature of communicative behaviour, incorporating the complexities of dynamic concepts pertaining to roles, relationships and identities, and attempting to make meaningful connections between socially-negotiated ‘rules’, contexts and actions unfolding in discourse. The role of language in these interactional processes and the dynamics of “conversational inference-making” are the focus of the analysis for this study