DATA OTHER THAN EMAIL

The data for the study other than email comprised two email questionnaires to the informants, an interview with one of them, a focus group survey involving international business practitioners, and some literary sources. The two email questionnaires to the informants, (a)³³ and (b)³⁴, provided information about

y the typicality of the collection period and the informants’ com-munication partners such as their organizational position and mother tongue (Questionnaire a)

3 3 See Appendix 2.

3 4 See Appendix 3.

y the informants’ views of the messages they had written and/

or received in terms of their communicative purposes, the action these messages triggered, the names of the messages, typicality of the language used in the messages, and the alternative media that could have been used to deliver them (Questionnaire b)

All eight informants returned Questionnaire (a), but Questionnaire (b), which was administered in late 2002, was only returned by five informants: one of the informants had resigned, another was on maternity leave at the time, and a third one did not return the questionnaire in spite of reminders. The messages presented to the five informants were either written or received by them, but the number of messages presented to each informant varied. In total, the informants gave their views of 16 messages.

The interview with one of the informants (Erja) was carried out to obtain background information about the use of email in the company. On the one hand, the topics dealt with in the interview centered on Erja’s observations about email use and English email messages in general and on the other hand, they focused on her own use of email, her communication partners, and the content of her messages.

The focus group survey was used to investigate the perceptions of nine international business practitioners about three internal email messages. In total, the comments on 27 messages were thus collected. The questions that the focus group members answered were basically the same as those presented to the informants in Questionnaire (b). In addition, the focus group members were asked if there was anything unfamiliar, surprising, or not typical in the messages. The focus group members represented one third of the students enrolled in an intensive pre-MBA (Master of Busi-ness Administration) program at the University of Michigan in summer 2002 to prepare them for MBA studies at the Business

School.³⁵ They were all non-native speakers of English whose mother tongues were Japanese (3), Chinese (3), Korean (2), and Portuguese (1), and they were all managers using both email and English for work purposes. Most of them were in their early thirties and their employers were mostly private corporations, but also a state-owned company, a small software start-up, and one of the major stock exchanges in the world were represented. The busi-ness experience of the members ranged from four to ten years.

Literary sources used as data in the present study included Stora Enso’s web pages, Louhiala-Salminen’s (2002b)³⁶ survey of communication and language use carried out in Stora Enso (and Nordea), and three modern business communication textbooks, which were consulted for the latest conventions of language use for business purposes (Locker 1998, Bovée et al. 2003, Munter 2003). Louhiala-Salminen’s (2002b) survey provides background information about the corporate and social context of writing in Stora Enso. The survey was targeted at Finnish and Swedish office employees and focused on communication practices, use of media and languages, and Finnish and Swedish respondents’ beliefs and attitudes about their own and each other’s communication styles.

Different data discussed above was used to meet the aims of the study as follows:

35 The selection process for the school is characterized as highly competitive and it emphasizes the applicant’s demonstrated and potential abilities as a student, manager, and leader. More than 95% of accepted students also have two or more years of work experience. (http://www.bus.umich.edu/Admissions/Mba/.) 36 The questionnaire was addressed to 520 Stora Enso employees. The response rate was only 33% but Louhiala-Salminen (2002b: 9) explains it: “Although the Sto-ra Enso response Sto-rate of 33% cannot be regarded as fully satisfactory, the Sto-rates were, however, accepted for the purposes of this study, since the aim was to look for general trends among the views of the employees, not for exact information on the distribution of the population’s views.”

TABLE 5. Data used to meet the aims of the study.

Aim No Focus Data used

1 Organizational context of Email corpus (primary + secondary) genres Questionnaires (a) and (b) to

informants

Interview with one informant Focus group survey

Stora Enso web pages

Communication survey in Stora Enso (Louhiala-Salminen 2002b)

2 Communicative purpose of Email corpus (primary + secondary) and action in genres Questionnaire (b) to informants

Focus group survey

3 Discourse features of genres Email corpus (primary + secondary) Questionnaire (b) to informants Interview with one informant Focus group survey

Business communication textbooks 4 Salutations, Closings, Email corpus (114 primary messages

Signatures from Henrik)

Questionnaire (a) to informants Interview with one informant

5 Requests Email corpus (114 primary messages

from Henrik)

Questionnaire (b) to informants Interview with one informant Communication survey in Stora Enso (Louhiala-Salminen 2002b)

As shown in Table 5, a minimum of three data sources was used to meet each aim of the study. Although messages from the primary corpus were used in meeting each of the five aims, the whole corpus of 282 messages was not used all through the study.

While it was used to meet the first three aims relating to the nature of genres in general, the corpus to meet the last two aims focusing on individual moves only used 114 primary messages as its data, i.e. Henrik’s mailbox collected over three weeks.

4.2 METHODS

The methods which were used in the analysis of the data and which emerged from the theoretical frameworks and review of literature presented in Chapters 2 and 3 are discussed after the description of the data collection methods.