‘The Snowball of Emails We Deal With’: CCing in Multinational Companies

Abstract

The ability to copy in relevant stakeholders has rendered the business email a useful tool for managing interpersonal relations and operational matters. However, CCing in business email has remained vastly underresearched in workplace discourse literature, a gap this article seeks to address. We explore the functions of CCing in workplace emails and the way formality is negotiated by writers in one organization. We draw on the analysis of email chains and discourse-based interviews and show that employees strategically project professional achievements and assume and deny responsibility for company decisions as they shift between the sender/receiver positions in the chain.