What is Rank

In many workplaces, social relations such as hierarchy may be uniquely indexed and performed in the email environment. In order to study this phenomenon, 250 emails were collected in three different Hong Kong organizations (corporate, non-profit, and university), and examined the impact of hierarchy on the email practices. it was found that the ways that members of diverse organizations navigate the (sometimes competing) domains of transactional and relational workplace discourse in their email communication are influenced by social variables interacting on different levels. On the macro-level, email discourse is influenced by linguistic conventions that characterize both the “professional email culture” and norms specific to the organization or community of practice (cf. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2007, Holmes and Stubbe 2003). On the micro-level, substantial differences in emails written by members of the same organization are explained by personal, interpersonal, and socio-structural factors, among them, professional rank and individual style.