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17.3 Genre Taxonomy
Our objective in proposing a genre taxonomy is to help people make sense of diverse types of communicative actions. The genre taxonomy thus has to represent both widely recognized genres, such as a report, and specific genres, such as a technical report used in a specific company, so that the context of genre use is highlighted. For example, comparing the form features evident in a technical report genre used by a company with those of the more general report genre helps us identify the different institutions that shaped the specific genre.The genre taxonomy also has to represent the elements of a genre as embedded in a social context reflecting the "5W1H''questions (Why, What, Who, When, Where, and How).[1] In other words, the genre taxonomy represents dimensions of genres in terms of purpose, content, participants, timing, location, and form (including media and linguistic devices). We do not intend these six dimensions to be exhaustive or definitive, but rather offer them as a grounded starting point for classifying characteristics of genres and genre systems based on empirical evidence in organizations. While other semantic categorization systems have been proposed (e.g., Lehnert 1978; Pentland and Lee 2001), they are based on formal approaches rather than empirical data. For our purposes here, we have preferred to base our taxonomic categories on the dimensions derived from Yates and Orlikowski's empirical work on the use of genres in organizational practice.[2] We describe each of the six dimensions of genre below.
17.3.1 Why — Purpose of a Genre/Genre System
Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) use speech act theory (Austin 1975; Searle 1969) as a deductive analytic framework for describing the textual moves that actors make when they intend to persuade in a peer review process. Although speech act theory is targeted at a speaker's utterances, they conclude that analysis of the illocutionary acts evident in peer review communication provides empirical evidence that illocutionary acts do get things accomplished in the world, either through direct or indirect means.
We established initial purpose categories in our genre taxonomy based on speech act theory, and modified and added some categories based on the coding schemes that Yates and Orlikowski used in their empirical genre studies (Orlikowski and Yates 1994; Yates, Orlikowski, and Okamura 1999; Yates, Orlikowski, and Rennecker 1997). In addition we referred to Roget's thesaurus (Roget and Chapman 1992) and WordNet (Fellbaum 1998), an on-line lexical database for English developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University, to clarify notions and write explanations of each category. The purpose categories now consist of eight items: inform, request, express (emotion), decide, propose, respond, record, and other (to allow expansion of a scheme that is inherently open ended).Some genres, especially generally recognized genres, such as the memo, have multiple purposes, and the genre taxonomy differentiates primary purposes and secondary purposes to help prioritization of genre use in social contexts. For example, the memo genre is used mainly to inform its readers and record information, and it may be used for directing an order or for proposing some course of action.It is worth noting that a genre system usually has a different purpose than its constituent genres because a genre system itself provides expectations about its socially recognized purposes to coordinate the collaborative activities by means of its constituent genres. We can illustrate this using the ballot genre system (see figure 17.1), which Yates and Orlikowski (1994) identified from studying a group of distributed professionals using electronic mail to negotiate the Common Lisp specifications (hereafter we call this task the Common Lisp project).
Figure 17.1: Example of correspondences in the ballot genre system in the common lisp project (excerpt)
The ballot genre system has three interrelated genres: the ballot questionnaire genre issued by the coordinator, the ballot response genre generated by group members, and the ballot result genre, a summary of the replies issued by the coordinator. As the ballot genre system was used to poll opinions and test consensus among the participants, it might belong to the 'decide'purpose. The ballot questionnaire genre might belong to both the 'inform'and 'request'purpose categories, because it was used to inform group members about issues and to request their replies. The ballot response genre might belong to the 'respond'purpose category, and the ballot result genre might belong to the 'inform'and 'record'purpose categories because the coordinator used the genre to notify group members of the results of a ballot and to record them electronically. Thus the ballot genre system as a whole has a purpose different from the purpose of its constituent genres.
17.3.2 What — Content of a Genre/Genre System
Genres provide expectations about content of a communication. For example, the recipient of a thank you note expects it to include some words representing the sender's appreciation. Suppose that an organization has a convention of a daily morning meeting and the meeting usually includes the manager's comments about his or her views of the present state of things. The specific face-to-face genre enacted at this organization might include the expectation of managerial comments. The genre taxonomy represents the typical content expected of different types of genres.As mentioned, sometimes genres are linked to each other so as to constitute a genre system that coordinates communicative actions. For example, the face-to-face meeting genre system may include the meeting announcement genre, the meeting agenda genre, the face-to-face meeting genre, and the minutes genre. Certain genres could be omitted from the genre system (e.g., meeting announcement), or combined (e.g., meeting announcement and agenda), while others are required (e.g., the meeting cannot be excluded).The genre taxonomy indexes genre systems and also the genre constituents of each genre system. Thus it can be used to discover both what genres a genre system may have and what genre systems are in the taxonomy. Both a genre system and its genre constituents are classified in the genre taxonomy under relevant purpose categories; thus the coordination process in a genre system may be understood through examining the purposes of the genre system and its constituent genres. For example, in the ballot genre system described above, the difference in purpose categories between the ballot genre system and the ballot questionnaire genre suggests that a ballot questionnaire helps to coordinate the decision process by informing recipients about issues and options and requesting responses by a due date.
17.3.3 Who — Participants in a Genre/Genre System
A genre is enacted by participants who communicate within a community, whose size may range from very small such as a department, an organization, and a class in a school to very large such as a profession and the citizenry of one or more countries. In the genre taxonomy, each genre is associated with a community to which its participants belong. For example, all genres elicited from the Common Lisp project are associated with the category 'Genres of the Common Lisp project'and all genres used in the on-line Process Handbook (http://css.mit.edu/pif ) are associated with 'Genres of the on-line Process Handbook.'The collection of genres used in the same community represents that community's genre repertoire, or the set of genres enacted by community members (Orlikowski and Yates 1994).Different genres within a genre system may also be associated with different senders and receivers. In the ballot genre system, for example, the coordinator issues the ballot questionnaire and the ballot result, while other group members receive these messages and send ballot responses.
17.3.4 When — Timing of a Genre/Genre System
Because a genre is invoked in a recurrent situation, its use is associated with particular timing or opportunity (Yates and Orlikowski 1998). Time can be quantitative or qualitative, clock or event based, and so on (Hassard 1996). For example, the thank you note genre is used when a person feels some appreciation for the gift or activity bestowed by another (i.e., event-based timing). Or, the daily morning meeting genre enacted within a specific organization, includes expectations of when it begins and ends (e.g., begins at 8:30 AM and ends at 9:00 AM) (i.e., clock-based timing). The genre taxonomy includes any timing expectations associated with the use of a genre, for instance, that a genre should be used within a certain time period of an event (e.g., thank you notes being sent within a few weeks) or at set time intervals (e.g., the daily morning meeting).A genre system typically has expectations about the sequence of its constituent elements. Thus the constituent genres of a genre system are related by their relative timing within a genre system. Altering the order of the constituent genres of a genre system creates a different variant of a genre system. For example, if a meeting announcement is sent before an agenda, the decision process used to decide which people will participate may be different than if an agenda is sent out before or along with the meeting announcement.
17.3.5 Where — Location of a Genre/Genre System
In a sense a genre reflects the culture shared by participants in a community, since it identifies the recurrent situation or socially defined need from the history and nature of established practices, social relations, and communication media within the community. For example, a kaizen proposal is used in Japanese corporations to facilitate bottom-up quality improvement, a common activity in Japanese manufacturing departments. Thus the genre taxonomy represents the location where a genre is typically enacted such as Japan, or Massachusetts, or northeastern United States. For electronic communication over the Internet, the physical locations of communicative actions are becoming less meaningful because of the shifting borders characteristic of cyberspace. However, because virtual spaces provide expectations of ''where''in an Internet community, the genre taxonomy may also include expectations about virtual space in addition to those for physical space. For example, a study of a Japanese R&D project group by Yates and Orlikowski found that members of different subgroups enacted genres within different ''local''newsgroups in the Usenet-based groupware system (Yates, Orlikowski, and Okamura 1999).A genre system also includes expectations about physical or virtual location. Using the ballot genre system as an example, if the participants are located close to each other, or they have an opportunity to gather at the same place such as an AAAI conference, then a physical or face-to-face balloting system might be easy to implement. In the case of the Common Lisp project, an email approach was used that allowed the coordinator and the various respondents to conduct electronic ballots when participants were geographically dispersed.
17.3.6 How — Form of a Genre/Genre System
As we described in the previous section, a genre is typically characterized by a recognizable form. Form refers to observable features that include structural elements, medium, and linguistic features. The genre taxonomy represents these features along with purposes for identifying a genre. For example, the genre taxonomy includes the 'Electronic traditional memo in Japan'genre, identified in the communication of a Japanese R&D group by Yates, Orlikowski, and Okamura, with 'Kanji signature'and 'no embedded message'as structural features, 'Usenet news group adjusted to Japanese environment'as medium, and 'Kanji subject line'and 'no dialect'as linguistic features.A genre system also has expectations about form, including expectations about media, and about the genres making up the system. For example, the face-to-face meeting genre system typically includes an announcement and an agenda in writing (either paper base or electronic), a face-to-face meeting, and minutes in writing. But form features may vary by local conventions or even by instance. For example, the face-to-face meeting genre system enacted in a certain group may not include the agenda genre and/or minutes genre due to the group's conventions.
17.3.7 Evolution of a Genre/Genre System over Time
From the organizational point of view, a genre is used in a process cycle that consists of enacting a genre and observing genre use.[3] At the same time genre use influences the participants involved in the communication. In enacting a genre, participants identify (whether reflectively or habitually) a recurrent situation and genre rules from their prior communication experiences in order to select an appropriate genre. They usually reproduce the established genre, but sometimes elaborate, replace, or under-cut it either inadvertently or deliberately in order to adapt to changes in the situation. Recipients identify the genre or genre variant being used based on their identification of a recurrent situation and their own prior experiences. A specific genre such as an email memo typically used in a particular company is a variant from the more general memo, and the genre taxonomy places specific genres in a category named 'Examples of a widely recognized genre'which is a subcategory under this general genre category.
Figure 17.2: Genre evolution example from business letter genre to electronic memo genre
The 'genre use over time'process cycle is a dynamic state of production, reproduction, and change. A genre can evolve from another genre because participants can elaborate or replace genres during their enactment. For example, in the past, a memo was elaborated from the informal business letter genre and the electronic memo genre was elaborated from the memo genre (see figure 17.2). In each case the genre had been used in an ongoing manner in one form before it was elaborated in another form over time.[1]Yates and Orlikowski illustrate that genre systems are a means of structuring six (5W1H) aspects of communicative actions. We extend their consideration to a genre that also has these aspects. Due to the imprecision of language, we do not intend the six terms (why, what, etc.) to be taken literally but as pointing to the underlying genre aspect ('purpose', 'Content', etc.)[2]Future work could include exploring the similarity and differences among the approaches.[3]For analytic purposes we separate 'Enact genre'and 'Observe genre use', though in practice they are intertwined.
