Exploitation des genres de textes pour assister les pratiques textuelles dans les environnements numériques de travail : le cas du courriel chez des cadres et des secrétaires dans une municipalité et une administration fédérale canadiennes

This research reveals how textual genres can be exploited in digital work environments to improve the textual practices of managers and secretaries in the context of a municipality and the Canadian federal government. The first objective of this research assesses the suitability of digital work environments to support the textual practices of managers and secretaries in their reading, writing and manipulation of texts. The second objective describes the various roles of textual genre during the managerial and secretarial textual practices. Using email as a focal point, the third objective examines how genre can be exploited to advance the benefits of textual practices in the digital work environments. This qualitative research entails a two-phase methodology. By the study of 17 secretaries and 17 managers, the first phase consists of a thorough examination of the current textual practices in the Canadian federal government and municipal contexts and the difficulties encountered during these practices. This phase also considers the various roles of genre in the digital work environments along with the salient clues sought during email management. This study deployed three data collection techniques: semi-structured interviews, diary journals and cognitive inquiries. The results are examined using several qualitative content analysis techniques. The second phase of this research consists of developing an email processing sequence to further expand our understanding of textual genre and its exploitation in the design of digital work environments. The data for this phase uses a corpus of 1703 messages developed from a sample of two governmental managers.  The results provide an encompassing overview of practices relating to the reading, writing and manipulation of texts that are both common and specific to managers and secretaries. With over 40% of events recorded in the diary journal relating to email, the importance of this type of system in digital work environments is clearly emphasized. The difficulties encountered in the digital work environments are also described. The role of genre during textual practices is examined according to a matrix illustrating both the individual and collective dimensions of genre in addition to its three main facets: the form, the content and the purpose. We present next an analytic framework of the prominent cues affecting email management to summarize the process of interpreting messages by the recipient. A typology of the categorization patterns of managers is also developed and used in a statistical experiment aiming to automatically describe and categorize email. Resulting from this experiment, we observe specific linguistic behaviours that characterize each email category. It is also revealed that automatic categorization based on message lexicon is more efficient than non-lexical categorization. At the conclusion of this research, we suggest to enrich the traditional human-computer interaction paradigm with a semiotics of genre in the digital work environments. The study also offers a reflection regarding email membership to a specific genre using the theoretical concepts of hypergenre, genre and sub-genre. The success of the automatic categorization of email according to genre-related facets (the content, the form and the purpose) uncovers valuable insights and perspectives in designing digital work environments with the objective of facilitating the vital performance of textual practices by employees.

Keyphrases: genre, email, genre, textual practice, organizational semiotics, text, automatic categorization, speech act, digital work environment, reading, secretary, manager, public administration, human-computer interaction