Strategic Uses of Electronic Mail in Organisations

The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed a dramatic upswing in the use of computers for communication (Hiltz, Johnson, and Turoff 1987; Hiltz and Turoff 1978; Rice 1984; 1987). Perhaps the greatest proliferation of computer-aided communication has been in organisations, typically via electronic mail systems. Electronic mail (email) is defined as “the creation, editing, sending, receiving, storage, forwarding, and printing of text —all facilitated by the computer” (Rice and Bair 1984, 191). An assumption of most of the early research on this subject is that email has certain objective characteristics which cause it to be used “primarily for its capacity to transmit messages efficiently” (Trevino, Lengel, and Daft 1987, 568; see also Schmitz 1988). Recently, this view seems to be changing. In this paper, we add to a growing literature that recognises the diverse and subtle ways in which email can be used to accomplish a broad range of communicative goals. For some of these goals, email simply offers an alternative way of communicating something that could be communicated via another medium. For other situations, the unique characteristics of the email medium create brand new possibilities for communicative strategies. In its initial formulation, media richness theory (Daft and Lengel 1984; 1986) posited that media vary in richness and that media choice depends on the degree to which a manager perceives equivocality in a communicative situation. A medium's richness is a function of its availability for feedback, possibility for multiple cues, and the type of language used. “Equivocality means ambiguity, the existence of multiple and conflicting interpretations about an organisational situation” (Daft and STEVEN R. PHILLIPS ERIC M. EISENBERG