International communication in a technology services call centre in India

Abstract

The data for this study was gathered from a US multinational company information technology enabled services (ITES) worksite offshored to India. The focus of the study is the exploration of the nature of English communication between professional support engineers across 'Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles,' and in particular the use of accommodation strategies used by the support engineers in the process of getting their professional work done on the phones with colleagues from all over the world. To date, little research into the needs and nature of English communication has been completed in this important industry in offshored destinations such as the Philippines and India. Such Outer Circle destinations are increasingly being selected by multinationals for offshoring and outsourcing due to the perception that these societies speak good English. But what does good English mean in globalized settings?

Understanding Each Other: Strategies for Accommodation in a Virtual Business Team Project Based in China

“…Businesses bemoan reduced productivity of virtual teamwork when compared to co-located teams, complaining that technology, poor leadership, poor meeting management skills, and problematic communication skills, including intercultural miscommunication, all have parts to play (see, e.g., Hertel, Geister, & Kronradt, 2005; Lockwood, 2013). In other words, technology seems to have disrupted the orderliness of face-to-face business meetings and created new frontiers of enquiry and analysis into digital business discourse (e.g., Darics, 2015).…”

“…This article explores how business collaboration in English is strategically managed in an ITO context in China where team members offshore have low levels of English proficiency and work virtually with onshore teams; it explores the specific issues of accommodation in the exchange. To date few linguistic studies have been carried out in this context, although some work has been carried out in the BPO call center sector (see, e.g., Friginal, 2009, Lockwood, 2007; Lockwood & Forey, 2010) and in the ITO sector in India and China (see Lockwood, 2013; Song, 2015, 2016). There have also been studies completed on the use of linguistic accommodation strategies in face-to-face business exchanges (see, e.g., Rogerson-Revell, 2010), on how power is linguistically realized in virtual team exchanges involving native and nonnative speakers (see, e.g., Lockwood & Forey, 2016), and on how business communication is impacted through digital technologies (see, e.g., Darics, 2015).…”