Genre Systems: Structuring Interaction Through Communicative Norms\"

¶ … Genre Systems: Structuring Interaction through Communicative Norms" by JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski (2008)

Because all organizations are comprised of people, developing and sustaining effective organizational communications represent a timely enterprise for businesses of all sizes and types today (Miner, 2002). In their study, "Genre Systems: Structuring Interaction through Communicative Norms," Yates and Orlikowski, professors and researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management, describe the results of their innovative experiment using so-called "genre systems" (these are sequences of interrelated communicative actions that teams routinely use to structure collaborative efforts) to investigate improved organizational communications techniques. This paper provides an analysis of this study, followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.

Review and Analysis

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the study by Yates and Orlikowski (2008) was to provide support for the proposition that genre systems can provide insights concerning how teams develop habitual ways of communicating within organizations by empirically drawing on data from a field study of teams using Team Room, a collaborative application tool provided by Lotus Development Corporation (Yates & Orlikowski, 2008). According to these researchers, "Genre systems are generally important ways of organizing the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of interaction. Genre systems can also be a particularly powerful means of structuring electronic interactions" (p. 14).

Research Design

The research designed used by Yates and Orlikowski (2008) used the Team Room application with three teams from a large telecommunications company in the southeastern United States to demonstrate how genre systems structure ongoing interactions between team members. The researchers conceptualized the genres they used in the study according to their socially recognized purpose first, and then by their common characteristics of form. For this part of the research design, the purpose of a genre was defined by Yates and Orlikowski as "a purpose socially constructed and recognized by the relevant organizational community for typical situations (e.g., proposing a project, meeting to review project status)" and "not an individual's private motive for communicating" (p. 14). Likewise, the researchers operationalize the term "Form" to describe various observable, structural and linguistic aspects of the communication process (Yates & Orlikowski, 2008).

Significance of the Study

Because all organizations run on good communications (Day, Halpin & Zaccaro, 2004), the significance of the study by Yates and Orlikowski (2008) demonstrate that the types of framework (genre) that is established within an organization can be used to better understand how team members collaborate and formulate their solutions and achieve their collective goals in computer-mediated forums and other online collaborative media. In this regard, Yates and Orlikowski (2008) emphasize that, "A genre established within a particular community serves as an institutionalized template for social interaction -- an organizing structure -- that influences the ongoing communicative action of members through their use of it within and across their community" (p. 14). Such genres are increasingly including a computer-mediated component (Dennis & Harris, 2002; Whittaker, 2004; Bell, Davis & Linn, 2004).

Results and Findings

The results of the study by Yates and Orlikowski (2008) involved three major findings as follows:

1. The meeting genre system used in the Team Room application essentially preserves and reinforces the existing communicative practices around meeting logistics, agendas, and minutes, as enacted on paper or in e-mail;

2. The collaborative authoring genre system reinforced the existing communicative practices around drafts, responses, and final versions, while also enhancing dimensions of this communication through facilitating changes in when, where, and how the interaction for collaborative authoring takes place, as well as potentially allowing for different types of content (e.g., dialogue around draft) to be included and participants to be considered and involved;

3. The collaborative repository genre system, with its placeholder and response genres, carries different expectations about some dimensions of the teams' communication (how, when, and where) and potentially different expectations about others (why, what, who/m), which represents a departure from existing communicative practices of the teams [and] potentially transforms the interaction of the team members around such activities as coordination, scheduling, brainstorming, decision-making, and synthesis (Yates & Orlikowski, 2008).

In addition, Yates and Orlikowski suggest that the use of Team Room by teams can help improve organizational communications in transformative ways, allowing for communications when and where team members prefer and producing a synergistic outcome that might not otherwise have been possible.