The Personal Organization of Electronic Mail Messages in a Business Environment: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

In the business world, electronic mail (e-mail) has emerged as a widely used communication tool for transmitting knowledge between managers. As a result, these messages will require organization should future access to this trapped knowledge be expected and desired. A manager's e-mail classification scheme should be logically constructed in anticipation of future need, but future need may be driven by the information needs of other people within the organization such as superiors or subordinates. This researcher explored the nature of e-mail classification and documented the emergence of a high utility, multi-stage, classification process. The resulting framework consists of four categories that help explain how managers classify business-related e-mail. The first category reflects the immediate needs of the manager and the behavior of establishing relationships between messages. The second category reflects the manager's use of the in-box as a crude task-manager. The third category aligns with the manager's interest in scanning the environment. The fourth category reflects the managers perceived future need for the captured knowledge. The subjects rejected automatic classification and preferred an enumerative scheme. The researcher illustrates how the results of this study align with Marco and Navarro's three stage cognitive process that leads to stored knowledge (On some contributions of the cognitive sciences and epistemology to a theory of classification, Knowledge Organization, 20(3), 126–132). The cognitive processes that underlie classification are an essential component in understanding knowledge organization and have remained in focus during this study.