The paper advocates a sociolinguistic, interactional perspective on professional communication in institutions. The aim of the paper is twofold: it is an attempt at clarifying the working concepts and it reports on research on intercultural communication which has been done in Romania, where native speakers of English (NSs) interact with Romanians speaking English. It also argues that, within the context of increased transnational mobility and of Romania’s recent accession to the European Union, an exploration of corporate cultures in Romania from an interactional perspective might bring further insights into how successful communication may be achieved.
By institutional discourse I understand the verbal/written interaction oriented towards a work task, as a means through which participants develop their professional activity. Drew and Heritage (1992: 22-25) identify three dimensions through which talk becomes institutional: it is goal-oriented in institutionally relevant ways (to meet various institutional tasks); it is shaped by constraints concerning what can be done; and it is associated with particular ways of reasoning or inference-making. The argument in the paper is that, since each of us is simultaneously a member of many different discourse systems - we are members of a particular corporate group, a particular professional group, ethnic group, and others – the cultural differences between people in professional communication are likely to be less significant than differences in the institutional discourse system.
The study which is reported in the paper integrates the pragmatic notion of ‘activity type’ (Levinson) and Goffman’s (1974) notion of frame as a working framework, within the interactional sociolinguistics theoretical paradigm of conversational inference in intercultural encounters (Gumperz, 1982, 1992). Within this framework, Gumperz has introduced the concept or ‘contextualisation cues’ as a prominent word in studies of the ways discourse indexes, reflects or influences properties of social situations in intercultural encounters. For the present paper, I have selected one particular setting, that of selection interviews, to show how troubles in the interaction are related to the nature of the activity type and the participants’ expectations about the goals of the event, rather than to cultural differences or linguistic competence of the participants. By ‘selection interviews’ I refer in this study to interviewing involving the selection of students for a post-university course in Social Work and Health Promotion within a TEMPUS project in which the Sociology Department from Transilvania University of Brasov has been involved as a partner university. The selection board was made up of two Romanians and two Irish natives speaking English. Five selection interviews have been recorded, totalling about 120 minutes.
After a brief characterization of selection interviews as institutional discourse/talk, I present two areas that the Romanian candidates seem to have had problems with in the course of the interview: bracketing of small talk, and a shared understanding of concepts related to social work. The analysis shows that candidates have come to the interview with the assumption that there is one frame, on professional matters and that small talk is not an available option, and also that both NS interviewers and NNS interviewees are aware of the different practices associated with social work. I argue, along the lines advocated by Sarangi (1994) that selection interviews, which are very specific in their nature and purpose, ‘will pose problems for the interviewees who are not familiar with this type of “interview game”, whether or not they come from different “cultural” backgrounds. What is at stake here is some kind of “situational literacy” which comes with experience of participating in these activity types’.
Based on the findings of the above-mentioned research, the paper advocates the necessity of investigating other prototypical activity types, such as business meetings or other professional activities within corporate organisations in Romania.
Up to the present, intercultural and organizational research has generally focused on Anglo-Saxon cultures, investigating the issue of immigrant integration within the host-cultures. Besides studies on cultures in interaction, research has been done from a contrastive perspective. Where investigations have focused on organisational cultures, these have mainly been of a sociological nature, with less emphasis on linguistic interactions. Where studies did have elements of linguistic interactions between participants belonging to different cultural backgrounds, the analysis has been done from the perspective of the host company/institution.
The main critique formulated to the main trends in intercultural or interactional approaches to communication is that previous studies in the field (Gumperz, 1992, Sarangi, 1994, Roberts, 2000) have been mainly preoccupied by the issue of discrimination against the minority culture and have shown that differences in communicative styles lead to such discriminations.
The suggestion for further research in the last section of the paper starts from the interactional assumption that, within the context of joint companies, the organizational culture is being created through a process of adaptation to the constitutive cultures and languages, in the process of interaction, and that unpacking the features of this new culture leads to an efficient process of communication.

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