Teaching, Emotion, & Technology 29
aware of this fact and take it into consideration, while writing e-mails to their students using
WebCT.
Future studies can address the question of students’ motives in more detail since the
students’ motives were not examined in this study. Also, in future studies of the ways students
express emotion in writing to their teaching assistants, researchers should be aware of compliance-
gaining strategies students might use to influence teaching assistants. Golish (1999) conducted a
study where she looked at such strategies and concluded that students challenged teaching
assistants’ credibility through interaction. Golish argued for analyzing students as agents of power
and persuasion and for studying teaching assistants’ interaction with students in terms of credibility
and power.
In another academic vein, electronic written texts can be also viewed as an organizational
discourse, in this case, discourse of the department of communication. Because teaching assistants
are official members of the department and are affiliated with the university, the texts they produce
can be considered as a part of this organization’s discourse. By examining the electronic texts
written by teaching assistants, future researchers can analyze to what extent those texts reflect the
organizational norms and values.
Conclusion
In organizational communication scholarship, much work has been done on emotional work
and labor (Fineman, 1993, 2000; Hochschild, 1983; Putnam & Mumby, 1992; Rafaeli & Sutton,
1987; Sass, 2000; Shuler & Sypher, 2000; Tracy, 2000). However, none of this work has examined
the connections between emotions and computer-mediated communication. We begin research in
Convention