Chapter 17: Genre Taxonomy — A Knowledge Repository of Communicative Actions - Organizing Business Knowledge The Mit Process Handbook [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 17: Genre Taxonomy — A Knowledge Repository of Communicative Actions

Takeshi Yoshioka,

George A. Herman,

JoAnne Yates,

Wanda Orlikowski

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as T. Yoshioka, G. A. Herman, J. Yates, and W. Orlikowski (2001), Genre taxonomy: A knowledge repository of communicative actions, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 19(4): 431-56. 2001 ACM. Reprinted by permission.

17.1 Introduction

Human communication has always been central to organizational action. It is not too much to say that whether a business is effective or not depends in large part on how well it communicates with its customers. These days many businesses face new communication challenges because they need to move their operations into a new sphere, such as making inroads into foreign markets and creating e-commerce units. As the Internet has spread, it has made communicating with various people easier, and it has facilitated the emergence and use of many types of new communication media within a variety of different business situations. For example, a virtual meeting space is used in daily communication within a software research and development community (Churchill and Bly 1999). Electronic bulletin boards are also used to share information on topics of common interest within communities of practice (Wenger and Snyder 2000) or professional associations such as the American Medical Association (Hagel and Armstrong 1997). Thus thinking strategically about the effectiveness of communication becomes increasingly important for organizations to obtain desired audience responses and achieve stated business goals.

There are many textbooks and guides on managerial communication (e.g., Munter 1997), but they provide only typical knowledge, and do not give us adequate guidance for communicating in a new medium or in a radically new situation. In order to apply knowledge in new conditions, we need an environment where well-categorized, typical examples are documented and available, where we can find similar cases to understand conditions for use and get ideas to apply to new situations or media, and to which we can add emergent examples.

Today knowledge creation, transfer, and transformation are seen as particularly important arenas for communication. The success of an organization often depends on whether or not members of the organization actively create knowledge and how effectively they share that knowledge within the organization through communication. As Senge (1990) claims, dialogue and skillful discussion are critical for developing ''learning organizations.''In addition people are said to ''make knowledge their own''within a communicative situation, that is, people often learn in the context of ordinary communication (Brown, Collins, and Duiguid 1989). Knowledge management is a buzzword now, and many firms have created their own knowledge repositories to share and reuse knowledge in the organization. However, a typical knowledge repository stores specific domain knowledge such as knowledge related to design and manufacturing in a firm, and the purpose is usually only to share the content of documents and document templates. Thus the knowledge repository provides ''know-what''but not ''know-how''or ''know-why,''and typically lacks the shared context for communication that helps with the mastery of new knowledge.

In this chapter we propose a new type of knowledge repository (a genre taxonomy) that represents know-what (the constituent elements of genres of communication) along with know-how and know-why (the typified social context of genre use). A genre, such as a report or a meeting, may be defined as a type of communication recognized and enacted by members of a community or organization (Yates and Orlikowski 1992). Genres may be analyzed in terms of a number of dimensions, particularly those representing the why (purpose), what (content), when (timing), where (location), who (participants), and how (structure and medium) of communication (5W1H). For the last decade or two many new electronic communication media such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web have emerged and evolved, but few people understand what genres to enact within these new media or how to use such media effectively within organizations. We believe that our genre taxonomy prototype, which offers knowledge about genres, as well as their effective use, can help people learn and communicate knowledge about genres, and to adapt or innovate their communication within new electronic media.

In this chapter we will introduce our genre taxonomy and its prototype implementation in the Process Handbook (Malone et al. 1999), a process repository developed by the Center for Coordination Science at MIT. In the next section we introduce and describe the notion of genres of organizational communication. In section 17.3 we describe the genre taxonomy in terms of the 5W1H dimensions and the use and evolution of genres over time. In section 17.4 we use coordination theory (Malone and Crowston 1994) to demonstrate how genres coordinate information in terms of usefulness, location, and timing. In section 17.5 we explain the prototype implementation of the genre taxonomy. In section 17.6 we draw on the genres used within the admissions process at MIT's Sloan School of Management (Orlikowski, Yates, and Fonstad 2001) to describe the relationship between genres and work processes, and illustrate the benefits that may be derived from using the genre taxonomy in practice. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of the genre taxonomy for researchers and practitioners.