Abstract
The paper is a presentation of the initial findings of a genre based case study at a large Swedish company. One employee kept one week of incoming email messages. Based on the messages and interviews with the employee we clustered the messages in different genres. Most literature of genres of organizational communication has focused on the email messages as genres themselves. We found, however, that many messages, rather than being instances of genres, were part of informal conversations. In these conversations, it was common to discuss and negotiate which genres where appropriate to use in different situations.