Organizational Consequences of Email Adoption and Diffusion: Theoretical Issues and Empirical Results

The actual use of e-mail communication in organisations presents a lot of surprising figures, and as such it is a far from being a well known technology when considering its social effects. In the filed of computer-mediated communication technologies our results confirm Emergent Approaches, and more generally Giddens’ structuration theory: the actual use of a technology is context-dependent, and they are embedded in a recursive interaction. Among the many surprising findings, we can mention that: no substitution effects between e-mail and face-to-face have been found, neither any implicit organisation’s democratisation; e-mail is more used to communicate with close than distant colleagues; northern people use e-mail in a different way from Southern people. From a methodological standpoint, our research is the most extensive, systematic and complete ever done. However, considering the huge amount of quantitative and qualitative collected data, present results should be regarded just as preliminary ones.