Changes in contemporary organisations and interculturality: from orchestrated communication to confidence

The growing interdependency of markets (including the money markets), the development of the multinationals, the take-off of standardised products and the emergence of international media, mean that the traditional borders of both a geographic and political nature between countries, and cultural divisions between nations, are directly influencing interpersonal relations at work. The rapid dissemination of Information and Communication Technologies significantly modifies the working relations between organisations or within businesses. The customer/supplier type relation becomes commonplace, gradually emerging as the single relational model for all collaborative work inter or intra enterprise, with the organisation itself breaking up into so many business units subject to competition and outsourced (or insourced) in line with the fluctuating strategies adopted by executives or the types of activity conducted. The ICTs foster this parcellisation, condoning interpersonal distance and relational instantaneousness, introducing simultaneity in a groups’ creative activity (concurrent engineering). But this flexibility that is supposed to improve the business’s productivity also appears to be a factor of fragility due to the multiple links of dependency it sets up between the players (individuals and partner organisations) likely to default, with tight flow pre-supposing perfection and temporal accuracy. In the present research, the authors take an interest in the major firms that over the last decade have been led little by little to concentrate their skills portfolios and develop beyond their initial geographic perimeter, albeit that this determination to go global runs up against the diversity of the local cultures ofthe players concerned. We specifically focus in this article on observation of professional practices in the departments of major tourism firms that maintain varied and changing relations of service with their partners.