Words Matter: Some Challenges of Communication in Global Engineering Teams by Elizabeth Keating
Prof Elizabeth Keating’s talk was centred on a three-year longitudinal study of global engineering teams, collaborating from four countries: India, Romania, Brazil and the US, which discusses some of the challenges faced by the engineers in understanding each other.
Prof Keating’s study is a detailed design review of petroleum processing plants in both onshore and offshore locations viz. Houston, Kolkata and Rio de Janeiro. In today’s ‘global’ economy, transnational business practices require professionals to work together on a virtual platform from different cultural locations. Prof Keating intends to refute the common assumption of communication as neutral. She argues that global office spaces are never devoid of influence from local structures and processes.
Communication technology entails unexpected conflicts with it. Those working on global teams spanning time zones and cultures are faced with several challenges in trying to avoid expensive and frustrating miscommunication with colleagues across the globe. One does not think of cultural differences when standardising desktops. Everyone has a limited understanding of the others’ culture. With the very scarce face-to-face time they spend together, the engineers struggle with a lack of ‘context’. Conversations in fluent English are also subject to misunderstanding. Prof Keating illustrated her case with several examples of cross-cultural communication, like requests coming as directives and questions coming as complaints. There are also conflicts in hearing viz. a verbal confirmation versus a written one.
Theoretically speaking, both ends of a communication process should be in the same model, enabling the communicators to understand the context of each other’s utterances. Such conduit models of communication are widely used despite their inaccuracies. However, the technological mediation of human communication through computer screens, handheld devices, and telephone conferencing, combined with cultural diversity, means new skills in communication are needed.
Prof Keating concluded her presentation emphasizing the need to innovate in the field of cross-cultural communication technology. She also provided a roadmap for possible research in the said field, focusing on the role of hearers, whom she calls the ‘unsung heroes’ of communication processes. She underlined the necessity to understand language as and in action, calling for technologies that allow for backtrack and repair.
About the Speaker
Prof Elizabeth Keating is a linguistic anthropologist who studies culture and communication, and is especially interested in investigating the impacts of technology on language and the role of language in maintaining social inequality. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the past, has been Director of the Science, Technology and Society Program in Liberal Arts. Her research interests lie in linguistic anthropology, including language and social hierarchy, virtual environments, societal impacts of technologies, visual language, multimodality, and language practices in the cross-cultural workplace. She is currently conducting research on (1) cross- cultural misunderstandings among engineers collaborating virtually from four continents, (2) computer gamers’ emerging skills and use of language as they participate in multiple environments, and (3) language, culture and identity. Her new book from the University of California Press is entitled Words Matter: Communicating Effectively in the New Global Office.
By Akshay Patil
Article 19 