Genres in Action: Negotiating Genres in Practice

In this paper we present the initial findings of a genre based case study at a large Swedish company, with a record of early use of internal email (1982). The design of the particular email system was closely mapped to the organizational hierarchy. One of our informants kept one week of incoming email messages. We then asked questions about each message and how it related to the work of the informant, and to the organization. Based on the messages and the interviews we clustered the messages in different genres. Most literature of genres of organizational communication has focused on the genres themselves, e.g. email messages constituting different instances of genres. We found however that many messages, rather than being instances of genres, were part of informal conversations. In these conversations, however, it was common to discuss and negotiate which genres where appropriate to use in different situations.