The usefulness of genre theory in the investigation of organizational communication across cultures

This paper extends the concept of genres of organizational communication proposed by Yates and Orlikowski (1992), to allow for the contextualized linguistic analysis of genre text-ualizations in multinational organizations. It does so by drawing on the findings from previous studies that have reported on cross- and inter-cultural variation in business genres and also on the work of genre analysts working in the fields of applied linguistics, organizational communication and rhetoric. The analytical constructs of Context and Situation are first discussed and this is followed by Genre and its formal and substantive characteristics. The final section of the paper outlines the approach to the linguistic analysis of discourse provided by Bhatia (1993), and shows how this may be of particular relevance to organizational communication across cultures.