Understanding e-mail overload

Purpose - This paper seeks to investigate the impact of e-mail on individuals and organizations and to provide a framework that frames e-mail management as a complex and multi-stranded issue. Design/methodology/approach - The paper employs a multi-dimensional appraisal of e-mail use in organisations and introduces a management framework as a practical tool to enact change and organisational learning. The approach uses Lee's five central concepts for understanding hermeneutics: distanciation; autonomization; appropriation; social construction; and enactment, applying these to the problem of e-mail overload. Findings - This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of e-mail use in organisations, and develops a practitioner toolkit for enacting change in e-mail use. This work uses hermeneutics and an interpretive framework to investigate the impact of e-mail on organisations, employing concepts from Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas, and Klein. Research limitations/implications - Future research could evaluate the effectiveness of e-mail performance improvement programmes using a mix of research methods including surveys of e-mail attitudes and analysis of e-mail readability and language analysis. Practical implications - The paper introduces an e-mail management framework that is a practical tool that can be used to enact change and organisational learning Social implications - Implementation could lead to improved communication; improved visibility of the informal organizational network, knowledge sharing, and action network; business process improvement; improved knowledge management; and increased employee morale. Originality/value - The paper shows how actors may choose to enact emancipation from e-mail oppression by taking deliberate action to reconstruct the environment in which they exist in an inquiry-change cycle of organisational learning by implementing an e-mail management framework.