© Wanda J. Orlikowski, JoAnne Yates
Wanda J. Orlikowski
Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology 50 Memorial Drive (E53-329) Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 253-0443 wanda@mit.edu |
JoAnne Yates
Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology 50 Memorial Drive (E52-545) Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 253-7157 jyates@mit.edu |
GENRES OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION
The authors would like to thank Miriam Oh for her dedicated research
assistance, the Common LISP participants who gave their time to
be interviewed, and Jim Hollan who helped us locate the archive.
Deborah Ancona, Lotte Bailyn, John Carroll, and John van Maanen
provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We
also benefited from the useful comments of three anonymous reviewers
and editor. The research support of the Center for Coordination
Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is gratefully
acknowledged. Both authors contributed equally to this paper.
Using the genre perspective, we studied the electronic communication
of knowledge workers collaborating on a multi-year project and
found that their work and interactions were mediated by the use
of four genres (or shared types) of communication. Drawing on
these findings, we develop the concept of genre repertoire
to designate the set of genres enacted by groups, organizations,
or communities to accomplish their work. We show that the establishment
of a community's genre repertoire, which typically occurs
at its formation, is a process that is largely implicit and rooted
in members' prior experiences of working and interacting.
Once established, a genre repertoire serves as a powerful social
template for shaping how, why, and with what effect members of
a community interact to get their work done. While serving to
institutionalize norms and forms of work and interaction, genre
repertoires can and do change over time through members'
response to project events, task demands, media capabilities,
time pressures, and converging community norms. The concept of
genre repertoire offers organizational research a powerful way
of understanding mediated work practices and interaction norms,
and hence how communication technologies may be associated with
changes in the work and interaction of groups, organizations,
or communities.
Much recent business rhetoric reflects the attempts by organizations
to transform their structures and processes through teamwork,
networking, and strategic integration into global enterprises
and virtual corporations. Integral to such organizational visions
are fast, accessible, and ubiquitous networks that support an
array of new communication technologies such as electronic mail,
computer conferencing, and desk-to-desk video. Such communication
networks will apparently enable organizational members to work
collaboratively and flexibly, and to span contexts and boundaries.
But exactly how the use of communication technology is associated
with changes in work and interaction is insufficiently explicated
in such discussions, and seems to be poorly understood in general.
A growing body of organizational research has focused on the influence
of electronic media on organizations (see reviews by Culnan and
Markus, 1987; Kraemer and Pinsonneault, 1990; Sproull and Kiesler,
1992). On the empirical side, researchers have, for example, examined
the relationship between electronic media and particular organizational
behaviors and outcomes such as intra-group interaction (Finholt
and Sproull, 1990), communication patterns (Eveland & Bikson,
1988; Feldman, 1987; Rice and Associates, 1984), group decision
behavior (Poole and DeSanctis, 1992), socio-emotional discourse
(Sproull and Kiesler, 1986; Rice and Love, 1987), and managerial
effectiveness (from the media richness perspective, e.g., Daft
and Lengel, 1986; Schmitz and Fulk, 1991; Sitkin, Sutcliffe, and
Barrios-Chaplin 1992; Trevino, Lengel, and Daft, 1987). On the
theoretical side, Huber (1991:67) has posited that communication
and decision-aiding technologies "will have a significant
effect on organizational design, intelligence, and decision making."
He proposed that these technologies will be associated with such
organizational outcomes as decreased organizational levels, greater
participation in decision-making, more rapid decision making,
higher quality decisions, and more accurate, comprehensive, and
timely organizational knowledge.
While the empirical research has shed light on the relationship
between electronic media and various aspects of groups and organizations,
the linkage between new communication technologies and organizational
changes in work and interaction has still not been systematically
conceptualized. Further, the theorizing, while interesting, remains
abstracted from the situated practices and norms that ultimately
explain how and why people act the way they do in organizations
(Barley, 1988; Giddens, 1984; Weick, 1990).
In contrast to these prior approaches, we have explicitly focused
on and empirically examined the relationship between use of electronic
media and changes in work and interaction. To inform our investigation,
we drew on the concept of genres of communication (proposed by
Yates and Orlikowski, 1992; see also Campbell and Jamieson, 1978;
Miller, 1984; and Swales, 1990) as a useful analytic device for
studying how knowledgeable actors use media within specific institutionalized
contexts. Yates and Orlikowski (1992) suggest that genres of organizational
communication -- for example, a memo, a meeting, an expense form,
a promotional video, and a resume -- are socially recognized types
of communication that are habitually enacted by organization members
to realize particular communicative purposes. Each of these genres
has a particular role and meaning that has become associated with
certain kinds of work practices and interaction norms. The use
of such genres thus, does not only mediate organizational communication,
it critically shapes the conduct of work and interaction in organizations.
In this paper, we go beyond the notion of genre to develop the
concept of genre repertoire -- the set of genres enacted
by groups, organizations, or communities to accomplish their work.
We argue that this concept offers a particularly useful approach
for investigating and articulating how electronic media may be
associated with changes in work practices and interaction norms.
Our argument is based on examining the use of electronic mail
by a group of professionals working on an inter-organizational,
multi-year project. Because electronic mail was the primary medium
through which the participants communicated, their electronic
interaction comprised the bulk of their project work. Our detailed
investigation of the group's electronic messages over an
extended period of time reveals the repertoire of genres they
used to accomplish their work, and explains how and why it changed
over time. This analysis allows us to generate some theory about
how and why a community establishes, uses, and changes its genre
repertoire, and hence its modes of work and interaction.
As more and more organizational work becomes a matter of symbol
manipulation and information exchange, the genres through which
information is shaped and shared for particular purposes (reports,
spreadsheets, meetings, teleconferences, etc.), are no longer
merely an aspect of organizational work; rather, they are
the organizational work. Hence changes in genres and genre repertoires
reveal changes in work, interaction, and organization. The project
we studied serves as a useful prototype for the kinds of work
and interaction anticipated in future organizations and groups
-- distributed, knowledge-intensive, and networked through communication
technologies.
According to Yates and Orlikowski (1992), a genre of organizational
communication is a typified communicative act having a socially
defined and recognized communicative purpose with regard
to its audience. For example, consider the annual shareholders'
meeting genre and the resume genre. The commonly recognized purpose
of a shareholders' meeting is to present the company's
past accomplishments and future outlook to stockholders, while
that of a resume is to summarize an individual's educational
and employment history for a potential employer. The purpose of
a genre is not rooted in a single individual's motive for
communicating, but in a purpose that is recognized and reinforced
within a community. A genre binds the shared purpose to characteristic
aspects of substance and form. Substance includes the topics,
themes, and arguments, along with typical discourse structures,
used to express the communicative purpose. For example, the substance
of a shareholders' meeting is usually the company's
new initiatives as well as its past and expected financial performance,
while that of a resume is typically the person's education,
experiences, and accomplishments, laid out in a distinctive sequence.
Form refers to the readily observable features of the communication.
For example, shareholders' meetings typically include oral
and visual presentation of progress and plans by company officials
as well as voting by shareholders on various proposals. A resume
typically displays a standard format with dates, schools, degrees,
employers, and job titles. Form has at least three elements: structural
features (e.g., text formatting devices such as lists and headings,
and devices for structuring interactions at meetings such as agenda
and chairpersons), communication medium (e.g., pen and paper,
telephone, or face to face), and language or symbol system (including
linguistic characteristics such as level of formality and the
specialized vocabulary of corporate or professional jargon).
Genres are invoked in response to commonly recognized recurrent
situations or occasions for communication, which reflect the
history and nature of established work practices, social relations,
and organizational policies. For example, an annual shareholders'
meeting is invoked by the end of the financial year and assumes
certain economic conditions and arrangements that include the
rights and duties of company owners and the responsibilities of
management to report to these owners annually. Similarly, a resume
is invoked by a job search that is part of a hiring process premised
on systems of education and employment as well as the requirements
for particular forms of reporting on individuals' scholastic
and professional accomplishments.
In organizations or communities, genres are enacted when members
take action by drawing their knowledge -- tacit or explicit --
of genre rules that bind a particular socially recognized purpose
and appropriate elements of form and substance with certain recurrent
situations. A particular instance of a genre need not reflect
all the rules constituting that genre, as long as it is still
recognizable as partaking of that genre. For example, business
letters with subject lines (RE: ... ) are easily understood as
such even though subject lines are more conventionally associated
with memos than with letters; similarly, business letters sent
via fax are still recognized as such, even though the transmission
medium has changed. Enough distinctive genre rules, however, must
be followed for the communicative action to be identified--within
the relevant social community--as an instance of a certain genre.
Yates and Orlikowski (1992) suggest that genres are produced,
reproduced, and modified by individuals through a process of structuring
(Giddens, 1984). That is, members of a community enact a genre
by drawing on their knowledge of a set of genre rules, and in
so doing reproduce or challenge the genre. When community members
use genres that -- through tradition or mandate --have become
established as useful for conducting the community's activities,
they reinforce those genres. Members can, however, challenge and
change these genres through their actions. When changes to established
genres are repeatedly enacted and become widely adopted within
the community, new or modified genres may emerge -- either alongside
existing genres or to replace those that have lost currency. For
example, Yates and Orlikowski (1992) show how the memo genre emerged
initially as a variant of the business letter genre and ultimately
as distinct from it.
While Yates and Orlikowski (1992) posit a mechanism for genre
production, reproduction, and change, they do not suggest why
communities produce particular genre repertoires, nor how, why,
and with what effect communities may change such repertoires over
time. These questions of repertoire formation, influence, and
change emerged as the focus of this paper. Using the genre perspective
as a starting point, we draw on the findings of our research study
to establish and elaborate the concept of genre repertoire, and
begin to articulate some theory around it.
Our research study investigated a project that involved computer
language designers who, through the 1970s, had worked with and
developed various and largely incompatible dialects of the artificial
intelligence language LISP. In early 1981 the Defense Department
(a funding source for much LISP work) put pressure on some of
these designers to negotiate a standard LISP language so that
programs written in that language would be portable across computer
types. Over the next two and a half years, the community of LISP
language designers engaged in complex and often controversial
negotiations to produce what came to be known as the Common LISP
() language. As the language designers were located at universities
and company sites dispersed geographically throughout the U.S.,
their interactions were conducted almost exclusively through electronic
mail transmitted via the Defense Department's ARPANET system.
Most of the designers knew each other, either from having previously
studied or worked together or from meeting periodically at professional
conferences. They were all working in the LISP language and all
had a great deal at stake as result of the decision to design
a standard LISP language: for the academic participants, future
funding from the Defense Department; for the participants working
at companies, the commercial potential of LISP-based products.
In introducing the manual, the project's final product, Steele (1984:xi) noted the centrality of the electronic medium to the project:
The development of COMMON LISP would most probably not have been possible without the electronic message system provided by the ARPANET. Design decisions were made on several hundred distinct points, for the most part by consensus, and by simple majority vote when necessary. Except for two one-day face-to-face meetings, all of the language design and discussion was done through the ARPANET message system, which permitted effortless dissemination of messages to dozens of people, and several interchanges per day.
The participants perceived electronic mail to be an appropriate medium for several reasons, both practical and customary. Their geographic dispersion made face-to-face meetings expensive and difficult to organize, especially since they undertook this project in addition to their other duties, without specific funding from the Defense Department, and with varying levels of support from their organizations. Most significantly, according to the participants, they were all regular users of electronic mail, already using it to communicate locally and at a distance. The medium was thus an obvious one to use. As one participant put it, "We didn't even consider not using it."
In preliminary discussions in April 1981, a few key LISP designers
came together at a larger professional meeting and agreed to cooperate
to define the standard LISP language. In a subsequent informal
meeting in June 1981 they assigned responsibility for the manual's
production to designers at one specific site. In August 1981 an
initial draft of the manual was issued, based largely on the documentation
of the LISP dialect at that site. This draft served as the basis
of discussion at a November 1981 meeting (the first of the two
referred to in Steele's introduction), where some basic
language design decisions were made, and many other issues raised
but not resolved. Between December 1981, when a central electronic
archive was established (and when our data set begins), and December
1983, when the manual was essentially complete, there was only
one more face-to-face meeting, in August 1982.
The group was ad hoc and relatively unstructured in its operation,
with no pre-defined time frame or formal organization. Nevertheless,
the person at the chosen site who took responsibility for compiling
the reference manual, emerged as a de facto project coordinator,
with several others playing key supporting roles. He issued various
drafts of the manual (on paper and in electronic form), that served
as milestones in the project and foci for the group's work. Another
participant took charge of the (electronic) mailing list and also
established an archive agreed to be available to anyone interested
in it. [1] During a period of over two years the group made
hundreds of decisions, both big and small and of varying levels of controversy,
about how the language would work; as a result, a record of the
discussion was seen as critical. The coordinator noted that the
archive "proved invaluable in the preparation of [the] manual."
The archive also made it possible for those joining the project
later to review what had already been said or decided on specific
subjects, as well as allowing regular or occasional participants
to revisit prior discussions. The project was negotiated to its
desired end product, a reference manual for a standard LISP language,
published in 1984 as Common LISP: The Language (Steele,
1984).
The primary data for this study consist of almost 2,000 transcripts
of archived electronic mail messages. Background information and
perspectives for interpreting these messages came from a series
of two-phase, semistructured interviews. Since the interviews
provided supplementary rather than primary data, we did not attempt
to interview all the participants, conducting interviews with
nine participants. These included the five key players in the
project, three core participants, and one peripheral player (see
below). The interviews were conducted after preliminary content
analysis of the messages, allowing us to draw on the results of
this analysis. The first phase of the interview, which was the
same for each participant, focused on project history, membership,
roles, and social norms. The second phase, a variation of the
discourse-based interview (Odell, Goswami, and Herrington, 1983),
focused on the patterns initially detected in the message transcripts
themselves. [2]This phase included customized questions
that probed
the patterns initially observed in the interviewee's messages
and those of the group as a whole. These interviews grounded our
interpretation of the messages and helped to elaborate and explain
the patterns we detected. We also communicated with some of these
interviewees later via e-mail to clarify issues that arose in
further analysis.
We analyzed the message transcripts both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, we read large portions of the archive to become familiar with the use of electronic mail by the participants. Genre analysis requires qualitative textual analysis of messages to understand the situations within which certain genres are invoked and their shared purpose, substance, and form. This textual analysis also provided the basis for devising a coding scheme and for interpreting the patterns and trends identified. Our coding scheme was designed by scrutinizing hundreds of messages in the archive and categorizing them in terms of two of the four dimensions constituting the definition of genre, social purpose and form. [3]We supplemented the observed features with standard text-formatting devices such as lists and subheadings (see, for example, Felker et al., 1981). The final set of coding categories included purpose categories and two types of form categories, structural indicators and language indicators (Table 1 contains a complete list of coding categories):
Purpose Indicators refer to the socially recognizable purposes of a message, including both primary and secondary purposes. For primary purpose, only one of six options was chosen as a message's key purpose. Because we observed that many messages had multiple purposes (e.g., a message raising a question and proposing a solution), one or more of the six purposes could be indicated for secondary purpose (including that for primary purpose).
Structural Indicators, an aspect of form, refer to a message's formatting features, including those common in non-electronic communication (e.g., subject line, opening, and sign-off), as well as those more characteristic of electronic communication (e.g., graphical elements such as the sideways smiley face :-) created with alphanumeric characters). These categories were coded simply as present or absent.
Language Indicators, another aspect of form, coded
the presence of four linguistic characteristics -- informality,
humor, sarcasm, and emphasis. For example, our working definition
of informal was "language you wouldn't normally use
in a paper-based business document (e.g., business letter or memo)."
These categories were coded as present or absent.
A research assistant used this scheme to code the electronic messages.
To judge coder reliability, one of the researchers independently
coded a stratified sample of 124 messages selected by the other
researcher to represent all coding categories. Intercoder reliabilities
were high (Cohen's k = 0.80 or above) for all categories
except primary purpose, sarcasm, and the residual "other"
categories in purpose, structural, and language indicators (see
Table 1). In the subsequent genre analysis we used secondary rather
than primary purpose because of its higher reliability, and did
not use sarcasm. [4]The "other" categories were used
primarily as aids in locating interesting phenomena for later
qualitative analysis.
The coded data were next examined for inclusion in the genre analysis.
Since the notion of genres of organizational communication
is socially based, we examined the frequency of participation
by senders. This examination revealed that while a core group
of 17 participants sent large numbers of messages, there were
also about 100 individuals who sent fewer than 1% of the total
messages transmitted during the project (less than one per month).
The interviews indicated that many individuals outside the core
group essentially observed the process, participating only rarely,
if at all. Moreover, responses to our query about the major players
in the project produced quite consistent responses, identifying
a common and very small set of participants, generally key LISP
designers with major responsibilities for LISP implementations,
all of whom were well over the 1% threshold. We thus decided to
remove from the data set those participants with fewer than 1%
of the messages, because as peripheral players they would be only
marginally involved in the ongoing enactment of genres in the
group. The resulting data set contained 1332 messages sent by
17 participants during a 25-month period. Table 1 shows the frequency
of each coding category in this data set.
Because the medium of electronic mail transmits written communication,
we began our exploration with the assumption that certain traditional
genres of written organizational communication (e.g., the memo)
might be enacted by the project participants. Based on the historical
evolution (Yates, 1989) and contemporary usage of these traditional
genres, we defined the typical form of each in terms of our coding
categories.
Because genres are often modified to suit a group's task
or a particular medium, we expected some genre variations in the
group, particularly as most of the participants had been using
electronic mail before the project began. We used inductive techniques
to identify and define such genre variants. Frequencies of coding
categories indicated which features were common and which were
rare, while textual analysis and interviews provided some rationales
for such patterns. In seeking genre variants, we used the frequencies
to assess the categories that most limited the number of exemplars
of a genre. We then determined which constraints could be dropped
without violating the essence of a genre (its recognized purpose
and salient characteristics of form). Where one of these variants
was much more common and characteristic than the genre as initially
defined, our analysis proceeded with that variant.
In this exploratory study we wanted to be open to the possibility
of other genres, including new electronic ones, so we also sought
other patterns among the messages by iteratively examining interview
data, message texts, and associations among the coding categories.
We examined both the presence of various genres in the archive
and the change in their use over time. To ensure that the identified
genres were shared among the participants -- a characteristic
necessary given our social definition of genre -- we also analyzed
the distribution of genre usage within the group. In doing so,
we treated the five individuals who each generated over 5% of
the messages as separate and key participants, and aggregated
the remaining twelve participants, responsible for a total of
33% of the messages, into a composite "other participants"
category. All the genres we considered here were used by each
of the five key as well as the composite other participants at
a level we considered more than adequate evidence of social support.
To get an overview of genre change, we initially divided the chronological
series of messages into fixed-size clusters (nine periods of 148
sequential messages each). The fact that the messages were distributed
quite unevenly over the period analyzed precluded calculating
meaningful percentages of genres for many time periods. Grouping
by number of messages allowed analysis of all the messages by
genre and "period." We believe this grouping adequately
captures what we are trying to investigate -- the ongoing enactment
of genres within a social unit. After grouping the messages in
fixed-sized clusters, we searched for trends in the relative enactment
of genres over time, ensuring that these trends--where present--were
sufficiently common to be considered shared within the group.
In examining changes over time, we explored one obvious possible
factor that might account for such changes--interactions with
the participation and genre use of group members. Individual contribution
to the data set as a whole varied over time. Consequently, our
analysis of changes in the use of genres distinguished broad-based
changes in use levels from changes in the participation of different
individuals with different genre preferences.
This analysis of the genres in the archive and their changes over
time is reported in the next section. The notion of genre repertoire
which emerged from this analysis is developed in the following
section, where we examine the genre repertoire to learn what it
can reveal about the nature of the group and its actions. We then
build some theory about genre repertoires by examining how and
why the repertoire was established and how and why it changed
in the context of project history, time pressures, events, media
capabilities, and community norms.
Our study of the project found that the participants enacted four
different genres or genre variants within electronic mail in order
to accomplish their project work: memo, proposal, dialogue, and
ballot (see Figure 1). The first two are variants of the traditional
paper-based memo and proposal. The latter two, though they have
precedents in written or oral genres of interaction, are different
enough to be considered separate genres not typical of most written
organizational communication.
A memo traditionally documents intra-organizational communication (Yates, 1989). We defined the form of the memo genre as follows (see Table 2 for a precise definition in terms of coding categories, and Figure 2 for an example):
Memo: a message using the standard memo header provided by the system (To, From, Subject, etc.), allowing common features such as subheads and lists, having formal language, and lacking any distinctive features of the other genres, such as greeting and sign-off, or features new to the electronic medium, such as graphic devices.
Using this definition, we found that 15% of the messages in the
archive matched the characteristics of the memo. This genre was
fairly widely shared across the participants: the five key participants
varied in their individual levels of use from a low of 2% to a
high of 28%, while the twelve other participants used it 25% of
the time.
In seeking potential variants of the memo, we considered several
options but ultimately focused on the formality constraint. Our
textual analysis and interviews had revealed that the group tended
to use a great deal of informal language more typical of conversation
than of formal written organizational communication. This impression
was confirmed by the coding, which identified 63% of the messages
as having informal language. All five key and twelve other participants
used informal language frequently, from a low of 57% to a high
of 85%. This informality probably reflected both the informal
culture of the group and the rapid exchanges allowed by the electronic
medium. We thus defined an informal variant of the traditional
memo genre that maintained its structural features but removed
the restriction on formality. This variant (which includes memo
itself as a subset) comprised 38% of the messages in the archive.
It was also widely shared among the group, with usage levels of
the five key participants ranging from 8% to 69%, and the twelve
other participants at 56%. Since this variant of the memo allowing
informal language was much more characteristic of the group's
interaction, we focused on it in our subsequent analysis.
It is not surprising that use of this broader form of the memo
was so prevalent and widely shared in the Common LISP interaction.
As noted above, the socially recognized purpose of the memo is
to document intra-organizational communication, in situations
where such documentation is called for. Documentation was clearly
an underlying purpose of the entire electronic exchange on Common
LISP, as suggested by the archiving of all messages. Subject lines,
prompted for but not required by the software, were used in 93%
of the messages; our interviews suggested that the participants
used the subject lines to separate various threads of discussion
and to facilitate retrieval of messages from a specific thread
at a later time. As one participant said, "I find [subject
lines] very useful as a way of indexing content and issues."
While the members of the Common LISP project worked for different
organizations, they were part of the same professional community
and many of them knew each other fairly well before the project
began. Moreover, the project by its nature asked these individuals
to come together in at least a temporary, electronic organization
with a common goal, making an intra-organizational genre seem
appropriate. In addition, most of the regular participants used
an e-mail system that provided fields for the standard memo header.
Thus the memo might have served as a kind of default genre.
Some of the Common LISP messages classified as memos are brief
replies to previous messages that lack context, closure, or both,
and depend on knowledge of previous messages. These memos bear
some resemblance to pieces of an ongoing conversation, a quality
likely reflecting the more rapid exchange of messages possible
in e-mail than in the paper medium. Despite their fragmentary
structure, these e-mail messages were seen by the participants
as serving a communicative purpose similar to that of paper-based
memos. As one participant noted in an interview, "we used
them the same way we used interoffice memos."
Figure 1 shows how use of the memo changed over the project. From
an initial level of 45%, its use rose to 54% during period 2,
then dipped sharply in periods 4 and 6 (explained in part by ballot
activity, discussed later) to a low of 22% in period 6. If we
smooth out those sharp dips, however, we see a general decline
from period 3 to the end of the project, when it stood at 27%.
The downward trend is widespread within the community, with all
five key and the twelve other participants showing a decline in
the number and percentage of memos used in later periods. Over
time, then, the group gradually decreased its use of the memo
variant.
A proposal has a specific communicative purpose -- to advocate a course of action for consideration by others -- but it can vary in length, formality, and structural features. We did not initially seek this genre, but were alerted to its presence in an interview with a key participant. We defined the form of the proposal genre to match the particular variant found in the messages (determined qualitatively and through analysis of the coding data), as follows (see Table 2 for a precise definition in terms of coding categories, and Figure 3 for an example):
Proposal: a message having proposal as (secondary) purpose, a subject line, and a formal specification or example of LISP code, offset from the rest of the text.
The subject line was required both to identify the specific aspect
of the LISP language dealt with and to aid in later retrieval.
The presence of LISP code precluded general proposals about group
process. Analysis of the data set revealed that 7% of the messages
matched this definition. This genre was used by the five key participants
at levels ranging from 3% to 16%, with the twelve other participants
at 6%. This distributed use suggests that it had a broad enough
social base within the group to qualify as a genre.
This genre appears to be a variant of the traditional written
proposal, sharing its social purpose of proposing some idea or
action for approval, though restricting the subject matter of
such a proposal to the Common LISP language, thus making it a
subgenre that would be recognized only within the community. We
did not restrict formality, nor did we require the section headings
characteristic of longer and more formal types of proposals but
not essential to informal, memo-like proposals in many organizations.
Paper-based proposals can take a very specific form (as in the
NSF proposal) or can be realized in the form of various other,
more abstract communication genres such as letters and memos.
Likewise, in this electronic archive, we found that the proposal
overlapped with other genres. Specifically, of the 97 proposal
messages found, 40% were also classified as memo, and 14% as dialogue
(discussed below).
Because the variant of the proposal genre was very specific to
the task at hand, change in its use over time (see Figure 1),
not surprisingly, reflected specific events in and tasks of the
project, rather than simply increasing or decreasing over time.
[5]The single face-to-face meeting that took place during
the time
covered by the archive occurred during period 3. Our interviews
as well as many of the messages indicated that during the meeting,
a number of unresolved issues were delegated to various participants
who were to prepare proposals on the issues and present them to
other participants through electronic mail, thus creating a situation
invoking proposals. For example, one proposal message began with
this introduction: "At the meeting I volunteered to produce
a new proposal for the ..." while another stated: "At
the meeting in August I was assigned to make a proposal..."
In addition, the two major ballots (to be discussed below) in
periods 4 and 6 were a mechanism for gauging level of agreement
on proposals as they accumulated, and they in turn spawned more
proposals. Thus percentage use of the proposal genre peaked in
periods 4 through 6, with a high of 14% in period 5.
The relative use of the proposal genre declined to its earlier
level in periods 7 and 8 before picking up slightly just before
the end when all outstanding matters had to be resolved (increasing
to 7% of the messages in period 9). A detailed textual
analysis of these final proposals indicates that many of them
referred specifically to their "last minute" nature.
For example, one message (sent at 11:26 pm) began with the comment,
"Okay guys, here is a (literally) eleventh-hour proposal
for ..." Others were suggestions for what should go into
the next edition of the manual.
Dialogue, which was identified both qualitatively and quantitatively
from patterns in the data and confirmed in the interviews, is
a form of written interaction that is modeled on oral dialogue.
This genre uses a specific structural feature, the embedded message
(all or part of a previous message, inserted into but visually
differentiated from the text of the current message[6]), in a
way
that suggests a conversation. At the same time, it makes use of
the documentary quality of written communication. We defined the
form of the dialogue genre as follows (
Dialogue: a message responding to a previous one
and including all or part of that previous message followed by
a direct response to it. Such a message also had a subject line,
typically picked up from the original message and occasionally
modified.
Analysis of the data set identified 20% of the messages as dialogue.
Use of the genre was widespread, ranging from 6.3% to 45% among
the five key participants and 17% among the other twelve participants.
This pattern exhibits all the basic components of a genre. The
messages are invoked in a recurrent situation--the interaction
of group members collaborating on a common, ongoing task. They
have a shared social purpose (replying to specific issues raised
in another message in a way that continues a line of discussion)
and common features of form (the embedded message and the subject
line). The embedded message feature takes advantage of the capability
of many electronic mail systems to insert a previous message into
a new message, a capability not easily available in the paper
medium. The closest paper-based analogue to this genre would be
a memo on which a response has been written by hand or to which
one has been attached. In that analogue, however, the exchange
is unlikely to continue beyond a single reply. In contrast, dialogue
messages may occur in a chain of interwoven messages, creating
what one participant called "the metaphor of a conversation."
Unlike the relative independence reflected in the conventional
(paper-based) memo genre, dialogue, as the name implies, creates
a continuity and interdependence among messages. While the memo
variants in the data set sometimes reflected more dependence on
preceding messages than in paper-based memos, dialogue messages
were explicitly dependent on each other, as indicated by the inclusion
of previous messages or pieces of messages and by the use of a
subject line that usually repeated or varied an earlier subject
line. In interviews, participants noted the usefulness of this
type of communication. For example, "I use embedded messages
all the time as a way of letting people know what I am referring
to," and "It was a way of making a connection with
what had come before."
Examining change in level of use of this genre, we see a general
rise over the project. It started out at a relatively low 8% of
all messages. Our interviews revealed that dialogue was already
in use at the time the project began. One participant noted that
"inserting quotes from a previous message so it gets more
like a conversation was not invented by this group, [but] imported
from outside." Use of dialogue rose through most of the
project, with local peaks in periods 4 and 6 coinciding with the
two major ballots (see below). Its use surpassed that of memo
in periods 6 and 9, ending at a high of 28%. The increased use
of dialogue was widespread in the group. Four of the five key
participants increased their use of dialogue over the project,
as did the twelve other participants. The pattern of change
revealed in Figure 1 suggests that while dialogue was a part of
the repertoire from the beginning and while task demands (the
first major ballot) may have encouraged its original rise, it
became an increasingly accepted and used mode of interaction,
whatever the task. [7]Moreover, the distinctive structural
characteristic
of this genre, the embedded message, was explicitly recognized
as a useful aspect of the group's communication. For example,
one participant told us in his interview, "There definitely
is a trend towards increased use of embedded messages."
Another was able to articulate the formation of specific norms
for using this genre, saying:
My software lets me do this easily -- it drops in
the whole previous message into your new message and then indents
it. I would then carve out what was extraneous and add my response
to that. ... Some people were using this technique as well but
most were not bothering to delete the extraneous stuff and just
dropping in the whole message (header and all). I find that very
annoying. Actually so do other people. I remember a message RG
sent to the group ... objecting to the practice of including the
whole previous message. He said something like, "Why can't
you do what SF does and send me just what I need not the whole
message." So I remember this as a style that we developed
in Common LISP.
Dialogue messages represent a significant genre in the archive,
and one likely to arise only in electronic mail systems that offered
the capability of embedding messages.
The label and socially defined purpose of the dialogue genre reflect
a conversational quality, being realized asynchronously and in
writing through electronic mail. In discussing "sequence
of discourse," Rubin (1984:206) notes, "Although a
written text is a monologue, writers may similarly enter into
dialogic relations with a previous piece of writing by authoring
a variety of types of comments, counterstatements, exegeses, or
replies." Unlike memo and proposal, the dialogue genre
attempts to internalize and visually highlight this dialogic relation
within a single written document. This genre, apparently new to
the electronic medium, thus integrates characteristics of both
written and oral modes of communication while depending on capabilities
unique to electronic media.
The other nontraditional pattern revealed through our textual
analysis was associated with what the group referred to as balloting.
We defined the form of the ballot genre as follows (see Table
2 for a precise definition in terms of coding categories, and
Figure 5 for an example):
Ballot: a genre comprising three distinct types
of messages: (i) the ballot questionnaire, which was a message
from one group member soliciting participation in the ballot,
providing instructions on voting, and listing and describing the
issues to be voted on; (ii) the ballot responses, which were messages
from the members containing their votes on each of the issues
in the ballot; and (iii) the ballot result, which was a message
from the ballot initiator, summarizing the results of the voting,
tallying the votes for each issue and reproducing comments expressed
by the participants.
Six ballots were found in the data set, each with all three message
types, including varying numbers of electronic responses to each.
Of these six ballots, the ones in October 1982 and May 1983 were
major, each representing significant decision points on over twenty
unresolved issues. Our interviews revealed that these two ballots
served as important milestones for the project, highlighting what
had been accomplished to date and what still needed to be done.
The other four ballots, some of which were referred to by participants
as "mini-ballots," covered fewer issues and were treated
as less important events.
This pattern, defined by detailed qualitative analysis of all
messages coded as "Other purpose," rather than in
terms of a specific set of coding categories, fits the most essential
aspects of our definition of genre, though it also pushes the
boundaries of that definition in some ways. Balloting is invoked
in response to a recurrent situation and has a shared communicative
purpose. The initiator used ballots after several unresolved issues
accumulated. For example, the initiator of the second major ballot
in May 1983 indicated that it was occasioned by the increased
number of issues raised in recent discussions: "I was going
to send these out in smaller doses, but a bunch of issues built
up and I decided that a real ballot would be easier." The
socially recognized purpose of balloting was to get a sense of
members' positions on various outstanding issues that needed
to be resolved. The project coordinator, who was the initiator
of the first major ballot, described its purpose and substance
in its preamble:
Here is what you have all been waiting for! I need
an indication of consensus or lack thereof on the issues that
have been discussed by network mail since the August 1982 meeting,
particularly on those issues that were deferred for proposal,
for which proposals have now been made.
The purpose was not simply to find out what solution the majority
favored. Rather, ballots were used to identify whether agreement
had emerged or whether more discussion was needed. As one key
participant told us, "it was a way of seeing if we had consensus
and a way of putting all the little details away--a way of sticking
a pin through our decisions." Issues in which such a consensus
did not emerge were recycled for further discussion.
The purpose and recurrent situation, then, were fairly clear.
The form of the genre is slightly more problematic. While ballots
had distinctive aspects of form, they were different for each
of the three types of messages--ballot questionnaire, ballot response,
and ballot results--raising the question of where to draw the
boundaries around the ballot genre. Is each message type a genre
in its own right? That definition makes it easier to identify
elements of form for each of the three types of messages. On the
other hand, a mechanical application of our social criterion to
the ballot questionnaire or the ballot results by themselves would
be problematic, since only two individuals initiated and reported
on all of the instances of ballots, though many participants sent
ballot responses. Alternatively, we could view the genre as the
series of three different types of messages (just as the formal
meeting genre includes the agenda, face-to-face interaction, and
minutes). This view seems more satisfactory in some respects,
since the three types of messages are necessarily linked and "balloting"
required all three. By this definition, however, there were only
six instances of the genre. Thus, we have used a combination of
these perspectives, depending on our purpose.
For purposes of counting the number of messages in this genre
in order to assess the proportion of messages it accounts for,
we included all instances of all three types, for a total of 55
messages. [8]Because the ballot seemed such a specific
genre, we
ensured that such messages did not overlap with any of the other
genres (see Table 2). For assessing the genre's social
acceptance, we included respondents as well as initiators of ballots.
By that definition, all five key and twelve other members participated
in the ballot genre.
In looking at the form of this genre, we analyzed the three types
of messages separately, necessarily beginning with the ballot
questionnaire, which shaped the responses and results. Its form
consisted of a numbered list of items phrased as issues or questions.
Each was followed by a statement of the issuer's sense of the
groups' and/or his own current preference for handling the issue.
In the first major ballot, the initiator specified the exact form
of the responses so he could compile them electronically. In the
other ballots, this process was abandoned for a more manual process
of compilation. In most cases, however, the responses tended to
include both a simple statement of agreement or disagreement with
the stated position and a statement of reasons, especially when
the position was one of disagreement. The results were generally
copies of the ballot, with a summary of the responses on each
item.
In interviews, the participants indicated that they thought such
electronic ballots were new to the medium, as well as to their
group. One participant told us, "I have only seen this ballot
in Common LISP. But there is nothing surprising about it. We were
experimenting with the new technology." The initiator of
the first major ballot explained in his interview that "I
probably invented the form, but I was modeling it on paper formats."
In fact, he sent the ballot out in paper and electronic media,
because it was formatted with text editing commands that some
electronic mail systems could not translate. Thus the ballot questionnaire
is clearly related to previously existing forms of voting. Such
paper-based ballots are not, however, commonly used in non-electronic,
project communication in organizations. In face-to-face meetings,
emerging consensus might readily be tested by informal means (summarizing
a position and asking if everyone agrees, or at most, asking for
a show of hands), and paper ballots are more often used in more
formal settings or for more formal tasks (e.g., electing officers
in an organization). [9]Since consensus in the group was
harder to
gather by informal, nonverbal and oral means, a more formal mechanism
was appropriated from another medium.
The set of genres presented above and the changing pattern of
genre enactment by the participants can be usefully analyzed in
terms of the notion of genre repertoire, a key concept that emerged
from this study. Just as understanding a symphony orchestra's
repertoire of musical pieces sheds light on the orchestra's
range, capability, and character, understanding the composition
of a community's genre repertoire can provide valuable
information about the scope and richness of its communication,
and the nature of its activities and interactions.
Applying the repertoire concept to groups and communities has
parallels in the organizational and rhetorical literatures. For
example, in the organizational literature Gersick and Hackman
(1990) are interested in the set of habitual routines that constitute
a group's behavioral repertoire, March and Simon (1958)
refer to the performance programs an organization possesses, and
Clark and Staunton (1989) define an organization's structural
repertoire as the set of typical mechanisms and ideologies from
which particular structural responses are selected. In the rhetorical
and socio-linguistic literature, Platt and Platt (1975) suggest
that the range of linguistic varieties employed by a discourse
community constitutes its speech repertoire, Bakhtin (1986) notes
that a repertoire of speech genres is associated with a given
sphere of activity, and Devitt (1991) explores the genre set of
a professional community. We will draw on this literature to interpret
our findings so as to yield more general insights than may be
available from a single study (Corbin and Strauss, 1990).
An in-depth examination of a genre repertoire explores the nature
and source of genres that are recognized and accepted by a community
of practice as legitimate forms of working and interacting, and
helps to explain when, how, and why established norms and practices
shift over time. For example, Berkenkotter and Huckin (1993) have
argued that in academic communities, genres of academic writing
serve to enact and reflect the epistemological, ontological, and
ideological assumptions of particular disciplines. They note that
in such communities, "Knowledge production is carried out
and codified largely through generic forms of writing: lab reports,
working papers, reviews, grant proposals, technical reports, conference
papers, journal articles, monographs, and so forth. ... [Genres
thus] package information in ways that conform to [the community's]
norms, values, and ideology" (p. 476).
In organizations, groups, and professional communities, genre
repertoires similarly reflect and shape their members'
values, expectations, and actions. For example, an organization
that issues many instances of documentary genres such as memos,
reports, and bulletins and that conducts face-to-face meetings
following Roberts' rules of order reveals a different set
of political values and social norms than an organization that
relies on frequent open-ended meetings, face-to-face conversations,
informal notes, and only occasional memos and reports. Each genre
repertoire defines a different set of interaction norms and work
practices, and each serves to define a different kind of community.
As Bazerman and Paradis (1991:7) have observed, "communities
establish themselves as distinctive through their discourse practices."
In her study of the genre set of the tax accounting profession,
Devitt (1991: 340) argues that "In examining the genre set
of a community, we are examining the community's situations,
its recurring activities and relationships. The genre set accomplishes
its work."
When members of a community draw on the community's genre
repertoire, they constitute the nature of that community while
also reaffirming their status as community members. In this sense
communities emerge out of and are shaped by their members'
practices (Brown and Duguid, 1991). Where members of a community
introduce new genres into the repertoire or deviate from the established
genres--whether inadvertently or deliberately--they may shift
the nature of the community's interactions and work practices,
hence changing how community members communicate and negotiate
meaning, how they take action and produce outcomes, and how they
define and understand the nature of their community.
The following sections examine three different aspects of a community's
genre repertoire, first in the context of the project findings
and then more generally:
- its nature, i.e., what do the genres composing the genre
repertoire tell us about the work practices and interaction norms
of the community;
- its establishment, i.e., how and why do community members
initially enact the set of genres that they will use to work and
interact;
- its change, i.e., how and why does the repertoire of
genres initially established in a community change over time,
both in terms of the frequency with which genres are used and
in terms of the types of genres themselves.
The set of genres that community members use (and don't use) to
conduct their interaction reveals a great deal about the nature
of that community, its interaction norms and work practices. We
found that the group's electronic genre repertoire was
composed of four genres--memo, proposal, ballot, and dialogue--generated
and distributed within electronic mail on a regular basis. [10]In
addition, two other genres were clearly important parts of the
group's non-electronic repertoire: the manual and its six
drafts (generated on paper, and distributed via the postal system,
though also available in electronic form); and the formal face-to-face
meeting, executed twice. We can learn more about the group and
its activities, by examining this set of genres from the perspectives
of task specificity and mode of interaction,
In the electronic repertoire, the proposal, ballot, and manual
drafts are task-specific genres, enacted as needed for specific
activities. In contrast, the memo and dialogue are not tied to
specific tasks, but are invoked for a wide range of communicative
purposes, as is the face-to-face meeting genre to a lesser extent.
The group's genre repertoire thus included both task-specific
and more abstract types of genres. Task-related genres in the
repertoire of a group reveal the specific tasks and ways of approaching
those tasks that make up the group's work practices and
norms. In this case, proposal, ballot, and manual were central
to the group's purpose. A completed and published manual accepted
by all key LISP implementations was the ultimate goal of the group.
The manual drafts published episodically during the project represented
the content of the work and progress towards that goal. The proposal,
which suggested ways of handling specific aspects of the language,
and the ballot, which allowed the group to test for consensus
around such proposals, were specific mechanisms for achieving
that goal. These specific mechanisms reveal a group that depended
on informal individual proposals from a wide range of group members,
but that employed a more formal mechanism, the ballot, to assess
level of agreement and establish decisions as final when it was
high.
Ballots were initiated by only two group members: the individual
who initially undertook to coordinate and compile the manual,
and another individual who stepped in to help at a point relatively
late in the project (an incident described below). The fact that
proposals came from many individuals but the critical ballot events
were initiated and coordinated by only two members of the group
also reveals the relative influence and power afforded to particular
individuals in the project. While interviewees insisted that the
project was accomplished by a group of peers, the coordinator
(and later the individual who helped him move the process forward)
clearly structured the process by framing the questions, interpreting
the issues, and closing the debate. Interviews revealed that the
coordinator was accorded that status in part for his ability to
refrain from using this power to push his own beliefs, in part
out of respect for his technical ability, and in part because
he had already worked on the manual for one of the LISP dialects
and was willing to take on that responsibility for Common LISP.
The genre repertoire thus provides information about a community's
power structures because it sheds light on members' influence
as they use genres to accomplish work.
The absence of another common task-specific genre in the group's
repertoire (electronic or otherwise) provides information about
the group's relationship to outside constituencies. If
this project had been explicitly funded and authorized (rather
than simply encouraged) by DARPA, the group would probably have
had to submit a series of progress reports and a final report.
The project as a whole, however, was documented in a published
manual, rather than in formal reports. Moreover, the report genre,
an extended and analytic documentation of a subject or situation,
was not consistent with the messages, which tended to be short
and rapid exchanges. [11]The absence of formal reports,
along with
the presence of the manual, proposal, and ballot, reveal that
the group felt itself answerable primarily to its members and
the broader community of practice (LISP designers and implementors),
rather than to an external funding institution (DARPA).
The more abstract genres that are not associated with specific
tasks provide insights into the interaction norms of a group.
In this case, the absence of available genres such as the
letter and the note provides clues about what kinds of interaction
were not valued or central to the group's activities, while
the presence of memo, dialogue, and meeting provides clues
about what kinds of interaction were important to members.
Because the group included members from various organizations,
we looked for something resembling the business letter
genre, traditionally used to communicate across organizational
boundaries. In spite of a definition that was as loose as possible
without rendering the genre unrecognizable or undifferentiable
from memo or note, [12]we found only four examples
(0.3%) in the entire
data set. In interviews, respondents indicated that they did not
distinguish their local (intra-organizational) electronic mail
messages from those used to communicate with their colleagues
in other organizations. As a participant noted, "I saw them
all just as colleagues." Given the informality of the group,
we also looked for the least formal genre of written organizational
communication: the note. A note is used to communicate
briefly, informally, and relatively personally, and is typically
considered ephemeral rather than documentary. Only three (0.2%)
of the messages fit our definition of note. [13]Openings,
which appeared
in only 3% of the messages, were a major factor limiting the note
genre. As one participant said in an interview, using openings
in CL messages "would be like saying hello all the time during
a conversation." It appears that in this community--where
professional ties were strong and where informality was the norm--and
for this type of work--extended, complex, and documented negotiations
among peers--letters and notes were not seen as appropriate or
effective types of communication.
The participants apparently perceived themselves as sending memos
to a group of people or taking part in an ongoing group dialogue.
The heavily used abstract genres, memo and dialogue, reveal the
group's drawing on but moving beyond traditional genres. One of
these, memo, draws on a traditional, non-electronic genre of written
organizational communication. While recognizable as such, the
electronic memos also varied from the traditional memo in that
they were often less formal in language and sometimes less complete,
referring to the readers' knowledge of immediately preceding
messages. The other abstract genre, dialogue, is not part of the
traditional repertoire of written communication in organizations,
but seems to draw on oral conversation as a model.
This oral influence raises a broader question of mode (written
versus oral) in the genre repertoire. Because messages in the
electronic mail medium are written, we initially sought traditional
genres of written communication in the group (i.e., business letter,
memo, note, and report). As one participant stated in his interview,
however, electronic mail shares characteristics of oral and written
communication:
Electronic mail feels halfway between writing and
speaking. . . . One thinks of having a conversation. It feels
like interaction--like speech--interactive and informal. [It also
feels] like writing where you have the opportunity to think about
the message and edit it.
This influence of the oral mode of interaction on genres in electronic
media is an interesting one that deserves further examination.
Some researchers who have closely examined language use in
electronic media (Murray, 1985, 1988; Ferrara, Brunner, and Whittemore,
1991) have suggested that computer-mediated communication, particularly
on-line, synchronous communication, is heavily influenced by oral
use of language. Similarly, in a closer examination of the language
of the messages in general, reported elsewhere (Yates and Orlikowski,
1993), we found ample evidence of oral as well as written patterns
of language.[14]
The presence of more abstract genres that reflect a strong oral
and dialogic influence in a community's electronic genre
repertoire likely reflects in part certain capabilities of electronic
media (speed and flexibility) that facilitate conversational usage.
This suggests that electronic media may provide an opportunity
for members of a community relying largely on written communication
for interaction to recapture some of the conversational nature
of speech through the enactment of written genres such as dialogue.
As more communities adopt electronic mail as their primary medium
for work and interaction, and as members gain experience in this
new communication technology, we may expect to see a similar trend
of increased orality in the composition of their genre repertoire,
moderated, of course, by contextual factors such as community
or organizational norms and specific task demands such as requirements
for documentation. For example, we might hypothesize that the
genre repertoires of communities that have relatively hierarchical
structures and formal interaction norms will draw on and use with
greater frequency genres influenced by the written mode, whether
they are actually conveyed on paper, via electronic mail, or orally.
Conversely, the genre repertoires of relatively informal, nonhierarchical
communities are likely to show a relatively greater influence
of the oral mode. The broader consequences of such changes are
difficult to assess without further empirical study, but we suggest
that if greater dialogical interaction in organizations lessens
the reliance on formal, routine, or bureaucratic procedures, it
might facilitate more participation and flexibility in work practices.
Genre Repertoire: Establishment
The evidence presented in the section above and depicted in Figure
1, indicates that from the beginning of the project, the memo,
dialogue, and proposal genres were being drawn on by the project
participants. Our interviews indicate that no explicit discussion
of genre rules or interaction norms took place at the start of
the project. The participants appear to have initially and implicitly
imported into the project their knowledge of how
they had worked and interacted in other contexts. All the participants
were active members of the artificial intelligence computer science
community, and were also computer language designers. Many of
them had trained together in two institutions -- MIT and Stanford
-- and hence shared background knowledge, experiences, and cognitive
schemas, including knowledge of the project's task (designing
computer languages), its domain (LISP dialects), and its process
(norms about language design and use of electronic mail). Thus
they were able to introduce -- without apparent discussion or
dissent -- a set of interaction rules and formats based on their
shared a priori assumptions about how their community of
practice communicates about and works on matters such as language
design. This knowledge was then exhibited (and reinforced) through
their enactment of the memo, proposal and dialogue genres.
This finding of genre importation is also exhibited in the participants'
use of the manual genre. They designated the existing manual for
one of the dialects, SpiceLISP, as the first draft which they
would work from and modify to achieve the final manual. As a key
participant recalled:
Here, [we] were working on SpiceLISP, and [the coordinator]
was drafting the manual for SpiceLISP. Then when we got involved
in Common LISP, we just transferred parts of the manual we were
already working on to get the Common LISP effort going.
Thus this previous manual served as a genre template for the final
manual. Although the nature of the LISP language was up for debate,
the structure and form of the manual genre were not.
The pattern of importation corresponds to existing research on
the formation of norms within groups. Bettenhausen and Murnighan
(1985, 1991), for example, showed that "members of a new
group import norms they held as members of different groups in
similar, previous situations" (1991:20). Likewise, Gersick
and Hackman (1990) found that early interaction rules and resources
are initially formed through members' prior experiences
and exposure to certain cultural norms. Initially, the set of
norms and rules that members will use to accomplish their actions
is often established quite implicitly. Gersick and Hackman (1990:75-76)
note that in the early stages of a group's life when the
members "have common previous task experiences, or share
a common set of subcultural norms," they "may simply
proceed to do what everyone knows should be done, and a pattern
of habitual behavior may be established without any explicit thought."
For example, a newly formed task force or committee may decide
at the outset, with little debate, to meet regularly in weekly,
one-hour, face-to-face meetings, and to distribute minutes and
report drafts on paper via inter-departmental mail. These decisions
are shaped by a number of factors including institutional procedures,
task exigencies, and available media, but they are also and strongly
influenced by members' shared expectations of how communication
takes place in committees. These expectations comprise genre knowledge
which is often based on members' prior experiences in similar
situations, and their sensibilities about what communicative actions
would be appropriate for a committee such as theirs.
The tendency to invoke the familiar when faced with a new situation
is particularly wide-spread, appearing in cognitive sociology
(Cicourel, 1974; Goffman, 1974) and organizational studies (Van
Maanen, 1984; Weick, 1979). For example, Van Maanen (1984:238),
examining organizational socialization, notes that "Given
a degree of similarity between an old and a new activity, the
new will be approached in the much the same way as the old."
Likewise, in the context of technology implementation, new technologies
are often assimilated under previous patterns of practice and
interpretation (Barley, 1988). For example, Orlikowski and Gash
(1994) show how users of a new computer conferencing system attempted
to make sense of it in terms of more familiar technologies such
as fax, voice-mail, and spreadsheets.
Extrapolating from our study and the literature just cited, we
can suggest that to the extent that members of newly formed groups
share background, experiences, and assumptions, and are undertaking
familiar types of tasks, they are initially likely to import genres
they have used in the past, implicitly and without extensive reflection.
If, on the other hand, group members come from diverse backgrounds
and experiences, more reflection and negotiation are likely to
be required to establish the new group's genre repertoire
and hence its modes of work and interaction. In this case, the
initial genre repertoire may take longer to form.
Above we saw how the establishment of a genre repertoire is relatively
conservative -- preserving the familiar norms and practices in
the context of a new group. Over time, however, the original genre
repertoire may change as the group's activities change
and as people's experiences in the group and with the available
media grow. Because genre use is a process of structuring, it
is always open to change, whether inadvertent or deliberate. Changes
in the genre repertoire can occur through changes in composition
(that is, the addition of new genres, modification of existing
genres, and deletion of obsolete genres) and changes in use (that
is, changes in the frequency with which different genres are enacted
over time).
The primary change in composition of the genre repertoire
was the addition of the ballot genre during the course of the
project. This genre was introduced by the coordinator in period
4, and was thereafter invoked intermittently (a total of six times)
as required by the status of the project. The ballot served as
an efficient mechanism for facilitating the rapid and written
polling of members so that the key participants could determine
whether there was agreement among the participants on a set of
issues. Introduction of the ballot genre thus appears to have
been triggered specifically by a project-related requirement to
assess the level of consensus.
Clark and Staunton (1990:188) suggest that organizational repertoires
may be changed by participants through two different mechanisms
-- what they term "custom" and "reflective agency."
Custom refers to change that occurs unintendedly in the course
of routine structuring. In this type of change, the main intention
of participants is to reproduce past custom, but through inadvertent
slippage or improvisation alterations are introduced. Reflective
agency refers to deliberate action by participants to observe,
revise, and modify their established actions. In this type of
change, participants actively choose to adopt new routines or
alter old ones, either by experimenting through trial and error,
by actively searching for alternative routines, or by learning
from others (Levitt and March, 1988).
The addition of the ballot genre to the genre repertoire was accomplished
through the reflective agency of one participant (the project
coordinator), and the subsequent acceptance and use by other participants,
including members who responded to the ballots and the member
who stepped in to help the coordinator later in the project. In
his interview, this participant suggested that he borrowed the
ballot conventions from the paper ballots he had experienced in
other contexts. Here again, we see a familiar template established
in one medium being transferred into a new medium. Unlike the
initial establishment of the genre repertoire where the transfer
of genres was largely implicit and unreflective, this transfer
of a familiar genre into a genre repertoire some time after its
establishment was clearly the result of deliberate and reflective
agency.
Because the presence or absence of certain genre types in a community's
repertoire does not tell us how frequently they are being used,
we must also analyze changes in the use of a genre repertoire.
For example, the genre repertoire of a committee may include memos,
reports, and face-to-face meetings. Without knowing that the face-to-face
meeting genre is invoked every week, memos once a month, and reports
every quarter, knowledge of the repertoire's composition
alone cannot provide much insight into the nature of the committee's
interactions and the rhythm of its work.
In the project, use of the genre repertoire changed noticeably
over the 25 months of the project, and we will use both Figures
1 and 6 to interpret these usage changes over time. Figure 6,
which shows the monthly use of genres in the project (in absolute,
not relative, terms), reveals three distinct episodes in the project
around which the changes in genre usage cluster. The first increase
in usage of the memo, dialogue and proposal genres followed three
project events: (i) the release of the first draft of the manual
-- the Swiss Cheese edition (subtitled "Full of Holes---Very
Drafty") -- in August 1981; (ii) the face-to-face meeting
in November 1981, at which a number of basic language decisions
were made, and (iii) the release of the second draft of the manual
-- the Flat Iron edition ("Still a Few Odd Wrinkles
Left") -- in February 1982. This second draft sparked a
major discussion among the participants (evident in the rise of
memo and dialogue genres in March 1982) having to do with the
treatment of a particular symbol ("NIL") in the language.
The participants appeared to be significantly divided on this
issue, and the debate was only resolved after a number of key
players agreed to compromise their positions. This disruptive
incident led to a drop-off in project activity for a few months,
as one of the participants recalled:
The issue of whether NIL is a symbol was one of the
most divisive and religious of issues in the LISP community. In
some cases significant implementation decisions hinged on the
answer to that question. ... [After a few of us compromised] the
list went dead ... decompression from this debate was the essential
cause.
After very little activity on the project from April to June,
the action picked up again with three project events -- the release
of the latest manual draft (in July 1982), a face-to-face meeting
(in August 1982), and a series of three ballots (in September,
October, and November 1982), one of which was major. A face-to-face
meeting rather than an electronic ballot was enacted because the
timing coincided with a professional conference attended by most
of the core participants, as evident in this message sent by the
coordinator in early July 1982:
Inasmuch as lots of LISP people will be in Pittsburgh
the week of the LISP and AAAI conferences, it has been suggested
that another Common LISP meeting be held at CMU on Saturday August
22, 1982. Preparatory to that I will strive mightily to get draft
copies of the Common LISP manual with all the latest revisions
to people as soon as possible, along with a summary of outstanding
issues that might be resolved.
The manual mentioned in this message was released at the end of
July, and it constituted the third draft of the manual -- the
Colander edition ("Even More Holes Than Before---But
They're Smaller!"). The manual draft, meeting and
three ballots generated a series of discussions, new proposals,
and agreements on unresolved issues. This second episode of activity
culminated with the release of the fourth draft of the manual
-- the Laser edition ("Supposed To Be Completely Coherent")
in late November 1982.
In December 1982 the project coordinator changed jobs, occasioning
a drop-off in project activity from late December 1982 through
April 1983. As he indicated in our interview, "I was starting
a new job, so there was a real drop off in my participation. I
was tired." As coordinator of the manual, he had the responsibility
for issuing the next draft of the manual, and a decline in his
participation and attention meant a decline in activity for the
whole group. For those participants who had software products
(in the form of LISP implementations) depending on the final definition
of the language, this delay became increasingly problematic as
time passed. In May, one such participant was sufficiently frustrated
to take action. He contacted the coordinator and offered to share
the responsibility for completing the manual. As he recalled:
Time was running out, and we were hanging from our
fingertips. ... That's when I became the moderator even
though [the coordinator] kept responsibility for the manual. I
was moving the discussion process forward.
This decision to share responsibility as a way of moving the process
forward was announced to the rest of the group in this message
in May 1983 by the new moderator:
For reasons too complicated to discuss here, progress
on the Common Lisp Manual has been rather slow lately. [The coordinator]
and I have discussed how to fix this, and we have decided that
the best way to converge quickly is for him to concentrate on
editing in the relatively non-controversial things and those items
on which decisions have been reached, and for me to orchestrate
the arpanet-intensive process of reaching some sort of consensus
(or at least a decision) on those issues that still require some
debate.
This new division of labor spawned increased activity in the project,
with all four of the genres affected. This increased activity
was associated with three ballots issued by the new moderator
at the end of May and in early June, all aiming towards completion
by Flag Day (June 14). This date was designated as the
final date for accepting changes to the language in a message
sent by the coordinator on June 9, 1983. He wrote:
The Great Mail Blizzard of '83 appears to have
subsided, and the outstanding issues, nasty and otherwise, appear
to be suitably dealt with. We have to choose a cutoff date, and
now seems to be a good time. I propose to give yet another meaning
to "Flag Day" ... After that point [23:59 on June
14, 1983] I propose to terminate "elective" changes
to the Common LISP manual.
This increased communicative activity was reflected in the changes
that were integrated into the fifth draft of the manual -- the
Excelsior edition ("Suitable For Framing Or Wrapping
Fish!") -- released in July 1983. This edition was sent
out, as the coordinator explained in a message, "for the
purpose of proofreading and implementation," and he sought
"feedback only on typographical errors, outright errors or
lies, and necessary improvements to the presentation."
Activity in the project did not end with Flag Day 1983; amendments,
corrections, and final proposals dribbled in over the next few
months. No more ballots were initiated, however, and use of memo,
proposal, and dialogue dropped off, with some slight increases
as a number of participants engaged in last-minute debates about
the implications of certain decisions. This episode culminated
in the release of the sixth, and final, draft of the manual --
the Mary Poppins edition ("Practically Perfect In
Every Way") -- at the end of November 1983.
While changes in use of the genre repertoire cluster in distinct
episodes, these episodes seem to be initiated and terminated by
specific happenings in the project (see Figure 1). Such associations
resonate with the findings of Gersick's (1994) study of
a start-up company, in which she identified two different mechanisms
that seemed to trigger changes in participants' attention
and actions -- temporal pacing and event-based pacing. Temporal
pacing generates a predictably-timed alternation of attention
between momentum and change, while event-based pacing regulates
attention through the recognition of specific events. These two
mechanisms are useful analytic devices for attempting to identify
when and why participants initiate changes in their attention
and actions.
Gersick (1994:36-37) argues that temporal pacing may be more prevalent
when there is a deadline, when participants have some control
over their own actions, and when the specification of the final
outcome is at least partly indeterminate. While the second of
these applies to the participants in the sense that they were
all volunteers on the project, and hence participated largely
on their own terms, the first and third characteristics do not.
The project did not have a predetermined deadline, and the participants
knew quite clearly what the final outcome had to achieve, even
though the specific details and features had to be negotiated.
Although temporal pacing to specific, periodic deadlines did not
seem to account for most of the changes in use of the genre repertoire,
there were three time-related pressures on the project that clearly
influenced genre usage and that seem related to Gersick's
notion of temporal pacing. The first was the influence of various
LISP implementation groups whose software development activities
critically depended on the manual being completed. These product
development efforts were typically long and expensive, and involved
multiple people including external vendors; as a result, there
was much pressure from these quarters to complete the project
expeditiously. This influence can be seen in the efforts of one
participant (responsible for one of the LISP implementation efforts)
to advance the project by assuming the role of moderator in May
1983. This pressure thus triggered a transition in project activity
from a phase of very low genre use (January - April 1983) to one
of high genre use (May 1983) with the usage of all four genres
increasing significantly.
The second temporal influence was the designation of Flag Day,
1983 as the final date for submitting substantive changes to the
manual. Until this point the debate about language features had
ebbed and flowed without any specific endpoint. Flag Day came
to represent a significant milestone in the project, and its passage
occasioned a marked transition in genre usage from high use of
all four genres (May - June 1983) to almost none or much lower
genre use (July - August 1983). The third temporal influence is
evident in the final weeks of the project, when the memo, dialogue,
and proposal genres all experienced a slight increase in use as
well as a change in focus and content. This recognition of the
end of the project appears to invoke two shifts in attention and
action. First was a final burst of activity to achieve closure
on some outstanding issues and to complete all the work. Second
was a change in genre content that reflected participants'
recognition that the project was winding down and that it was
time to shift gears--cognitively and communicatively--to begin
discussing LISP implementations and next versions of the manual.
Event-based pacing, the second of Gersick's triggers of
change, is more likely under conditions when there is more certainty
about what is required for success, when participants have less
control over the speed and timing of events, and when there is
less emphasis on deadlines than on achieving specific outcomes
(pp. 36-37). The first and last of these characterizes the participants
quite well. They knew what was required to complete the manual,
and they knew they had to get this job done (to provide the basis
for other LISP projects), however long it took them. The second
characteristic applies in the sense that these participants were
working on the project in a largely part-time capacity. The exigencies
of their regular jobs and work responsibilities would have impinged
on their participation in many and often unpredictable ways. For
example, the coordinator's job change in December 1982
triggered a significant drop-off in project activity (from January
to April 1983) that was only reversed with the intervention of
another participant reacting to the pressure of his product development
schedule. The other events shown in Figure 6 and described above
-- two meetings, six ballots, and six manual editions -- are clearly
associated with either increases or decreases in genre usage.
The meetings and ballots are triggered by the accumulation of
issues that need to be voted on and resolved (either via oral
or electronic ballot). The manual editions are accounts of the
work done on the project to date, and are produced as major issues
are resolved and incorporated into text.
Figure 1, which shows the relative change in genre usage by period,
reveals much broader trends than are visible through the more
closely-grained analysis of Figure 6. In particular, this figure
suggests that changes in the frequency of use of the abstract
genres, memo and dialogue, appear to be related
-- not only to the events detected in Figure 6 -- but also to
converging interaction norms and increasing experience with the
medium and the project. That is, use of the dialogue genre gently
increased throughout the project, while that of memo declined
sporadically. In contrast to the use of the genre repertoire in
the initial periods of the project -- where use of the monologic
memo genre dominated the conversational dialogue genre -- the
final four periods of the project reflect, if not a complete reversal,
than a substantially altered pattern of repertoire use. Both in
periods 6 and 9, participants drew more on the dialogical than
the monological genre.
This change in repertoire use seems to reflect some convergence
towards project norms. Over the course of the project, the participants
became increasingly likely to take advantage of the medium's
facility for embedding messages and to enact the dialogue genre,
rather than merely to issue their own stand-alone messages. They
further developed a characteristic form of embedding messages
that emphasized efficiency and convenience for the reader -- retaining
only the salient pieces of the embedded message. The increased
use of the dialogue genre over time suggests that the participants
came to share an understanding of dialogue as a more efficient
and effective means for interacting than memos, as it supports
indexicality, maintains discussion threads, and facilitates a
more conversational tone to the deliberations. Bettenhausen and
Murnighan (1985), for example, show that the shared experiences
of a group lead members to develop a "common definition of
appropriate group behavior," which then forms the basis
of expectations about future interactions. Similarly, we might
suggest that as participants become more cognizant -- whether
discursively or tacitly -- of the genre norms of their community
-- they will increasingly draw on those norms in their work and
interaction, thus further reinforcing a convergence of genre norms
in the community.
Such convergence and reinforcement reflects the tendency within
communities of practice or organizations towards institutionalization
that results in the habitual enactment of particular behavioral
routines (Zucker, 1977). A similar process of institutionalization
occurs around genre norms. As members interact and perform work
through enacting genres, their shared understandings, experiences,
and expectations about how work should be accomplished and how
interaction should take place shape become stabilized, normalized,
and taken for granted. Once institutionalized in this way, the
genres constituting a community's genre repertoire serve
as behavioral and interpretive templates for the community (Barley,
1988).
We began this study as an attempt to observe genre use and change
over time in an electronic medium. The emergence of the notion
of genre repertoire and our findings about the group's
electronic genre repertoire ultimately shed light not simply on
the electronic medium, but on the operation of task-based groups
in general, consequently broadening the implications of the study.
In fact, the concept of genre repertoire offers organizational
research a powerful way of understanding work practices and interaction
norms, whatever the communication media. While this single study
certainly cannot be taken as definitive, it has initiated a process
of theory generation around this concept. By linking our observations
in this case to some of the organizational and rhetorical literature,
we have been able to suggest some hypotheses about the nature,
establishment, and change of a community's genre repertoire.
As a fundamental premise, we suggest that the genre repertoire
of a group of knowledge workers reflects and embodies its work
practices and interaction norms. Bazerman (1988:182) notes that
the features of a community's discourse are a major aspect
of its communal activities, particularly where these activities
are largely oriented towards producing information. Examining
the changing genre repertoire of such a community, then, is not
merely an exercise in classifying discourse or communication types.
Rather it is a way of understanding the nature of the community
and the social action it engages in (Miller, 1984).
We also suggest that when a group, organization, or community
is formed, its members come to some understanding--whether tacitly
or explicitly--about the set of genres and media that they will
use to interact as a collectivity. As members act on this initial
understanding, they produce a structured pattern of social interactions,
which defines and shapes the initial social structure of their
community. Over time, with reinforcement, this pattern becomes
increasingly established, taken for granted, and identified as
the way the community works and interacts.
Despite the conservative influence of institutionalized genre
repertoires, we should keep in mind that they can and do change
over time and with changing circumstances. Genres, while highly
influential, do not necessarily determine the particular ways
in which members work and interact. Because the enactment of genres
occurs through a process of structuring (Giddens, 1984), members
are always negotiating, interpreting and improvising in ways that
may allow for "slippage between institutional templates and
the actualities of daily life" (Barley, 1988: 51). As reflective
agents, members respond to time pressures, project events, task
demands, media capabilities, and converging community norms by
changing their behavior. Such action may introduce new norms and
forms of working and interacting, which over time and through
diffusion and reinforcement may change the genre repertoire of
the community.
We introduced this paper by suggesting that existing organizational
literature has not systematically addressed the relationship between
new communication technologies and changes in work and interaction.
We believe that the concept of genre repertoire developed here
and the implications we have begun to draw about its use and effects,
provide a solid conceptual basis from which to understand how
and why work and interaction will be mediated and possibly changed
by the introduction of new communication technologies.
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[2] As described in Odell, Goswami, and Herrington (1983),
this technique is based on a previous analysis of text written by the
interviewees. It involves showing interviewees specific passages along with
one
or more variations, and then asking them to discuss their reasons for using the
chosen alternative rather than other options. We did not pose alternatives in
our interviews, but simply inquired about message samples and patterns of
use.
[3] We did not code for recurrent situation
because that
dimension involves elements outside of the message itself (social context and
history); we depended on interviews to understand this aspect of genre use. We
also did not code for substance because the group's project provided
consistency on this dimension.
[4] Our use of secondary rather than primary
purpose
did not pose a significant problem for our genre analyses. Coding multiple
purposes allowed genre overlap only for messages classified as proposals
(discussed below). It is not surprising that sarcasm posed problems for coder
reliability, since it often depended on intimate knowledge of LISP and the
community. In fact, in a few messages participants displayed some confusion
about whether a particular proposal was made seriously or sarcastically.
[5] The relatively small numbers precluded examining the
trends for each participant.
[6] This feature, not available in all electronic mail
systems but available to the core participants, is not automatically invoked
when replying to a message, but has to be explicitly selected.
[7] We examined and eliminated one possible explanation
of
the rise: that over time there were more messages that could be embedded.
Qualitative analysis showed that dialogue messages were almost always in
response to the most recent messages.
[8] There were more responses from peripheral players
which
were eliminated when we restricted the data set to core participants.
[9] Interestingly, more recent electronic media for
facilitating face-to-face meetings have embedded other variants of paper-based
balloting or straw polls (Nunamaker et al., 1991; Poole and DeSanctis, 1992).
[10] We did not have access to private e-mail messages
between specific participants, nor to other interactions such as telephone
conversations and chance encounters at professional meetings or hallway
corridors.
[11] To check that the report genre was indeed absent from
the electronic archive, we searched for the presence of a structural indicator
characteristic of the report--the main heading. This feature appeared in only
five (0.4%) of the messages, none of which corresponded to the report genre on
textual inspection.
[12] The loosest variant of the business letter was defined
as having opening, signoff, no heading, no embedded message, no graphical
elements, no nonstandard elements, no asides to individuals, and no informal
language.
[13] The note was defined as having a greeting, sign-off,
no
subject line, no heading, no embedded message, and no personal aside.
[14] Another aspect of the group's language in electronic
mail reported in (Yates and Orlikowski, 1993) was the relative absence of what
has come to be known as "flaming" (i.e., emotional outbursts, name-calling,
and
sarcastic or obscene language) (Sproull and Kiesler, 1986). In interviews,
participants cited two primary reasons for the relatively low level of flaming:
familiarity with other participants and task demands. One participant said,
"Peer pressure prompts people to tone down their messages," while another
noted
"There was a reason to be polite. We had a job to do."
Date: Monday, 26 July 1982, 14:07-EDT
I would like to state for the record that either BOOLE should be strictly
Date: 27 April 1983 15:30-EDT
The T dialect has a family of special forms called things like CASE, SELECT,
etc.
Is this what you're looking for?
Date: Monday, 8 November 1982 21:40-EST
(2) To me, the purpose of the asterisks is to flag those variables that
Hmm, that's an interesting and novel idea. We handle that by having
Date: Mon, 30 May 1983 02:18-EDT
Memorial Day Ballot:
I was going to send these out in smaller doses, but a bunch of issues built up
Recommendations in square brackets are by SF.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. It is proposed that we eliminate PARSE-NUMBER from the manual.
[I am strongly in favor of this. This function is hard to document properly,
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. LOOP should create a BLOCK NIL around the TAGBODY, so that RETURN
[I am strongly in favor. If LOOP doesn't do this, the user will almost always
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Define GET-INTERNAL-TIME to get some implementation-dependent
form
[I am strongly in favor.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...
1The numbers in this column do not add up to 100 percent because not all the messages in the archive were uniquely classified
as genres of communication. Further, some of the messages were not uniquely classified, and overlapped with some of the other genres.
2This includes 6 Ballot Forms, 1 Ballot Form amendment, 42 Ballot Responses, and 6 Ballot Responses. Additional responses
to
each ballot were eliminated from our data set when peripheral participants were eliminated.
(italicized cells indicate event occurred beyond scope of electronic archive)
Footnotes
[1] All e-mail messages that included
the distribution list in the TO or CC field were sent to all individuals
participating in the project and were automatically archived. While some
one-to-one messaging also took place among the participants (which the
participants we interviewed referred to as "back channel" communication),
only
a handful of these messages made it into the official project archive and hence
this study.
TABLES AND FIGURES
Figure 2: Example of Memo
From: DW
Subject: Re: Boole
To: Common-Lisp at SU-AI
limited to three arguments, or it should work as it does in Maclisp (any
number of arguments, left-associative). It is unacceptable for it to do
anything other than these two things, on the grounds that adding new
arguments incompatible with Maclisp cannot possibly be so worthwhile
that it is worth introducing the incompatibility. As to which of these
two things it does, I'll be equally happy with either.
Figure 3: Example of Common LISP Proposal
From: KP
To:
Cc: Common-Lisp @ SU-AI
and a related family called XCASE, XSELECT, etc. meaning
"exhaustive". I
suggest that Common-Lisp could adopt a similar convention.
(XSELECTQ FOO .. forms ..)
would be like
(SELECTQ FOO .. forms .. (OTHERWISE .. error ..))
Figure 4: Example of Dialogue
From:
To: SF
Cc: common-lisp at SU-AI
Subject: asterisks around variables
In-reply-to: The message of 8 Nov 1982 20:56-EST from SF
Date: Monday, 8 November 1982 20:56-EST
From: SF
are "property of Lisp" so that the user doesn't accidentally
blunder into them.
DEFVAR complain if you define the same variable in more than one file,
and by using packages to decrease the likelihood of that. The asterisks are
not there to distinguish the system's variables from the user's variables.
My philosophy is "the fewer magic distinctions between the system and
the user the better; anything the system can do the user should be able to
understand and to change."
Figure 5: Example of Ballot Form (excerpt)
From: SF
To: common-lisp@su-ai
Subject: Memorial Day Ballot
and I decided that a real ballot would be easier. A few more issues will be
sent out for consideration as soon as we have come up with some coherent
proposals and analyses. Please reply by Wednesday afternoon to SF and/or
Common LISP.
hard to implement in its full generality, and useless. Most of what this
function does can be handled simply by calling READ on the string. Other
cases, such as Teco-like integer prefixes, can easily be handled by application-
specific user functions to scan a string for the first non-digit, etc.]
works.
have to, and any future complex LOOP package would have to create such
blocks as well.]
of runtime. Add a second function, GET-REAL-TIME that returns some
measure
of elapsed real time in the same internal-time format. On some machines,
especially personal ones, these times will be identical, and implementations may
not be able to supply one or the other, but where both are available (as on the
Vax), there are legitimate needs for both.
Table 1: Definition, Reliability, and Distribution of Coding Categories in Archive (N=1332)
Coding Categories
Definitions of Coding Categories
Reliability
(Cohen's [[kappa]])N
%
Audience Indicator:
Number of Recipients Number of receivers to whom message sent 1.00
None Indicated
No information in "To:" field of message
8 0.6%
One Named Recipient
One individual named in message "To:" field
641 48.1%
Many Named Recipients
Multiple individuals named in message "To:" field
86 6.5%
Distribution List
A distribution list named in message "To:" field
597 44.8%
Purpose Indicators:
Primary Purpose Primary purpose of message [only one coded] 0.68
FYI
Informational message ("For Your Information")
204 15.3%
Meta-comment
Comment on group process or use of the medium
25 1.9%
Proposal
Proposed rule, feature, or convention for CL
55 4.1%
Question
Request for information, clarification, or elaboration
44 3.3%
Response
Reply to previous message or messages
972 73.0%
Other
Residual category (e.g., ballots, thanks, apology)
32 2.4%
Secondary Purpose Secondary purpose of message [more than one coded]
FYI
Informational message ("For Your Information")
0.85 610 45.8%
Meta-comment
Comment on group process or use of the medium
0.91 128 9.6%
Proposal
Proposed rule, feature, or convention for CL
0.83 321 24.1%
Question
Request for information, clarification, or elaboration
0.91 388 29.1%
Response
Reply to previous message or messages
0.89 1068 80.2%
Other
Residual category (e.g., ballots, thanks, apology)
0.68 146 11.0%
Structural Indicators:
Aside to an Individual Group message includes a remark to a named individual 0.85 34 2.6%
Embedded Message Message includes all or part of a previous message 0.96 284 21.3%
Graphical Elements Message includes graphical elements 1.0 13 1.0%
Heading Message includes a single main heading 0.90 5 0.4%
LISP code Message contains offset extracts of LISP code 0.95 235 17.6%
List Message includes lists in the body of the text 0.98 176 13.2%
Nonstandard Usage Message includes nonstandard grammar or punctuation 0.91 50 3.8%
Opening Message includes an opening salutation or phrase 1.0 46 3.5%
Signoff Message includes a closing remark or signature 0.96 466 35.0%
Subheadings Message includes subheadings in the body of the text 0.85 62 4.7%
Subject Line Message includes a completed subject line in the header 1.0 1241 93.2%
Word or Phrase Emphasis Message emphasizes some words or phrases 0.94 203 15.2%
Other Message includes other structural indicators (residual) 0.72 166 12.2%
Language Indicators:
Emphatic Message includes strong discussion or argument 0.84 317 23.8%
Humorous Message includes jokes or humorous references 0.80 142 10.7%
Informal Message indicates informality and colloquialism 0.84 883 66.3%
Sarcastic Message includes words denoting sarcasm or irony 0.43 87 6.5%
Other Message contains other emotion (e.g., anger, sympathy) 0.79 38 2.9%
Table 2: Definition and Distribution of Genres in the CL Electronic Repertoire
Genre
Definition of Genre
N
%1
Memo subject line; no opening; no
signoff; no heading; no embedded
message; no graphical element; no
nonstandard elements; no aside to
individuals; not ballot 508 38.1%
Common LISP Proposal secondary purpose="proposal"; LISP
code; not ballot 97 7.3%
Dialogue secondary purpose="response";
subject line; embedded message; not
ballot 258 19.4%
Ballot not captured by coding categories;
identified through textual analysis
of those messages where secondary
pupose="other" 6
(55 msgs)20.5%
(4.1%)
Table 3: Main Events/Incidents of CL Project
Initial face-to-face meeting
Informal meeting
Swiss Cheese edition of Manual
First Face-to-face Meeting
Flat Iron edition of Manual
NIL Incident
Colander edition of Manual
Second Face-to-face Meeting
Mini-ballot
First Major Ballot
Mini-ballot
Laser edition of Manual
Job change for Coordinator
Volunteer appointed as Moderator
Second Major Ballot
Mini-ballot
Mini-ballot
Flag Day (changes to manual frozen)
Excelsior edition of Manual
Mary Poppins edition of Manual
Manual sent to typesetter