Why is written communication, such as e mail a preferred medium for global virtual teams

Business email communication has received increasing attention in the last decade (DeSanctis and Monge, 1998, Gains, 1999, Gimenez, 2000, Nickerson, 1999, Nickerson, 2000; among others). With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Nickerson, 2000, Yates et al., 1999, Yates et al., 2003), most studies in email communication so far have concentrated on one-way, self-contained messages (Fulk and DeSanctis, 1995, Hinds and Kiesler, 1995), paying attention to various aspects of this new genre: its linguistic and stylistic conventions (Gains, 1999), its role in the business communication process (Louhiala-Salminen, 2002), and its purposes in the patterns of communication of multinational corporations (Gimenez, 2002, Nickerson, 1998). However, new exigencies of the business community (ease of reference and retrieval, and increased levels of accountability, for example), especially in international communication settings, have required business emails to adapt and evolve. One way in which emails have responded to these new demands is by becoming a more complex genre which embeds a series of messages generated in response to the original email, hence the name ‘embedded email’.

The term ‘embedded email’ is preferred to other terms, such as ‘chain emails’ and ‘threaded emails’, used in the literature. Whereas ‘chain’ and ‘thread’ have been used to refer to either the process of composition by which messages are textually connected (e.g., Boudourides et al., 2002, Lewis and Knowles, 1997, Yates et al., 2003) or to the process of transmission (Nickerson, 2000), the term ‘embedded’ is used here to indicate that the different parts of the message have a dissimilar status. As in grammatical embeddedness (main and subordinate clauses, for instance), message embeddedness implies that one or more parts of the message are dependent on another or others to make complete communicative sense.

This paper analyses 52 samples from a databank of 123 emails for international business communication. These 52 samples, which represent 42% of the total number of messages, are embedded emails and the remaining 71 emails (58%) were simple, one-way messages. The 52 embedded emails analysed in this paper were exchanged between 13 emailers who are native speakers of four different languages (Dutch, English, Italian and Spanish), and work in five countries (the Netherlands, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Mexico). The 13 emailers all use English for international communication. The paper focuses on the most prominent textual features that reflect the changes emails have experienced to meet the new demands of the business community. Following the main areas of genre change presented in Ramanathan and Kaplan (2000, p. 180–183), the analysis in this paper shows how emails have evolved to meet new demands of the business community, and reflect the individual agency of the members of such a community.

Previous contributions to email communication research

Interest in email communication started to gather momentum in the late 1980s (e.g., Daft and Lengel, 1986, Rice and Bair, 1984), but it was during the 1990s that the field started to yield a considerable wealth of research studies (Eklundh and Macdonald, 1994, El-Shinnawy and Markus, 1998, Herring, 1996, Markus, 1994, Nickerson, 2000, Yates et al., 1999; among others). Although research in email communication has focused on different aspects, the main contributions to the field have

Methodology, data and research issues

As mentioned above, changes in the social, economic and technical contexts imply changes in the genres that social agents use to realise their communicative actions. As Orlikowski and Yates (1994) state, one of the three aspects to examine when analysing a community’s genre repertoire is change; that is, how and why genres change over time. This is the case with electronic communication in general and with emails in particular. Emails seem to be changing and evolving to keep pace with the

The dynamic nature of emails

Genres have been identified as dynamic entities capable of changing to adapt to temporal and physical contexts (Hyland, 2003, Ramanathan and Kaplan, 2000). As a result of their adaptation capacity, genres reflect “changing socio-cultural and political realities and thus have components of flexibility built in them” (Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000, p. 180). Emails, as organisational genres, seem to have evolved to meet the new communication demands of the business community, to adapt to its

Conclusion

This paper has showcased some of the most prominent textual features that evidence the evolution of email communication to meet the new exigencies of the business community. The paper has also suggested some reasons for the evolution and change of email communication. The need for easy and quick reference and retrieval as well as the new demands of accountability and reliability has impacted the structure and the function of emails. Message embeddedness shows how emails have evolved to meet

Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions for improving this paper. All remaining errors are entirely my own.

Julio C. Gimenez is a lecturer at Middlesex University, London, UK and a PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published in the field of electronically mediated communication and English for international communication. His main research interests are critical discourse analysis, business discourse and international communication.

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