Organizational consulting and training experiences: intercultural identities and discursive practices in the creation and management of learning.

The context is the spread of English as the world’s business language, BELF, business English as a lingua franca., together with harmonization of corporate models, norms and behaviour. There is a dialectic, however, with local realities due to the growing geopolitical and economic importance of significant world regions. Interculturality and language is the subject of this study, using recordings of a weekend workshop given by a North American consulting group in Malaysia. Conversational analysis and corpus linguistics trace the linguistic structuring and sequencing of the interaction, revealing different kinds of “facework”, key to negotiating relative levels of power and interactive distance between the participants: areas of investigation deal with (in)directness, vague language, mitigation and accentuation strategies, hedging and boosting, humour and the lack of it.