Structuring of Genre Repertoire in a Virtual Research Team

Genres are considered “as socially recognized types of communicative actions that are habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular social purposes” (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994, p. 542). This paper investigates the evolution of an e-mail-based genre repertoire and questions whether it is related to the degree of complexity associated to different tasks and to the phases of group development. The analysis has been carried out by studying the case of an international research team involved in a European project that principally collaborates through e-mail and other CMC technologies in order to execute different kinds of tasks