Content area
Full text
How does the medium of electronic mail support rich communication?
In the well-established and traditional perspective of information richness theory (Daft and Lengel, 1986), electronic mail is a lean medium that does not readily support the level of communication richness associated with, for instance, a face-to-face meeting. In the view of information richness theory, electronic mail filters out important cues such as body language and tone of voice and, unlike a face-to-face meeting, is not conducive to immediate feedback. This perspective considers the property of leanness to be inherent to the medium of electronic mail and even to persist across its different users and different organizational contexts. However, recent studies have identified serious conceptual and empirical weaknesses in information richness theory (Contractor and Eisenberg, 1990; Fulk, et al., 1990; El-Shinnawy and Markus, 1992; Kinney and Watson, 1992; Markus, 1991; 1992; Rice, 1992; Yates and Orlikowski, 1992). These studies include reports of empirical findings in which e-mail readily supports the level of richness that information richness theory reserves for what it considers to be rich media. These are findings that information richness theory cannot easily explain, if it can explain them at all.
Providing the starting point for the investigation in this article are the reports of empirical findings that electronic mail, despite what information richness theory would lead us to expect, can indeed readily support rich communication. Of course, knowing that e-mail can readily support rich communication is not the same as knowing how the richness occurs. Recent studies have already established that it occurs. One of the two purposes pursued in this investigation is to provide an account of how the richness occurs. The other purpose is to highlight, for research on the managerial use of electronic communication media, the value of an interpretive perspective--in particular, the interpretive perspective of hermeneutics. Although the motivation in this investigation is not to seek out and report yet additional evidence that can serve the purpose of refuting information richness theory, the investigation examines evidence of this sort.
We need to understand how richness occurs in communication that uses e-mail. The availability of such an understanding has lessons for how electronic communication systems in organizations are used, selected, designed, implemented, maintained, upgraded, and otherwise managed. Such lessons are...