An attempt by the e-mail author to get the recipient to perform an action required by the institutional, professional, and personal circumstances through evoking the recipient’s need for compliance on the grounds of institutional, professional, and personal motivators such as necessity, duty, and goodwill.
Published in Chapter:
The Need for Identity Construction in Computer-Mediated Professional Communication: A Community of Practice Perspective
Victor Ho (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)
Copyright: © 2013
|Pages: 29
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2211-1.ch027
Abstract
This chapter discusses the construction of personal identities by individuals of the same rank through the discourse they constructed while engaging in computer-mediated professional communication in the workplace. First, it discusses the need for the members of three different communities of practice to construct desirable personal identities via their daily computer-mediated professional communication. Second, it discusses how the members constructed these identities through the e-mail discourse they composed by exploiting various discursive strategies. Drawing upon systemic functional grammar, influence tactics, interdiscursivity, and rapport and rapport management, a total of 89 request e-mails were analyzed. The present study intends to bring to the fore the importance of the choice of language in professional communication in general, and in e-mail in particular, thereby enabling professionals to both encode and decode workplace communication in a more comprehensive manner.