The World Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski (1992; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994) proposed using genres. They de � ned genres as “typi� ed communicative actions characterized by similar substance and form and taken in response to recurrent situations ” (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992, p. 299). They further suggested that communications in a new media would show both reproduction and adaptation of existing communicative genres as well as the emergence of new genres. We studied these phenomena on the World Wide Web by examining 1000 randomly selected Web pages and categorizing the type of genre represented. Although many pages recreated genres familiar from traditional media, we also saw examples of genres being adapted to take advantage of the linking and interactivity of the new medium and novel genres emerging to � t the unique communicative needs of the audience. We suggest that Web-site designers consider the genres that are appropriate for their situation and attempt to reproduce or adapt familiar genres.

Focusing on the case write-up within the Harvard case method of instruction, this study provides historical and empirical evidence for the theory of genre systems. The Harvard case literature and interviews at a case-based business school in the Harvard tradition show that the purpose of this largely ignored written genre is to prepare students to participate in the primary genre, oral classroom discussion of the case. The case genre system provides highly conventionalized conductor-choreographer roles for instructors and blunt, detached consultant roles for student writers/speakers who repeatedly enact decisive, adversarial personae affirming practices and values of the business school.

Organizations bring together people with various access to and understanding of the work at hand. Despite their different stocks of background knowledge, most of them engage in documentation, whether as writers or readers. This paper explores how documents serve such diverse users by building a framework articulating the characteristics of documents supporting collaborators with asymmetric access to knowledge versus people with symmetric knowledge. Drawing on document-centric approaches we hypothesize that documents supporting asymmetric groups are likely to be more prescriptive and explicate their own use compared to documents supporting symmetric groups. Through exploratory analysis of two kinds of documents, used across three FLOSS projects, we find that documents supporting collaborators with asymmetric knowledge do appear to explicate their own use in more detail. They do so by prescribing their own 1) purpose, 2) context of use, 3) content and form in greater detail than documents used by core community members with symmetric access to project knowledge. 1.