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17.2 Genres of Organizational Communication
As a concept, genre has a long tradition in rhetorical and literary analysis (Bakhtin 1986). Recently a number of researchers in cultural, rhetorical, and design studies have begun using it to refer to typified social action (Brown 1994; Bazerman 1988; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Miller 1984). Orlikowski and Yates (1992) have applied the notion of genres to organizational communications such as business letters, memos, face-to-face meetings, reports, and announcements. They define genres as ''socially recognized types of communicative action habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular communicative and collaborative purposes''(Yates and Orlikowski 1992, p. 299). Genres may be identified by their socially recognized purpose and common characteristics of form.The purpose of a genre is not an individual's private motive for communication, but the purpose that senders and recipients of communication within a community socially recognize and invoke in a typical situation, for example, proposing a project, informing and directing in an offcial announcement, or brainstorming how to resolve a problem. The form of a genre refers to the observable aspects of the communication: media, such as pen and paper, face-to-face, and electronic mail; structural features, such as document style and format; and linguistic features, such as informality, humor, and technical language.Yates and Orlikowski (1992) argue that genres constitute social structures that manifest what Giddens (1984) has called the ''duality of structure.''That is, structures are enacted by the recurrent social practices that shape and are shaped by them. Understanding this duality of structure helps us to comprehend how and why genres are established, used, and changed over time.Yates and Orlikowski also examined the genres enacted in such electronic communication media as electronic mailing lists (Orlikowski and Yates 1994), Usenet newsgroups (Yates, Orlikowski, and Okamura 1999), and the Team Rooms of Lotus Notes databases (Yates, Orlikowski, and Rennecker 1997; Yates and Orlikowski 1997; Orlikowski and Yates 1998). Drawing on Bazerman's (1994) notion of genre system—sequences of interrelated communicative actions such as the reviewing process for a scientific journal—Yates and Orlikowski examined the genre systems in use within a US high-technology company using Team Room (Yates, Orlikowski, and Rennecker 1997). They found that a genre system reveals expectations about purpose, participants, content, form, timing, and location of communicative interactions. For the purposes of this chapter, the key difference between a genre and genre system is that while each has attributes, a genre system additionally has relational attributes that indicate relationships among constituent genres, such as sequence.
