Chapter 2

Workplace Genres: Activities and Texts in

Workplace Discourse

2.1 Introduction
The previous chapter outlined some of the key characteristics of workplace discourse, but beyond these very general features shared by
all language at work, how are we to make sense of the great diversity of spoken interactions and text types used in different
organizations and professions? Does the language used on the factory fl oor really have anything in common with that used in
interactions between health professionals in a hospital, or the texts produced by the legal profession? Seeing workplace interactions and
texts as instances of ‘genre’, that is as goal-oriented, recurring manifestations of certain ‘types’ of texts and activities, is useful in trying
to make sense of this diversity, and provides a systematic approach to describing workplace discourse.
That said, as there are a number of different approaches to the study of genre, which all deal with useful – but sometimes seemingly
contradictory – aspects of this notion, applying genre analysis to workplace discourse is by no means straightforward. Bhatia (2004, p.
22) attempts to bring together the three main approaches to genre – the social-constructionist approach, the so-called Hallidayan
approach, which emphasizes schematic structure, and the rhetorical approach – in one defi nition:

Genre analysis is the study of situated linguistic behaviour in institutionalized academic or professional settings, whether defi ned in
terms of typifi cation of rhetorical action, as in Miller (1984), Bazerman (1994) and Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), regularities of
stages, goal-oriented processes, as in Martin, Christie and Rothery (1987), or consistency of communicative purposes, as in Swales
(1990) and Bhatia (1993). (original italics)

While genre analysts in the rhetorical school, following Swales’ definition, consider communicative purpose to be the defi ning and
‘privileged criterion’ (Swales 1990, p. 58), Swales himself (Askehave and Swales 2001, Swales 2004) points out that identifying
communicative purpose is not necessarily straightforward. There may be multiple purposes, or different views within the discourse
community of what the purpose of the genre is (Askehave and Swales 2001). Handford (2007, forthcoming) argues that privileging
communicative purpose may mean neglecting other important aspects of genre, such as structure. In the Hallidayan approach, structure,
in particular the presence of certain ‘obligatory elements’ (Hasan 1985), is key in identifying genre, but using exclusively formal criteria
runs the risk of confl ating ‘genre’ and ‘text type’ (Bhatia 1993, Paltridge 1996). Some textual patterns, such as problem-solution or
general-particular, are common across a range of written genres (Paltridge ibid.); and equally, a genre may have a variety of structural
realizations. For example, Bhatia (ibid.) argues that sales promotional letters and letters of application, while quite different structurally,
are both instances of ‘promotional’ genre, due to similar communicative purposes.
In my own work (Koester 2006, p. 22), I take the view that ‘formal linguistic characteristics are important aspects of genre, however,
they should not be considered as the defi ning features of a genre, which should be communicative purpose’ (original italics). That is to
say, it is not the form that determines the genre, but formal generic patterns are the result of recurring, goal-oriented activity. In this way,
we can also account for the fact that generic structure is variable (the same genre can be performed in different ways) and that genres
change. Whether or not communicative purpose is taken to be the main criterion in identifying a genre, it seems clear that both shared
communicative purpose and formal or structural features are important properties of genre. Yates and Orkilowski(1992), who defi ne
genre as ‘a typifi ed communicative action invoked in response to a recurrent situation’ (ibid., p. 301) see genre as being characterized by
both substance (which equates more or less to communicative purpose) and form. Form includes structural and linguistic features, but
may also include elements of the context, such as time and place.
Meanwhile, genre analysts working in the social-constructionist tradition are less interested in formal properties of genre, and more in
‘the ways in which genre is embedded in the communicative activities of the members of a discipline’ (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995, p.
2). Therefore they have tended to examine how a discourse community uses genres, and how these genres are related to one another. For
example, Devitt (1991) studied the ‘genre set’ – the range of texts – used by tax accountants in the course of their work; and Bazerman
(1994) extended this to the notion of ‘genre system’ – ‘the full set of genres that instantiate the participation of all the parties’ (ibid., p.
99), including those outside the professional community, such as clients and government organizations (Swales, 2004, uses the term
‘genre network’ here). Genres are also seen as inherently dynamic and subject to change, in response to the changing needs of the
discourse community (Miller 1984, Yates and Orlikowski 1992, Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995). Therefore, it is possible to study genre
‘evolution’ (Berkenkotter 2008), as Yates and Orlikowski (1991) do in tracing how the memo genre evolved from the business letter in
the nineteenth century to be transmitted eventually via electronic mail in the twentieth century.
The social constructionist perspective has shifted the emphasis away from seeing genres as inherently stable and self-contained to
recognizing the fl uidity and interconnectedness of genres, as seen for example in recent work by Swales (2004) and Bhatia (2004), who
examine such notions as genre networks, genre sets or genre colonies. Another instance of this fl uidity of genre is the overlap that exists
between related genres, or the diffi culty at times in establishing which genre is being enacted in a particular text or activity. For
19 Workplace Discourse

example, Bhatia (2004) notes that certain genres, such as book reviews and company reports are partly promotional and partly
informational. Should they therefore be considered as promotional or informational genres? Two ways of approaching this kind of
gradation and overlap between genres have been proposed in the work of Bhatia (2004) and McCarthy (1998).
Bhatia (2004, pp. 57–84) proposes the idea of ‘genre colonies’, which are grouping of closely related genres that largely share a
communicative purpose, but are different in a number of respects, such as discipline, profession, contexts of use or participant
relationships. One such colony relevant to workplace discourse is the colony of promotional genres. Some genres in a colony are more
typical representatives of the genre than others, and are therefore ‘primary members’. Primary members in the colony of promotional
genres include advertisements, promotional letters, job applications and book blurbs, as these have the primary communicative purpose
of ‘promoting a product or service to a potential customer’ (Bhatia 2004, p. 60). ‘Secondary’ members of the colony would not be
classifi ed as advertisements, but have a strong promotional concern, for example fundraising letters or travel brochures. Finally, there
are ‘peripheral’ genres, which are ‘mixed’ in terms of their communicative purpose; for example book reviews and company reports are
partly promotional, partly informational. Such peripheral members may be primary members of another genre colony, for example
annual company reports, which can be described as belonging primarily to the colony of reporting genres (ibid., p. 62). Promotional
genres which are widely used in the world of work include advertisements, job applications and sales promotion letters. Another genre
colony described by Bhatia is that of reporting genres, which are used in almost any domain of work, for example business reports (e.g.
annual reports, feasibility reports) police reports and medical reports.
While Bhatia proposes viewing the overlap between related genres on the basis of family resemblance, McCarthy (1998) examines
how different variables or dimensions combine to form specifi c genres, and how small changes in these variables result in genre shift.
This approach was used as a classifi catory scheme to set up the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus Discourse in English (CANCODE),
a corpus of spoken English mainly targeting everyday speech, but also including some professional and workplace interactions. The two
main dimensions according to which all the interactions were classifi ed are goal type and context. Three general goal types were identifi
ed: collaborative task, collaborative idea and information provision; and fi ve contexts, based on the type of relationship between the
participants: transactional, professional, pedagogical, socializing and intimate.
McCarthy (ibid., pp. 38–46) shows how shifts in goal or sub-goal type and in the relationship between the participants (including the
the degree of intimacy and shared knowledge) and other contextual features (e.g. the physical environment) results in more or less subtle
changes to the specifi c genre being performed. For example, two decision-making or planning encounters (a subgoal type of
collaborative task) from two different contexts (‘intimate’ and ‘professional’) are compared: one involving a family planning holiday and
the other a planning meeting in a publishing company. The two encounters are surprisingly similar in terms of the contextual variables:
the setting is informal and the degree of shared knowledge is high. However, there are subtle differences in these contextual variables
and in the goals which result in the professional encounter having more indirect language, less deixis and a slightly higher lexical
density. Most signifi cantly, the participants in the planning meeting must orient to institutional deadlines and targets, which is obviously
not the case in planning a family holiday. Balancing these goals, with relational concerns (or ‘face work’) results in the use of more
indirect language in the publisher’s meeting, for example (in talking about numbers of reprints for a title):

Example 2.1

can you just fi ll me in again [<S01>mm] just very quickly [<S01>mm] how many and when are they likely to hit me.
(from McCarthy 1998, p. 44, extract from CANCODE, © Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission)

The use of hedges and vague language (‘just’, ‘very quickly’, ‘likely to’) make the request more indirect, and may thus serve to mitigate
any perceived threats to workplace relationships which institutional imperatives could represent (see Chapter 4.2). Such mitigation is not
usually necessary in intimate situations, such as planning a family holiday. Thus the two encounters can either be considered to belong to
the same or to different genres, depending on the specifi city of generic description. Importantly, the model allows a specifi c description
of how related genres vary according to the two dimensions of goal type and context. Two of the CANCODE context types
(‘transactional’, which involves mainly service encounters, and ‘professional’) are particularly relevant for workplace discourse, but the
model also shows how ‘everyday’ genres used in intimate or social contexts are related to professional or workplace genres.
The latter is an important point, as the professional genres that have been described in the literature are frequently fairly specialized
and conventionalized, such as the genre set used by tax accountants: transmittal letters, research memoranda, tax protests, to name just a
few (Devitt 1991). These are genres for which the discourse community has a name and often explicit structural conventions.
McCarthy’s (1998) comparison of the intimate and professional CANCODE data reminds us that not all workplace communication,
especially if it is spoken, involves such formalized genres, but may nevertheless display generic patterning according to the transactional
goal of the encounter, for example instruction-giving, decision-making, planning or reporting. These are what Bakhtin (1986) calls
‘primary’ genres, that is genres which occur in ‘unmediated conversation’; in contrast to ‘secondary’ genres, which are instances of
highly developed and organized cultural communication and are primarily written (ibid., p. 62). Not all descriptions accord the status of
‘genre’ to such primary genres: Bhatia (2004, pp. 59–60) refers to instructions, descriptions, narratives etc. as ‘generic values’ or
‘rhetorical acts’, and notes that genres are realized through a combination of such acts. Müller (2006a) makes a similar point when he
says that genres are made up of ‘communicative forms’ – smaller patterns similar to Levinson’s (1992) ‘activity types’. It is certainly
true that more complex secondary genres are not confi ned to single rhetorical acts; for example Bhatia notes that promotional genres
draw on descriptions and evaluations. Nevertheless, I would like to retain the label of genre for such primary genres, as they can be
described according to the two main identifying features of genre: communicative purpose and formal/ structural characteristics.
 Workplace Genres 20

Another aspect of the question of what should ‘count’ as genre, is the level of generality of the generic description. Is the business
letter a genre, or is this too general a category to allow generic description, for example, in terms of communicative purpose or rhetorical
structure? Yates and Orlikowski (1992, p. 303), who are concerned specifi cally with genres of organizational communication, take the
view that it is possible for genres to be either very general or very specifi c, as long as ‘a recurrent situation, a common subject . . . and
common formal features’ can be identifi ed. Genres thus exist at various levels of abstraction:

the business letter and the meeting might at one point be genres, whereas at another point, these types of communication might be
considered too general and the recommendation letter or the personnel committee meeting might better capture the social sense of
recurrent situation. (ibid.).

Therefore, more general genres can be viewed as having sub-genres, which might in turn have even more specifi c sub-genres, for
example (ibid., pp. 303–304):

business letter
↓
letter of recommendation ↓
positive letter of recommendation
Bhatia’s (2004) genre colonies are also composed of such genres and subgenres, for example within the genre of advertisements, a
promotional genre, we can identify sub-genres such as print advertisements, radio advertisements, TV commercials.
In addition to different levels of abstraction, genres can also be distinguished in terms of their ‘normative scope’ (Yates and
Orlikowski 1992, p. 304); that is the extent to which they are shared across society. Yates and Orlikowski identify fi ve levels of
normative scope:

a. existence in most societies

b. existence in particular societies or cultures
c. use in certain occupations and industries
d. use in particular organizations or corporate cultures
e. use in particular intra-organizational groups, for example departments or teams

Business letters and memos, for example, are used in most industrial societies (level a), whereas legal cases are specifi c to the legal
profession (level c).
The notion of genre can thus be approached from a number of different angles; genres can be viewed as multi-layered, and it is
possible to investigate them at a number of different ‘levels’. From this complex multi-layering, two broadly different ways of
approaching the investigation of workplace genres can be discerned. One is to take a more broad brush approach, where genre is viewed
at a more general level of abstraction, and examine genres which recur across a range of organizations and/or professions. The other is to
narrow the focus to more specialized genres, which may be specifi c to particular professions or even to particular workplaces. The most
narrow focus would involve a case study of all the genres used in one particular organization. Both approaches have certain benefi ts.
With the fi rst approach, genres can be compared across workplaces, and thus common general characteristics can be identifi ed. With
the second, more focused approach, the emphasis shifts from identifying the formal and linguistic characteristics of a genre to examining
how genres are embedded in their social context and how the genres used in a workplace or profession interact with one another.
The chapter is organized around these two approaches to examining workplace genres. First we review some genres which are very
widespread and seem to play a key role in workplace communication, for example meetings, decisionmaking or business
correspondence. Then, we turn to the use of genres within particular professions or organizations.

2.2 Recurring or widespread genres in the workplace

What then are the main genres to recur across a range of workplace contexts and professions? Genre analysts have tended to avoid
devising taxonomies of genre, and, as Askehave and Swales (2001, p. 196) note, any such taxonomic schemes, such as Martin and
Rothery’s (1981) ‘six elemental genres’ have been controversial. The same reluctance to categorize genre is evident in studies of
workplace genre. An exception to this is Müller’s (2006a, 2006b) proposal that there are eight (spoken) communicative genres in
industrial organizations:

1. private conversations
2. contact conversations
3. presentation talks
4. training talks
5. evaluation (appraisal) conversations
6. planning conversations
7. crisis conversations
8. analysis talks
21 Workplace Discourse

Müller’s list of eight genres overlaps to a large extent with the genres identifi ed in my own research on spoken workplace
communication (Koester 2006). Müller (2006b, pp. 150–152) stresses that this list does not represent a complete taxonomy of workplace
genres, but is an ‘open inventory’ based on a corpus of meetings recorded in three factories (in Germany, France and Spain) belonging to
a multinational company. Similarly, the genre set I identifi ed is not exhaustive, but results from an attempt to categorize the recurring
communicative events identifi ed across a range of offi ce environments in the North America and Britain. The offi ces were in a variety
of organizations and business sectors, including higher education, publishing, the paper trade, advertising and retail (Koester 2006.).
From approximately 30 hours of audio-recorded data, a smaller data set was transcribed, and a corpus consisting of 66 conversations or
generic stretches of talk and totalling 34,000 words was compiled (the Corpus of American and British Offi ce Talk, or ABOT). In order
to establish the genre categories for the corpus, linguistic evidence of speakers’ goals, identifi ed through qualitative analysis, was used
to pick out recurring genres and organize exemplars of these into sub-corpora (see Koester 2006, chapters 2 and 3). The following genres
were identifi ed, and grouped into three ‘macrogenres’:

1. Unidirectional genres
z Procedural and directive discourse z Briefi ng z Service encounters z
Reporting z Requesting
2. Collaborative genres
z Decision-making z Arrangements z Discussing and evaluating
3. Non-transactional genres
z Small talk z Offi ce gossip

Unidirectional genres involve a discursively dominant speaker imparting information or instructing/directing another participant; in
collaborative genres, participants contribute more or less equally to the discourse. The genres grouped under unidirectional and
collaborative discourse are all transactional, that is work-oriented; whereas non-transactional genres are not concerned with performing
workplace tasks, but involve topics outside work (‘small talk’) and off-task talk about work (‘offi ce gossip’). The most frequently-
occurring genres were decision-making, and procedural/directive discourse, making up 26 and 15 per cent of the corpus respectively.
It is interesting that many of the genres which make up the ABOT corpus are similar to the genres identifi ed by Müller (2006a,
2006b), although Müller’s data was collected in different countries, quite different workplace environments (factories rather than offi
ces), and the participants spoke German, French and Spanish, rather than English. This seems to indicate that many of these genres are
very widespread indeed in spoken workplace communication. Table 2.1 shows the overlap between Müller’s eight genres and genres
identifi ed in the ABOT Corpus.

2.2.1 Decision-making or meetings?

One glaring omission from the above two lists of spoken workplace genres is business meetings, which clearly play a key role in most
workplace settings, and

Table 2.1
Müller’s 8 genres (2006a) Similar genres identifi ed in the ABOT Corpus
(Koester 2006)
(1) private conversations non-transactional genres
(2) contact conversations —
(3) presentation talks —
(4) training talks procedural and directive discourse
(5) evaluation (appraisal) conversations —
(6) planning conversations decision-making/arrangements
(7) crisis conversations
(8) analysis talks discussing and evaluating
have been extensively described in the literature on workplace discourse (Boden 1994, Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997b, Poncini
2002, Holmes and Stubbe 2003). Although many of the encounters in the ABOT Corpus (and also in Müller’s corpus) take place in the
context of meetings, meetings are not treated as genres. This is because meetings can have a variety of purposes, for example planning,
problem-solving, reporting (Holmes and Stubbe 2003), and thus cannot be described as constituting a genre, if one takes a goal-based
defi nition of genre (see Koester 2006). Müller’s genre categories are also largely derived on the basis of communicative goal; or, more
specifi cally, the reason (‘Anlass’) for the interaction together with the participant roles (‘Teilnehmer’) constitute the genre (2006b, p.
149).1 Handford (2007, forthcoming), on the other hand, argues that communicative goal should not be the sole criterion for defi ning
genre, but that structural features, in combination with particular practices and strategies, should be taken into account as well, and that
therefore the business meeting can be viewed as a genre. Structure is clearly an important aspect of genre, whether a defi ning feature or
not, and as Handford points out, meetings do have clear beginnings and endings, whereas the same is not necessarily true of activities
 Workplace Genres 22

like decision-making. Decision-making may be ‘invisible’ in organizations, as it is often ‘incremental and fragmentary’ (Boden 1994, p
183), or it may actually take place outside the meetings where the issues are discussed (Handford 2007).
Nevertheless, there is ample evidence in both the ABOT Corpus and the
Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus (CANBEC), 2 used in Handford’s study, that decision-making is a key activity in
workplace discourse; accounting for over 25 per cent of the entire ABOT Corpus. Whether or not a decision is reached in the actual
encounter, a large proportion of spoken workplace communication seems to involve people actively engaging in verbal decision-making
(Willing 1992, McCarthy and Handford 2004). The following two extracts involve decision-making in quite different workplace settings,
but they are strikingly similar in terms of the linguistic and interactive features they share (these are underlined in the examples).
Example 2.2 is from a small family-run business, and involves two colleagues discussing some problems with their accounts, whereas
example 2.3 is from the meeting of a medical team in the nursing-home care unit of a hospital (both data samples are from North
America).

Example 2.2: Discussing problems with accounts

(1) Chris But– I think the– it seems to me that what we need to do on those →
(2) Amy ⎣But–
(3) Chris → is is . . . basically make our– →
(4) Amy ⎣/say– tell ‘em/ we’re gonna start charging an interest (5) Chris ↑Yeah make– make the interest provision
stick. It’s there already.
(6) Amy ⎣make our interest
(7) Amy Right
(8) Becky An’ that’s /??/–
(9) Amy ⎣We just need the systems to make it do that.

Example 2.3: Discussing patient treatment plan

(1) Ellie: I have a problem with this care plan

(2) Barbara: Yeah go ahead
(3) Ellie: We’re saying he has self total self-care defi cit then she’s saying he’s able to eat . . . has the ability to eat and does so
effectively then why are we saying total self-care defi cit?
(4) Barbara: You’re right if it’s self-care defi cit . . .
(5) Ellie: We’re contradicting ourselves!
(6) Barbara: and we need . . . and we need . . . and we need . . .
(7) Laura: Yeah
(8) Barbara: . . . to identify the . . .
(9) Laura: Mobility mobility umm
(Cook-Gumperz and Messerman 1999, pp. 159–160)

In both encounters, speakers make suggestions how to deal with a particular problem, for example ‘it seems to me . . . , we need (to) . .
.’. The language used is quite direct, with frequent use of the deontic modal verb ‘need’, and unhedged agreement/disagreement and
expression of opinion, for example:

z Yeah z Right z I have a problem with . . .

z We’re contradicting ourselves z You’re right

The discourse is highly collaborative, with speakers interrupting each other and jointly putting forward proposals. These examples seem
to indicate that it is possible to identify decision-making in terms of its formal linguistic and intera ctive properties, as well as its overall
goal orientation (see also Chapter 3, p. 62).
There is clearly a large overlap between meetings and decision-making discourse. In discussing data from the Wellington Language in
the Workplace Project, Holmes and Stubbe (2003, p. 75) note that ‘in many meetings it was important for those involved to reach
decisions on issues, and indeed in some cases this was the primary function of the meeting’. Handford (2007, pp. 249–256) points out
that the role of decision-making in meetings may be infl uenced by the relationship of the participants. Overall, there is more linguistic
evidence in CANBEC of problem-solving and decision-making discourse (e.g. the use of the words ‘problem’ and ‘issue’) in company-
internal meetings than in external meetings (meetings between different companies). External meetings often involved reporting about
decisions already made or discussing such decisions in some way. In internal meetings, decision-making was often the focus in meetings
between peers, especially in strategic meetings; whereas meetings between managers and subordinates frequently involved handing
down decisions made by upper management. However, Cook-Gumperz, and Messerman,
(1999) point out that there is not always a straightforward relationship between decision-making and status. In the medical team
meetings exemplifi ed in extract 2.3, it is regularly the lower status members, such as the social worker (Barbara in example 2.3 above)
23 Workplace Discourse

or dieticians, who play a key role in deciding what goes in the medical records. In the ABOT Corpus, it is also the case that those driving
the decision-making process are not always the most senior in status, and more generally there is evidence that in collaborative discourse
differences in status play a less important role than in unidirectional discourse (see Chapter 4).
The advantage of decision-making as a genre category is that the linguistic characteristics of decision-making discourse linked to the
discourse goals (e.g. the use of deontic modals like ‘need’) can be more easily described than those of meetings, where the goals may be
more diverse. This means genres can be compared easily across workplace contexts. On the other hand, meetings have a spatio-temporal
reality within the workplace context, and ‘meetings’ as a genre label has the advantage of being recognized by its users. Perhaps another
way of looking at the difference between decision-making and meetings as generic categories (besides the goal-based versus structure-
based defi nitions), is to see decision-making as a primary genre, which also occurs in nonworkplace contexts (as seen in the discussion
above of the CANCODE data), and meetings as a secondary genre with a recognized cultural identity in the workplace.

2.2.2 The structure of meetings

Most descriptions of meetings have tended to identify a three-part generic structure, for example, Bargiela-Chiappini, and Harris (1995)
found that both British and Italian management meetings could be divided into the following phases:

1. Opening Phase
2. Debating Phase
3. Closing Phase

Holmes and Stubbe (2003) propose a similar three-part structure, but label the second phase ‘exploratory’. Handford (2007,
forthcoming) elaborates on this three-phase model and proposes further stages which take into account the preparation leading up to a
meeting and what happens as a result of the meeting:

Stage pre-2: Meeting preparation

Stage pre-1: Pre meeting
(transition move)
Stage 1: Meeting coheres
(transition move)
Stage 2: Discussion of the agenda/topic
(transition move)
Stage 3: Closing of meeting
Stage 4: Post-meeting effects

The pre-meeting involves any talk (often phatic) that occurs before the offi cial start of the meeting. The fi rst and the last stages
(meeting preparation and post-meeting effects) are different from the other four, as they do not describe specifi c interactive events; but
including these in the model recognizes the fact that meetings do not ‘exist in a vacuum’ but are in fact highly intertextual (Handford
2007, p. 319). Handford argues that the model should also take account of the turn-by-turn nature of meetings, and therefore includes a
transition move between three of the stages as shown above. For example to signal the transition between the pre-meeting stage and
stage 1, the chair may say something like: ‘okay well we might just start without Seth’ (from Holmes and Stubbe 2003, p. 57).
The core stage of a meeting – the discussion of the agenda/topic – consists of several phases, which tend to follow either a linear or a
‘spiral’ pattern, as identifi ed by Holmes and Stubbe (2003, pp. 68–71). In a meeting following a linear pattern, each problem is dealt
with before moving on to the next; if it has a spiral pattern, a point may recur several times with further discussion. Meetings, or stages
of meetings, with a decision-focus tend to have a spiral pattern, whereas information exchange meetings (typically between managers
and subordinates) tend to be more linear (Handford 2007). Handford shows that there is considerable variety in how/whether each of the
stages is realized and how developed it is. Some of the factors which seem to have an infl uence here include the regularity of the
meeting, whether the meeting is internal or external and what the relationship between the participants is. For example, in regular
internal meetings, stage 1 (meeting coheres) tends to be quite short and perfunctory (ibid., p. 321).

2.2.3 Service encounters

Service encounters comprise another genre occurring in the ABOT Corpus which is quite widespread in institutional and workplace
discourse, and has received considerable attention in the literature. Service encounters are ‘front stage’ activities (see Chapter 1.3),
frequently involving interactions between service providers and the general public, for example retail sales. Some of the foundational
studies in genre analysis were based on market transactions (Mitchell 1957/75) and small shop encounters (Hasan 1985), and other retail
settings examined include encounters in bookshops (Aston 1988) and at the supermarket checkout (Kuiper and Flindall 2000). The
leisure industry has also received some attention, for example service encounters in travel agencies (Ventola 1987, Coupland and
Ylänne-McEwen 2000, Ylänne-McEwen 2004), in restaurants (Merritt 1976) and at the front desk of hotels (Schneider 1989, Cheng
2004). Many service encounters take place over the telephone, particularly with the growth of call centres, which have been the focus of
 Workplace Genres 24

a number of studies (Cameron 2000, Cheepen 2000, Taylor and Bain 2003). Telephone calls may also be initiated by customers, as for
example in the case of calls to emergency services (Zimmerman 1992), or queries regarding bills or banking, for example Iacobucci’s
(1990) study of customer’s calls to the telephone company regarding their phone bills. Besides such interactions between lay people and
professionals, service encounters also take place between companies or professionals, for example the commodity trading studied by
Firth (1995a and 1995b), or the encounters between wholesale paper sellers and their customers that form part of the ABOT corpus.
With such a diversity of encounter types and settings, does it make sense to think of the category of service encounters as constituting
a genre with a common communicative purpose and having particular structural features? There are at least two factors which can be
said to be common to all service encounters. First, the roles of service provider and customer (or service receiver) are constants in all
service encounters. Secondly, the main transactional goal of such encounters is that of giving or obtaining a service of some kind,
whether it be transacting actual goods or services, or simply obtaining information.
However, specifying the structural features of the genre is not straightforward. Hasan (1985) described the ‘generic structure potential’
of service encounters as consisting of certain ‘obligatory’ and ‘optional’ moves or elements:

z Obligatory elements: sales request, sales compliance, sale, purchase, purchase closure
z Optional elements: greeting, sales initiation, sales enquiry, fi nis

However, positing that all the above moves are obligatory is problematic, as Ventola (1987) points out, as there are clearly many service
encounters which do not include an actual transaction in the form of a sale and a purchase. For instance, frequently customers may only
make an enquiry of some kind, but the interaction is nevertheless still a service encounter. One could say that at a minimum all service
encounters will include a service request and a service compliance of some kind, but this does not really tell us very much about an
encounter. In fact, focusing too much on structure may mean missing what is most interesting about the encounter, and indeed many
studies have examined other aspects of service encounters. For example, Goodwin (1995) looked at how teams working in the
operations room of an airport collaboratively construct responses to queries from pilots of incoming fl ights. Zimmerman’s (1992) study
of calls to emergency services examined the sometimes diffi cult task of achieving alignment with callers in order to get the required
information.
Furthermore, many service encounters include a substantial amount of relational talk, in addition to the transactional elements, as a
number of studies have shown. McCarthy (2000) describes ‘close contact service encounters’ in hair-dressing salons and during driving
lessons, where server and client are in close physical proximity for an extended period, and shows that relational talk is prominent in
such interactions, with transactional elements only making up a small portion of the talk. McCarthy convincingly demonstrates that
relational talk plays a key role in such service encounters, and other studies have also focused on the role of small talk and other
relational elements of talk in some service encounters, for example travel agency interactions (Coupland and Ylänne-McEwen 2000,
Ylänne-McEwen 2004) and supermarket checkout talk (Cheepen 2000).
The presence or absence of relational talk in service encounters clearly has a great deal to do with the nature of the service encounter,
for example, small talk is unlikely in a situation where participants must focus exclusively on the task at hand, for example in responding
to an emergency call. But, the nature of the relationship between server and client is also an important factor: whether they are strangers
or have occasional or even regular contact with one another. Where there is a relationship to build or maintain, attention to relational
aspects of the interaction will be more important than if it is a one-off encounter. For example, Ylänne-McEwen (1996) found that, in
travel agency encounters, the level of acquaintance between server and client played a role in the occurrence of relational talk. 3 Where
there is no relationship to maintain, transactional elements of the genre may dominate, with phatic elements limited to greetings and
thanking, as for example in the beginning of a service encounter at the front desk of a university offi ce in example 2.4 (which we have
already seen in Chapter 1, example 1.2):

Example 2.4:

(1) Visitor /(Hi)/ (2) Server Hello.

(3) Visitor Um . . . (5 sec) Is there a list of . . . uhm . . . faculty assistants?
[1 sec] in the handbook or something like that? I need to try
and /???/
(4) Server ⎣No:, there isn’t a list in the handbook, I have a . . . typewritten
list here,
(5) Visitor Wow. thank you very much.
In such interactions, the participants exclusively enact their pre-established roles as server and servee, but if a relationship has already
been established, they may step out of these roles and interact on a more personal level. Example 2.5 shows a small talk sequence from
another service encounter in a university offi ce – here between a student and two secretaries involving an enquiry about the student’s
user name. In the relational talk shown, the participants refer to a previous encounter with the student, in which she had left some food
for her mother’s birthday dinner in the English offi ce for the secretaries to ‘look after’.

Example 2.5:

(1) Liz Did your mum like her dinner.

(2) Jenny Yeah hehehe
25 Workplace Discourse

(3) Susan I know it was a while ago,

(4) Liz She’d been-She’d been to Sainsbury’s hadn’t she.
(5) Jenny Hehehehe Yeah /??/
(6) Liz ⎣ And she was cooking dinner for her mum.
[3]
(7) Susan ↑ Oh was it for your mum. I didn’t realize that.
(8) Liz ⎣ Yeah,
(9) Liz For your mum’s birthday.

Here the asymmetry of the service encounter and the attendant institutional roles are temporarily suspended and participants interact as
equals, referring to common ground and to the relationship that already exists between them (see also Ylänne-McEwen 2004). This
relational episode occurs in the middle of the transactional encounter, effectively interrupting the service provision.
Where, on the other hand, there is a relationship, but it is not well-established, evidence from the ABOT Corpus suggests that phatic
communion occurring at the beginning and end of encounters is particularly prevalent in workplace encounters (Koester 2006, p. 142,
see also Laver 1975). One striking example of this is a service encounter involving a meeting between a supplier and customer, where
the small talk at the beginning and end of the meeting take up 18 and 8 turns respectively. What may play a particularly important role in
service encounters is the power difference that often exists between server/supplier and customer, which seems to result in a
predominance of negative politeness (see Chapter 4.2), characterized by a large amount of hedging and indirect language, as is the case
in the above-mentioned customer-supplier meeting (key language is underlined):

Example 2.6

(1) Ian Uh ↓ Just wanted to come and chat to you a little bit about the company. /’Cause the-/ paper brokers have changed a little bit,
(2) Paul Oh yeah? What you been up to then
(3) Ian Uh:m . . . Well I– I did quite a bit with Danny Murphy and ⎣<Paul>: Mm⎦ Bob Green. Um centrally. And uh . . . we used to
do quite a bit- with you as well. ↓Uh:m . . . /but at least i- /

This exchange marks the transition from the 18 turns of initial small talk to the actual business of the meeting, and it is marked by
extensive hedging on the part of the supplier, Paul: ‘just wanted to’, ‘a little bit’, ‘quite a bit’.
Another type of service encounter in which such negative politeness is important is in interactions at the front desk of a hotel. Cheng’s
(2004) analysis of in a number of checking out encounters in Hong Kong hotels revealed that Chinese front desk staff interacting in
English with international clients sometimes failed to display the expected degree of negative politeness, thus falling short of the level of
service stipulated by the hotels’ mission statement:

Only six [of eleven] checking out discourses clearly communicate a message of customer care and concern for providing “impeccable
service” that is so central to the mission of the hotel. (Cheng 2004, p. 157)

The role played by relational talk is of course an important topic for most workplace genres (see Koester 2004b and 2006). But, because
there is such a range in the possible social distance between servers and clients (as compared, for example with workplace colleagues,
where a certain level of familiarity can be assumed), the discursive shape of service encounters may be particularly diverse as a result.
One objection to viewing service encounters as genres could be the argument that different types of discursive activity can take place
within a service encounter setting. For example, service encounters between companies often involve protracted negotiations, which
could be considered a different genre entirely (Firth 1995a and 1995b). Ylänne-McEwen (1996) takes a bottom-up approach to analysing
travel agency encounters, looking at the local management of the discourse and the goals the participants are orienting to, rather than
classifying such discourse a priori as a service encounter.4 Therefore, an interaction can be considered to constitute a service encounter if
the main transactional goal is that of giving or obtaining a service or information. Taking a bottom-up approach allows for the possibility
that more than one genre may be performed in the course of an interaction, for example the customersupplier encounter from the ABOT
Corpus mentioned above mostly involves service provision, but does contain some elements of negotiation.

2.2.4 E-mail
Turning to written workplace genres, various forms of business correspondence, particularly letters, faxes and e-mail are central to the
work of any organization.
Over the last decade or so, e-mail as emerged as an important – or perhaps even the most important – means of communication in the
workplace. But can it be considered a genre? In their seminal study of genres of organizational communication, Yates and Orlikowski
(1992) identify e-mail as being a medium, not a genre. They stress that the distinction between medium and genre is an important one:

Media are the physical means by which communication is created, transmitted or stored. Genres are typifi ed communicative actions
invoked in recurrent situations and characterized by similar substance and form. (p. 319)
 Workplace Genres 26

However, they acknowledge that the medium may play a role in the recurrent situation and form of a genre. On the one hand, the
recurrent situation may involve the use of a specifi c medium, for example, an e-mail message typically evokes an e-mail response; and
on the other hand, the medium can be an aspect of a genre’s form, for example letters are traditionally paper-based (ibid., p. 310).
Other studies, even some which build on Yates and Orlikowski’s work (Mullholand 1999, Nickerson 1999), treat e-mail as a genre in
its own right. In examining e-mail as a genre in a Dutch multinational corporation, Nickerson (1999) invokes the conventional
association of genre with a medium discussed by Yates and Orlikowski. She suggests that it may be possible to identify a common
communicative purpose for e-mails, citing a number of studies (Sherblom 1988, Markus 1994, Ziv 1996) which show that e-mail seems
to be used primarily to exchange information in organizational settings (ibid., p. 40); whereas other media, for example face-to-face
communication, may be chosen for other purposes which do not involve the straightforward exchange of information. Nickerson’s study
examines the use of English in the Dutch multinational as an aspect of the ‘form’ of the genre, resulting from the recurrent situation in
which it is used (ibid., p. 42). Mulholland (1999) also views e-mail as a genre, but notes that as people learn to use e-mail by ‘trial and
error’, they are infl uenced by other ‘companion genres’ (such as letters and memoranda), and that therefore, e-mail draws on features of
other genres. (ibid., p. 58).
There are also different theories about the origins of e-mail. According to Yates and Orlikowski (1992), e-mail has evolved from the
genre of written memos, but they note that the medium of e-mail may also be used for more ‘ephemeral’ types of messages which
resemble other genres, such as voice mail (ibid., p. 317). According to Gimenez (2000), e-mail is derived from telephone conversations,
and therefore has many features of spoken language, such as simple syntax, reliance on context, elliptical forms and informal language.
Louhiala-Salminen (1999) suggests that new demands in today’s business environment, such as the need to communicate across time
zones, results in the choice of e-mail and fax for types of communication that might have been done via the telephone previously. There
seems to be general agreement in most studies that e-mail is infl uenced by both written and spoken genres, and is therefore a kind of
‘hybrid’ genre (Yates and Orlikowski 1992, Mullholland 1999, Louhiala-Salminen 1999).
However, a number of studies examining specifi c types of e-mail communication throw doubt on the notion that a common
communicative purpose can be identifi ed for all e-mail. A recent study by Jensen (2009) on professional e-mail negotiation would seem
to strengthen the case for seeing e-mail as a medium rather than a genre, as such interactions clearly have more in common with face-to-
face negotiations than with other types of e-mail communication, such as internal messages, where the focus is on conveying
information.
Gimenez (2006) discusses the phenomenon of ‘embedded’ e-mails, where a series of messages sent back and forth results in a chain of
textually connected messages. Such embedded e-mails seem to fulfi l a particular need in a globalized business environment, as ‘the
appropriate communication tool when the complexity of the topic being discussed by a geographically dispersed team calls for team
decision-making’ (ibid., p. 162). This is clearly quite a different communicative purpose from the one of simple information exchange
identifi ed by Nickerson (1999). What Gimenez seems to be describing is a particular genre of e-mail with specifi c formal and structural
features that all contribute to the overall communicative purpose. In terms of structure, an embedded e-mail begins with a ‘chain
initiator’, followed by one or several embedded messages and concludes with a ‘chain terminator’. Other key formal features of the
genre are the carbon copy (CC) and forward (FW) facilities, which allow messages to be sent to several participants and passed from
recipient to recipient. This enables multiple participation in the decision-making process, with different levels of participation of the
recipients: some of them actively involved and others as ‘witnesses’ of the process (Gimenez 2006, pp. 161–162).
Gimenez (ibid.) is mainly concerned with showing how e-mail has changed in response to a changing business environment involving
new demands on communication, namely the need to make decisions in geographically dispersed teams and to keep a written record of
the process. What all studies of e-mail do seem to agree on is that e-mail communication is the site par excellence for examining genre
change or evolution in organizational settings. Many studies highlight the emergent nature of e-mail and faxes, such as the lack of
standardization, which leads to much more variation, for example in the level of formality, when compared with letters or memos
(Mullholland 1999, Louhiala-Salminen 1999, Koester 2004a). Yates and Orlikowski (1992), Orlikowski et al. (1995) and Yates et al.
(1999) examine e-mail and other forms of electronic communication to illustrate the process of genre change, and the way in which
genre both shapes and is shaped by communicative practice in organizations. For example, Orlikowski et al. (1995) show how specifi c
individuals (so-called mediators) infl uence the adoption of new computer-mediated modes of communication in an organization.
A diachronic examination of the studies of e-mail communication provides a telling illustration in itself of the way in which e-mail has
evolved from an electronic medium for conveying information, such as company-internal memos (Yates and Orlikowski 1992) to a much
more versatile tool used for a variety of purposes, including decision-making (Gimenez 2006) and negotiation (Jensen 2009). With the
increased use of e-mail and other forms of electronically mediated communication, such as newsgroups and business networking, for a
wide variety of communicative purposes, it seems more accurate to speak of genres of e-mail and other forms of electronic
communication, as Yates et al. (1999) do, rather than e-mail as a genre. For example, in analysing messages posted on a Japanese
company-internal electronic news system, Yates et al. (1999) identify six different genres, including offi cial announcement, trip report,
and lost and found notices.
But whether or not e-mail is treated as a genre in its own right, it exemplifi es two important aspects of genres in today’s workplace:
(1) the rapid evolution of the genres that are used, and (2) the increasing hybridity of many genres. A further, related aspect of e-mail
which is discussed in a number of studies is that it is not used in isolation, but in conjunction with other written and spoken genres.
Gimenez (2006, p. 164) notes that embedded emails are often used in conjunction with conference calls, and Louhiala-Salminen (2002,
p. 217) talks of the ‘interwining’ of email communication with phone calls in dealing with a particular problem in the course of a
manager’s day. This interaction of workplace genres with one another is the subject of the remainder of this chapter.
27 Workplace Discourse

2.3 The use of genres within organizations

Workplace genres do not of course exist in isolation, but the discourse community, whether at the organizational or professional level,
uses a ‘genre repertoire’ (Orlikowski and Yates 2004). Looking at the kinds of genre used within different workplace contexts, a very
general distinction can be made regarding such genre sets or repertoires. In some professions, such as the legal professions and tax
accounting, written texts play a key role. The work carried out by professionals in these fi elds consists in producing texts, and texts thus
essentially constitute and defi ne the work (Devitt 1991). In many other jobs, the work is carried out less (or less exclusively) through
written texts, and more through a process of collaborative tasks. Verbal communication may interact with material resources or
‘artefacts’ (Goodwin 1995) that people use in their work (charts, forms, lab equipment, electronic devices etc.); or the work itself may be
constituted mainly through non-verbal action (as in the case of manual labour), and language may merely accompany the task. This kind
of language has been referred to as ‘language-in-action’ (Ure 1971). Of course, even in professions which are heavily text-based, such as
tax accounting, verbal genres will still be used; for example, tax accountants will have meetings or telephone conversations with clients.
Both written and spoken genres are used in all workplaces, but in some professions written texts play a much greater role than in others.
Written and spoken workplace genres also interact with one another, for example, meetings are minuted or medical records are produced
as a result of verbal consultations. This relationship, or intertextuality, between written and spoken genres will also be examined, as well
as the relationship between genre and ‘material artefacts’ (Goodwin 1995) or ‘tools’ (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995) 5 that are used in
their enactment.

2.3.1 Text-based genres

Devitt’s (1991) much cited study of the range of written genres used by tax accountants illustrates the way in which a genre set is used
by a professional group in the course of its daily work routine and how these genres are part and parcel of the discourse community’s
values and epistemology. Texts are central to the work of tax accountants, as they are both the resources and the products of this
profession. Texts are its products, as tax accountants charge fees for the texts they write for their clients. They are also its resource, as
other texts, such as tax returns or letters from the tax authority, are the subject of the texts they write, and texts, such as tax publications,
provide the authority for what the accountants write. Devitt concludes that,

These texts and their interaction are so integral to the community’s work that they essentially constitute and govern the tax accounting
community, defi ning and refl ecting that community’s epistemology and values. (ibid., pp. 336–357)

Other professions in which one can expect written texts to play such an essential, enabling role are law and academia (ibid., p. 344). In
his work on research genres, Swales (2004) examines how different academic genres are linked to one another through hierarchies, sets,
chains and networks. According to Swales, ‘genre networks’ are ‘the totality of genres available for a particular sector (such as the
research world)’ (ibid., p. 22), whereas ‘genre sets’ are ‘the total genre network that a particular individual – or . . . class of individuals –
engages in’ (ibid., p. 20). Studying ‘genre hierarchies’, reveals those genres which are most highly valued in different academic
disciplines, which may be, for example, the research article, research monograph or conference presentation, depending on the discipline
(ibid, pp. 12–18). ‘Genre chains’ consist of a series of genres which are chronologically linked to one another, in that ‘one genre is a
necessary antecedent for another’ (ibid., p. 18), as for example proposals for conference papers or research articles, which go through a
review and redrafting process before the presentation of the conference paper or the publication of the article. The chain may consist
entirely of written texts, as in the case of a research article, but even an oral genre like the conference presentation (which in some cases
is a written text read out loud), is preceded by a chain of written genres, from the call for papers through to the abstract, review process,
and sometimes the submission of the written paper prior to the conference.

2.3.2 Action-based genres

In other areas of work, producing and responding to written texts plays a lesser role, and work is carried out more through spoken
genres, which may involve interaction with the physical environment. In such contexts, non-verbal activities may be integral to the
genres used, and language may even play a subsidiary or supporting role to the activity. Ure (1971) uses the term ‘languagein-action’,
borrowed from Malinowski, to describe situations in which it is essential to know about the ‘the action accompanying the text’ (ibid., p.
443) to understand what is going on, as in example 2.7:

Example 2.7

(1) Mark There’s a matt one,

(2) Val Mm,
(3) Mark That’s with nothing on it, [1] yeah?
(4) Val Mm =
(5) Mark = An’ it stays like tha:t, yeah?
(6) Val Yeah =
 Workplace Genres 28

(7) Mark = That’s . . . not got any varnish on it.

(8) Val Right.

Without knowing that this conversation takes place in a printing company, and that the printer (Mark) is showing a label he has just
printed to a colleague, it would be very diffi cult to make sense of this interaction. This is due to the frequent use of deixis, typical of
language-in-action, as a result of speakers referring to material artefacts which form part of their work. While one would typically
associate such language with manual labour, for example Weigel and Weigel’s (1985) study of directives in the work of migrant
labourers, languagein-action plays an important role in a variety of workplaces. In the ABOT Corpus, all the settings in which data were
collected were white-collar offi ces (with the exception of the printing company), and language-in-action typically occurs in interactions
involving procedural discourse or briefi ng.
While in ‘extreme’ forms of language-in-action, language plays a role which is completely ancillary to – and perhaps even
unnecessary for – the action; in many cases, linguistic and non-linguistic elements of the genre are essential to accomplish the task at
hand. Goodwin (1995) gives an interesting example from an airport ground operations room of the way in which actions, language and
material artefacts interact in ‘collaboratively constructing’ a response to queries from pilots of incoming fl ights. Announcements from
pilots who are coming in to land a plane are received by a fl ight tracker, who consults video monitors showing the current status of the
gates, and confi rms to the pilot whether or not the gate is ready to receive the plane. In doing this, the fl ight tracker may also need input
from a ramp planner, which may lead to a collaborative construction of the response given to the pilot. In this very specialized genre, a
co-ordination of linguistic interaction, interaction with material artefacts, and action (including the pilot fl ying the plane and the
physical orientation of operators in the control room towards the monitors) are essential for its successful accomplishment. Goodwin
refers to this activity as a service encounter (clearly of a very specialized kind), and although she does not use the term ‘genre’, her
reference to the ‘predictability with which such sequences are routinely played out’ (ibid., p. 176), clearly shows that this is ‘a typifi ed
communicative action invoked in response to a recurrent situation’ (Yates and Orlikowski 1992, p. 301).
Although, as we have seen, professional discourse tends to involve a large number of written genres, there are some professions in
which language-inaction also plays an important role. The medical professions readily come to mind (e.g. examining a patient or
performing an operation), but the same is true of architects, who need to refer to material artefacts, such as building plans, models and
physical structures. Medway (1996) gives the following example (2.8) from an interaction between architects:

Example 2.8

Dave: OK, OK, I understand, OK, I thought this was the second fl oor plan. So here’s the main wall, and then . . . so that this is, this is
75 cm right here, right, and then . . . and then it cuts in a meter.
Nelson: Yes, on the top level.
Dave: OK on the top, over here.
Nelson: Yes.
Dave: That.
Nelson: But on the main level it only goes 150, so it goes in that much, and it goes out like that, it goes back in like that. (from
Medway 1996, p. 484)

The language is typical of language-in-action with frequent use of deixis (‘this’, ‘here’, ‘that’), but what is interesting about this
example is that, although the material artefact the speakers are consulting is a building plan, they seem to be describing an actual
building. Dave says, ‘here’s the main wall’, although he is simply pointing to some markings on a two-dimensional plan – there is no
actual wall there. Medway (1996) argues that this ‘virtual building’ is as real for the speakers as a physical building, although it does not
yet exist: ‘the virtual building seems to be a shared reality for the participants. They talk about it entirely as if it had substantive current
existence’ (ibid., p. 482). Some interesting characteristics of the virtual building are that knowledge about it may be unevenly distributed
between the participants, as illustrated in example 2.8, where Nelson seems to have more complete knowledge than Dave, and that the
virtual building can be changed through talk, that is through joint decisions made about changes to the building plans. According to
Medway (1996 and 2007), the genres used by architects draw on a range of symbolic and semiotic systems, that is verbal, gestural and
graphical representation. For example, architects’ plans often combine graphical representation with writing, and example 2.8 shows a
combination of speech and gesture (pointing to different parts of the plan).
But language-in-action which involves the construction of such virtual worlds is not restricted to the language of architects. Example
2.9 below (from the ABOT Corpus) is from the sales offi ce of a paper wholesaler. The extract is part of a lengthy explanation of the offi
ce manager, Ben, to a new sales rep, Sam, about the procedure he needs to follow when a printer wants to order adhesive labels (see also
Chapter 4.5). He explains that Ben needs to get details from the customer about the format of the plate they use for printing, in order to
see whether the company’s labels are the right format for that plate. This involves Ben in explaining the printing process in great detail:

Example 2.9

(1) Ben So here’s his printing plate, an’ on his printing plate, he’s got– let’s say they’re– let’s say they’re um: labels for peanuts.
(2) Sam Yeah,
29 Workplace Discourse

(3) Ben [drawing and pointing to his diagram as he speaks] so on each one o’ those, . . . they’re just white labels, and in the middle
o’ that you might put a picture of a . . . peanut, . . . with a couple o’ legs and a couple o’ arms ↓ an’ /?/ an’ put peanuts under it
right? Alright?
(4) Sam ⎣Yeah. . . [chuckles]
(5) Ben So all you’ve got on here,. . . is loads o’ little peanuts, with arms an’ legs, . . . So . . . on that printing plate, you got them
going round an’ round a cylinder, . . . that’s /fl at/ wrapped round a cylindar like that right, . . . an’ here comes all the labels
yeah? . . . . So here comes these labels, . . . an’ all those little . . . peanuts, land, right in the middle of all those . . . labels, right?

In explaining the printing process, Ben constructs a whole virtual printing press in operation, aided by a drawing on a piece of paper
representing the sheet with labels. As with the virtual buildings, the printing process he describes is not actually happening, but the
participants focus their attention on this activity as if it were actually taking place. Using this virtual situation as part of his explanation
has a pedagogical purpose in trying to make the explanation vivid and entertaining for the new and very young sales rep. Action-based
genres thus involve situated workplace activities, where verbal activities interact with non-verbal ones, and thereby are integrated into an
‘extratextual’ environment. However, this environment may involve virtual as well as physical worlds.

2.3.3 The Interaction of spoken and written genres

The juxtaposition in the previous section of text and action-based genres is an attempt to capture some of the key ways in which
workplaces may differ in terms of their genre repertoire. But, of course the text versus action or written versus spoken distinction
represents two extremes. Most people use a range of written and spoken genres in the workplace, as well as genres in which some kind
of nonverbal activity plays a role. The key point is that performing genres may involve drawing on both verbal and non-verbal resources,
and that the genres used within an organization or a person’s daily work routine are linked to one another in various ways. Devitt (1991,
p. 336) remarks on the high degree of intertextuality in the genres used by tax accountants: ‘No text is single, as texts refer to one
another,
draw from one another, create the purpose for one another.’
Such intertextuality can also exist between the written and spoken genres used in a workplace. In observing all the activities carried
out by one manager in the course of a day, Louhiala-Salminen (2002, p. 217) notes that:

throughout the day spoken and written communication were totally intertwined, there was hardly any activity in either mode where
the other would not be present as well; many phone calls were to confi rm an issue in an e-mail message, e-mail messages referred to
phone calls, and they were constantly discussed in face-to-face communication with colleagues.

This intertextuality is refl ected in the many explicit references in the discourse used by the participants to other discourse acts, for
example writing ‘I tried to call you back’ in an e-mail.
A written document may also be the topic of discussion, in which case understanding the intertextual references is absolutely essential
in order to make sense of the interaction. Koester (2004a, pp. 43–46) shows the following example (2.10. below) from the ABOT Corpus
of a meeting between a sales manager and his boss, the president of the company, where they discuss a document the former has drawn
up to give his sales team. The draft document is a list of ‘conversation stoppers’, that is things that sales reps should not say in their
phone calls with potential customers. The president, Chris, makes a number of suggestions how he thinks the document can be
improved:

Example 2.10

(21) Chris Uh . . . I don’t know why this is . . . large. Isn’t this the same as all the rest of these? It’s just another . . . example?
(22) Joe Yeah. It should be, [1.5] Yeah that’s just another example.
(23) Chris
[. . .]
(24) Chris U:hm . . . an’ a- an’ maybe just a note at the end here, that says to the person ↑ Ask yourself is this question . . . a: an
indirect invitation for the prospect to end the conversation [Joe: Yeah] because . . . I mean if they really answered that honestly,
almost all of these are.

The interaction is replete with references to the document discussed using deictic items such as ‘this’, ‘these’, ‘that’, ‘here’, and this
spoken advice-giving sequence (a specifi c type of procedural discourse) is entirely dependent on the written text discussed.
Another way in which written and spoken genres can be linked is if, as is frequently the case in organizational settings, a written
record is routinely made of a verbal event, such as a meeting. Cook-Gumperz and Messerman (1999) discuss the case of record-keeping
in the medical profession. They studied an interdisciplinary medical team in the nursing home care unit of a hospital, combining
ethnographic fi eldwork with discourse analysis of weekly team meetings (see example 2.3 above). The purpose of the meetings was to
review patients’ treatment plans and to produce a written record in the form of a revised treatment plan. Thus the team meetings, which
involve decision-making regarding patient care and the treatment plans, are specialized genres used in this institution, and perhaps in
other similar professional medical settings. Cook-Gumperz and Messerman’s (1990) study focuses on the way in which negotiated
 Workplace Genres 30

consensus is achieved in the meetings and how the records are created as a result. They discovered that there is an ‘essential tension’
(ibid., p. 151) between the what happens in the meetings and what ends up in the records. The meetings are local, situated interactional
events, which are ‘subject to all the ambiguities and problems of any interactional exchange’ (ibid., p. 148), but the records must provide
an institutionally sanctioned account of the decisions made at the meeting. This means that decisions taken at the meetings must be made
to fi t the institutional requirements, which includes the form and wording required by the treatment plan. This kind of tension between
spoken workplace genres and the records that are kept of them is probably not unique to the medical profession. The written genres
provide the offi cial and institutionally sanctioned records of the interactive events, but are not ‘merely factual descriptions of what was
done’ (ibid., p. 170).
Such intertextual links between genres used in the workplace remind us that individual genres are embedded in workplace processes
and may be part of a ‘genre chain’ (Swales 2004). This is refl ected in Handford’s (2007 and forthcoming) model of the meeting genre in
the pre-meeting and post-meeting phases (see section 2.2.1). Similarly, Müller (2006b, pp. 144–149) notes that whereas dealing with a
workplace task may involve a meeting at the ‘core’ of the process, this will be preceded and followed by a succession of activities, some
of which will involve communicating with others (e.g. through phone calls and e-mail), while others will not (e.g. producing or copying
documentation).
Examining the intertextual links between all the different genres used in an organization or professional group is one way of trying to
understand the ‘community’s epistemology and values’ (Devitt 1991, p. 337), as Devitt for example has done. Smart (1998) made a
similar attempt in a case study using interpretive ethnography to investigate the Bank of Canada economists’ knowledge-making
practices. Smart (ibid., p. 117) found that the economists employ a ‘distinctive discourse combining language, statistics, and
mathematics to create specialized knowledge’. The way the economy is intersubjectively perceived in this professional community is
informed by a set of oral and written genres, such as regular meetings, ‘analytic notes’, ‘research memoranda’ and the policy document
(ibid., p. 117). The genres used by the economists thus play a particular role within the epistemology of the discourse community;
however, Smart does not analyse these genres or their use in any detail. Medway (2007, p. 195) summarizes the role of intertextuality in
workplace discourse in the following way:

Intertextuality is of central importance in workplace discourse. It ties all the separate written and spoken communications into a single
multi-stranded web of discourse (a text is a textile, something woven) and in the process knits the diverse participants together into a
discourse community. (original italics)

2.4 Conclusion
Drawing on the three main approaches to genre analysis, this chapter has attempted to show how diverse and multi-layered any attempt
to describe the world of workplace genres necessarily will be. While the notion of genre remains diffi cult to pin down, it nevertheless
provides a useful lens through which to view workplace discourse. As genres, the activities and texts used in the workplace can be
examined for their structural and formal characteristics, as well as for the ways in which they are embedded in the practices of the
discourse community. I have suggested that there are broadly two ways of approaching the study of genre in the workplace: on the one
hand, a particular genre can be examined across different workplaces or professions, whereas another kind of perspective is provided by
the examination of the use of different genres within a particular workplace or professional group.
The fi rst approach is particularly useful for identifying the formal and structural characteristics of a genre, and for generalizing fi
ndings beyond specifi c workplace contexts. In this chapter, I have attempted to identify some of the key characteristics of a number of
genres which are used very widely across different workplace settings: decision-making and meetings, service encounters and e-mail.
However, we have also seen that identifying genres at such a general level of abstraction is not unproblematic, and that it may not be
possible to formulate generic descriptions which are relevant for all realizations of the genre across different workplace contexts.
The second approach has led us into an investigation of genres fi rst as interrelated written (and spoken) texts within particular
workplaces or professions, and secondly as situated actions, in which verbal and non-verbal activities interact with material resources.
While we have seen that some professions or workplaces may be either more text- or action-based, the text versus action distinction also
provides two perspectives on how genres are integrated into and constitute the workplace practices of an individual or a group within an
organization.
The topic of genre in workplace discourse is a recurring one in this book. In the following chapter, which examines workplace
discourse and corpora, we see how corpus linguistic research can provide further insights into the genres used at work.