This book examines the internal email communication of a multinational company in lingua franca English. The corpus consists of 282 emails written by the company's Finnish and Swedish employees at different organizational levels. To determine the corporate context where the messages were produced and used, background information was elicited from the writers and recipients and sources such as a communication survey carried out in the company were used. The book focuses on the nature of genres in email; it shows how they are used to do business and describes the features typical of their discourse. It also sheds light on the reported differences between Finnish and Swedish communication styles. Although the study is not concerned with teaching, the implications for teaching business communication are obvious: in a shared corporate context, genre knowledge is more essential for a business practitioner's professional success than impeccable language skills.
