Communication Richness in Electronic Mail: Critical Social Theory and the Contextuality of Meaning

Abstract

Information Richness Theory (IRT) has enjoyed acceptance by information systems researchers throughout the last decade, but recent unfavorable empirical evidence has precipitated a shift away from it and a search for a new theory. Because of this shift, a new definition of communication richness is needed to succeed the IRT definition. Since its inception, IS research on communication richness has been limited to the perspective of positivism and, more recently, interpretivism. In this study, a new perspective to the study of communication richness in computer mediated 1Robert Zmud was the accepting senior editor for this paper. communication, critical social theory (CST), introduced. The paper outlines (1) a CSTbased definition of communication richness and compares it with positivist and interpretivist definitions of communication richness and (2) a CST-based social action framework for empirical study of organizational communication in any media use situation. The CST definition and framework are used in an intensive investigation of an episode of the managerial use of electronic mail in a company to illustrate how research on communication richness can be conducted from the CST perspecfive. This illustration also points out the usefulness of the CST perspective in recognizing instances of communication richness in electronic mail communications that would escape detection in not just the IRT perspective in particular, but also positivist and interpretive perspectives in general Finally, the paper concludes by outlining the potential for future IS research on organizational communication and information technology from the CST perspecfive. In addition to the specific contribution to the development of a new theory of communication richness in electronic media, this study also contributes an example of CST research on IS and extends the domain of the CST-IS research program.

Strategic Information Systems

“…However, there have been relatively few subsequent publications on the practical application of CST in IS. Some of them are surveyed in Ngwenyama and Lee (1997), a paper demonstrating the significant relevance of CST to IS. Another interesting example, exploring how Triple Loop Learning (Flood & Romm, 1996) can be applied to the complexities during systems development is given in Finnegan, Galliers, and Powell's (2002) work.…”

Empowerment through ICT: A critical discourse analysis of the Egyptian ICT policy

“…Another concept related to power and empowerment and central to critical research in IS is emancipation [2,3,42,66,81,20,82,59]. The idea of emancipation is to "help eliminate the causes of unwarranted alienation and domination and thereby enhance the opportunities for realizing human potential" [48, p. 69].…”

MXit it up in the media: Media discourse analysis on a mobile instant messaging system

“…The truth claims check for falsehood, deliberate omissions of information -especially if it is opposing the views being promoted by the speaker (Van Djijk, 2006). Validating the truth requires not only understanding the context in which the information is presented, but also analysing the entire corpus of text, (Ngwenyama and Lee 1997), ie one cannot claim incompleteness or bias of discourse from one news article. Analysing the whole corpus may also help one understand individual articles (ie hermeneutic cycle).…”