Dg. Schwartz, When email meets organizational memories: addressing threats to communication in a learning organization, INT J HUM-C, 51(3), 1999, pp. 599-614
The communicative act in a learning organization is subject to a number of
threats to its validity (Habermas, 1981), in particular the comprehensibili
ty, truth, trustworthiness and appropriateness of a given message. Organiza
tional memories (OMs) can be used to address these threats. Our focus is on
email communication, which suffers from the same threats identified by Hab
ermas. The integration of email with on OM can improve the quality of commu
nication by applying meta-knowledge to appropriately link a given message t
o the OM. In this paper, we expand upon the direction taken by earlier work
of Abecker et al. (1997) with respect to the importance of the object-meta
relationship and the use of meta-knowledge to manage (or rather to complet
e) an OM. We suggest that the focus of the meta-knowledge in an email appli
cation, should be on the roles, perspectives, and characteristics of the pe
ople in an organization rather than on knowledge description. This, we argu
e, will effectively ensure that knowledge will not be disassociated from th
e people and the situation (Sierhuis & Clancey, 1997). We present the Hyper
Mail architecture and sample application to illustrate how formal meta-know
ledge is used to re-associate informal email communications to an OM. (C) 1
999 Academic Press.