This study uses ethnographically contested microanalysis of natural conversation to investigate communication in the bicultural workplace. Audiotapes and videotapes were made of conversations between Japanese and Americans who work together at three firms in Tokyo. Transcriptions of the data are used to help locate misinterpretations that can arise from differing assumptions about the communicative task of giving instructions. The data also provide evidence for how co-workers create rapport despite cultural differences. Some of these group-bonding strategies are joking and teasing, cooperative complaining, conversations in a form of mixed English and Japanese ("code switching "), doing appropriate listening, and producing talk that has an echoing effect. The findings suggest that a context-sensitive, interactional approach to situated talk will enable us to locate pragmatic misunderstandings and other important communicative phenomena that other methods will fail to identify.
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