GENRE ANALYSIS IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH

Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, 2003 by Firth, David R, Lawrence, Cameron

This table aims to show five things. First, it shows which IT system was analyzed, which will show us any biases researchers have for studying particular systems over others. The details of the system were taken directly from the paper. Given that genre analysis is a study of communication, we next characterize the communication being analyzed, again determining this directly from the paper.

We then attempt to summarize why genre analysis was used in this particular research. Where possible, we looked for specific language in the paper that explained this. When this was not presented, we used a careful reading of the paper to establish the purpose for using genre analysis. Fourth, we elucidate the insight that was derived from the use of genre analysis. To the extent possible we present the exact language used by the authors, usually found in the discussion or conclusion section of the paper. Where the exact language was verbose or spread around the paper, we use our own language to summarize. Finally we present the impact that this insight might bring, which is again extracted where possible from the exact language used by the authors, usually in the discussion or conclusion section of the paper.

This summary shows that the IT systems examined using genre analysis have been quite diverse - synchronous, asynchronous and collaborative IT systems have all been addressed. Most interestingly though, despite the fact that Orlikowski and Yates (1994) tell us that "genre and genre repertoire may be particularly useful for conceptualizing and investigating the introduction of new media in organizations", the newest media available to organizations such as Internet messaging or Text messaging has yet to be examined. The table also shows that the types of communication investigated are quite disparate - there has been coverage of web page communication, e-mails to support work, bulletin board postings to support MBAs coming to school, as well as digital documentation of work products. One author (Erickson, 1999; Erickson, 2000) addressed the more social aspects of communication, by looking at how limericks are written and how non-work related communications developed in the workplace.

Our review shows that at the heart of each author's use of genre analysis is a desire to understand the communication being supported by the particular technology in use. Whilst the insights of using genre analysis are specific to the research question being examined, the impacts of using genre analysis appear to have a number of common threads. First, many of the authors used genre analysis as a tool for understanding the structure and concerns of communities using a particular IT. Given the range of IT being studied by our authors, this shows that genre analysis is a particularly useful tool for studying a wide range of IT supporting communication. In our introduction we asked how we could study emergent communication technologies such as Internet Messenger (IM). We have an answer; genre analysis provides an excellent way to understand the way in which these new technologies impact the community using them.