Electronic Mail Communication in a Multinational Freight Forwarding Company: a Case Study

9INTRODUCTION Multinational and global corporations relying on geographically distributed teams (virtual organizations) have acquired growing significance in the last decades as a result of the globalization process. The fact that their workforce is no more located in a single site, but geographically dispersed the world over has inevitably impacted the communicative choices of these businesses as to the medium and the code to adopt. Research on the communicative practices in multinational corporations (among other Nickerson 1999, Gimenez 2005, 2006a) seems to suggest that the electronic mail system and the English language are respectively the medium and the code commonly selected for communication within these organizations. The intrinsic characteristics of the electronic mail system make it particularly suited to both fulfil the organizational demands of virtual organizations and to facilitate intercultural communication. Businesses enjoy the speed of email, its multiple- addressability which makes individuals accountable for their decisions and in turn decisions more reliable, the written record it leaves of the information exchanged and of the activity carried out, its searchable memory for easy retrieval of messages, and last but not least the possible transference of data (attachments). In addition, the fact that electronic mail is written and asynchronous facilitates intercultural communication (Shachaf 2008) for those multinational corporations employing local workforce: on the one hand, written messages lack precisely those non-verbal (e.g. gestures), para-verbal (e.g. accents), and social cues (age, sex, physical appearance) which can be tricky in intercultural communication; on the other hand, the asynchronicity of email leaves time to both writer and reader for encoding and decoding the massage which is invaluable when participants do not share the same mother tongue. The global spread of English in the last four centuries has gradually made it the preferred tool for communication not only between native speakers (NSs) and non- native speakers (NNSs), but also between NNSs. In a nutshell, English serves as a lingua franca in a wealth of communicative situations where the participants do not share the same mother tongue. Business settings are no exception. In multinational corporations, English is often employed as lingua franca for internal communication between employees from different branches around the world. Following my internship in the Modena branch of a multinational freight forwarding company, and in the light of these considerations, I found that an analysis of