| dc.description.abstract | This study examines authentic email interaction in the workplace. The main purpose is to identify the emergence of email literacy as developed in organizational email communication. More specifically, the study focuses on the emergence of communicative norms and rhetorical practices as they are expressed in email exchanges within a distributed group (Agenda) in a Norwegian telecom company. By a data driven approach the study aims at identifying established norms and routines of email interaction. Because an email is a seen as a hybrid mode of communication and includes features that may be associated with both the letter and the conversation, the emails in this dissertation are analyzed as both conversational turns and written texts. An email message is understood as a communicative action situated in a social and institutional practice. The study is conducted within a dialogical epistemology, and is methodologically carried out within the framework of discourse analysis. The analyses draw on the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), dialogical versions of speech act theory (SAT) and politeness theory (PT), and are informed by relevant work on email communication from both linguistics and organizational studies. Social network analysis is used to describe interactional patterns within the group. The study consists of four articles. Two of them examine email literacy with regard to interaction norms (chapter 6 and 7). The remaining two (chapter 4 and 5) examine literacy as leadership practices as they are performed linguistically in a virtual team.
Chapter 4 examines quantitatively how leadership is expressed through a virtual team’s frequency of contact and email exchange pattern, and more specifically what kind of leadership actions the leader of the group performs. A social network analysis of the group’s total messages shows that the leader sends the highest number of messages, has the most ties to the others in the group, produces the most requests in the group, and is in addition the one who produces the most minimal responses. These findings reflect that the group is hierarchically organized around a powerful leader who performs two important leadership functions. On the one hand she controls the group performance through frequent initiatives, invitations to meetings and informing messages sent to the group as a whole. These actions may be associated with a team management function. On the other hand, the findings reflect a leader who supports and appraises her team by frequent responses and acknowledgements. These kinds of actions may be associated with a team development function.
Chapter 5 elaborates the study in chapter 4 and examines how leadership is performed linguistically. Here, the leader’s rhetorical practices are examined. The study shows that the leader invites to group identification by giving the group a positively loaded nick-name, using different kinds of narrating devices, and providing receipts and supportive acknowledgements. Furthermore, requests are produced with positive politeness strategies, something which presupposes common ground and familiarity. The leader backgrounds her institutional position in favor of building socio-emotional ties with the group and positioning herself as an egalitarian leader. In requests to group externals, the leader use more direct strategies and appears more authoritative. In these situations, she draws on her role as a leader in order to legitimize the request.
Chapter 6 examines the implicit norms of responding in email interaction. The main goal is to identify the norms of response-giving in email interaction and to compare these with the organization of adjacency pairs in conversation. The study shows that the responses in average were produced within 28 hours. In addition, the study identifies three general interaction norms; First, a response is conditionally relevant after questions and requests. Second, responses to requests for comments and corrections of a proposal are conditionally relevant only when there is something to report. Non-response signals acceptance of the proposal. Third, a response to non-requesting messages is not conditionally relevant, but occurs as minimal responses, acknowledging receipts and repairs.
Chapter 7 examines how employees in a distributed work group use email copies in networks of collaboration. It studies the audience design of messages with multiple recipients, analyzing explicit and implicit addressing devices used to appoint recipients as primary and secondary participants in the interaction. The study shows that copying in recipients serves to share knowledge of ongoing projects and to build up a common information pool. Furthermore, it is used to facilitate multi-party interaction and to build personal identity and alliances. Copies to third parties may also be used for reasons of social control, for instance in order to gain compliance or to put pressure on the addressee to conform to social norms of conduct.
In conclusion, the current study shows that specific common norms have evolved for the use of email. Email literacy involves understanding and orienting to the unwritten norms of sending copies, for giving responses and to exploit these norms for different purposes in a given institutional setting, as for instance to practice leadership. Furthermore, the study shows that virtual teams may exhibit hierarchical structures by means of the leader’s frequency of contact and email exchange pattern, but also exhibit egalitarian leadership by means of the leader’s rhetorical practices. The study shows how the leader’s methods of performing requests and creating socio-emotional relations within the group contributes to promoting ingroup solidarity, back grounding her institutional role as a superordinate and foregrounding a personal and egalitarian leadership style. This may contribute to support the existing picture of Scandinavian leadership style as typically egalitarian and democratic, a style which conceales existing power differences behind a veil of positive politeness and interpersonal closeness. | en_US |