Abstract:
This thesis discusses ethnographic research carried out in two very different workplaces, one a
manufacturing plant, the other an educational organisation, to explore the relationship between the
organisational or workplace culture and the role, status and style of email. The research was
concerned with looking at the specific functions of email alongside other means of communicating
at work and how it was perceived by its users and receivers compared to these other means of
communication. It also investigated when and why email was the preferred medium of workplace
communication and some of its distinctive stylistic features. In addition to relating these latter to
the workplace culture, the effect on email style of sociolinguistic variables was also explored.
Pragmatic theories provided the framework for analysing the data which was interpreted from a
social interactionist, social constructionist perspective.
A combined corpora of 515 email messages provided the primary linguistic data. This was
supplemented by quantitative survey data and qualitative data from observations, two diaries of
reflective practice, interviews, and recordings of four people's communicative interactions over
one workday. The messages were coded initially for communicative function and then, in order to
explore the affective aspect of email communication, for mitigational and boosting elements. In
addition to the above, a qualitative analysis of a thread of email messages was undertaken to
demonstrate how email communication is used in knowledge creation.
The study found that there was little difference between the two organisations in the
communicative functions for which email is used. In both, the transmission and seeking of
information is its predominant use followed by the making of requests. However, the two
workplaces differed considerably in the use made of email which is shown to be essentially a whitecollar
mode of communication. But even in the educational organisation where email is used
extensively, face-to-face remains the preferred form of communication and dominates
communication time.
The type of organisation also seems to affect the way in which email messages are written. Email
messages from the manufacturing plant displayed more features of solidarity than those from the educational organisation. There was a much higher use of greetings in these messages and more
direct language forms. The messages were also longer. There was also a difference between the two
workplaces in male and female style. Women in the educational organisation wrote longer
messages and used more affective features in their emails than their male counterparts. The
converse was true in the manufacturing plant.
Stylistically, email directives were seen, in general, to lie midway between the mainly direct forms
of spoken communication and the mainly indirect forms of other types of written communication.
The study also found that as part of its communicative functions, email plays an important role in
organisational knowledge creation, and that in addition to being a useful communication tool
assisting in the functional work of an organisation, it does considerable relational work. This has
implications for the way in which email messages are written.
