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Interaction Ritual Threads:
Does IRC Theory Apply Online?
Paul DiMaggio, New York UniversityClark Bernier, Princeton UniversityCharles Heckscher, Rutgers UniversityDavid Mimno, Cornell UniversityDavid Mimno, Cornell University
Working Paper #16, April 2017
Interaction Ritual Threads: Does IRC Theory Apply Online?1 Paul DiMaggio, Clark Bernier, Charles Heckscher, David Mimno
New York University Princeton University Rutgers University Cornell University
1 Paper prepared for The Microsociology of Randall Collins: New Directions in Theory and Research, ed. Elliot Weininger, Annette Lareau and Omar Lizardo. The authors thank IBM for making these data available and are grateful to Mike Wing and Jim Newswanger for invaluable guidance in understanding the context and structure of the Jams and data, as well as thoughtful comments (for which we also thank Randall Collins) on an earlier draft. Opinions are the authors’ alone, with which neither IBM nor any IBM employee should be presumed to agree.
Interaction Ritual Threads: Does IRC Theory Apply Online? Paul DiMaggio, Clark Bernier, Charles Heckscher, David Mimno
New York University Princeton University Rutgers University Cornell University
This paper presents results of the first empirical application of Randall Collins’s theory of Inter-
action Ritual Chains (IRC) to internal corporate online interactions, using nearly complete data
on two online discussions organized by a major multinational corporation for its employees
worldwide. The discussions we analyze took place on the company’s Intranet, open to employ-
ees but not visible to outsiders. Participants had to register to view or post, and anonymous
posts were not permitted. IRC theory predicts outcomes of face-to-face communication based
on physiological and neurological mechanisms that depend on co-presence. Such mechanisms
are absent in online communication, but we find that IRC theory applies nonetheless.
Online discussions have three components: forums dedicated to specific topics; posts
(statements that individuals address to others who are viewing a particular forum); and threads
(sets of posts that respond to previous posts, establishing an online interaction sequence). Al-
though online discussions aim to encourage wide-ranging interaction, typically most posts do
not receive responses and most threads are not very long. Thus one measure of a discussion’s
robustness is its persistence as evidenced by the length of threads. We focus on the micro-
determinants of thread length, asking under what conditions a post elicits a response and a
thread acquires an additional contribution. To test IRC theory, we predict persistence as a
function of two features (focus and entrainment) that the theory highlights and a third
(identity) that is an outcome of successful IRCs with potential positive feedback effects.
Although Collins developed his theory to explain face-to-face interaction and has ex-
pressed skepticism about whether IRC dynamics operate online, we find that the theory pro-
vides considerable explanatory leverage, with analyses yielding strong support for the efficacy
Interaction Ritual Threads ---2---
of focus and entrainment in promoting thread persistence in the discussions we studied. We
infer from the theory’s strong performance that although some elements of IRC dynamics are
limited to face-to-face interaction, others may be generic to human communication.
To broaden IRC theory’s scope, we emphasize, first, structural features of different com-
municative genres and, second, a wider range of mechanisms through which the effects of such
features as focus and entrainment are transmitted. Both structure and mechanisms, we argue,
vary markedly between face-to-face and computer-mediated interaction. We suggest that the
face-to-face communication genres on which Collins’s work has focused are special (albeit
especially important) cases of the broader range of phenomena to which the theory applies.
Introduction The theory of Interaction Ritual Chains was articulated by Collins (1981) and fully explicated in
Collins (2004). Collins begins with Durkheim’s work on ritual (1965 [1912]) and Goffman’s in-
sight (1967) that, in societies with a complex division of labor, successful interactions are rituals
that ratify the sacredness of individuals who participate in them. But he goes well beyond this,
first, in developing an elegant predictive theory of the circumstances under which interaction
rituals succeed or fail and, second, in describing implications of this view for such macro-sociol-
ogical phenomena as group formation, culture production and collective behavior.
Briefly summarized, Collins argues that when two or more participants assemble around
a common focus of attention, the process produces situational entrainment (intense involve-
ment in and commitment to the interaction), which in turn produces solidarity, shared identity,
and tangible emotional energy (EE). EE, in turn, influences human behavior through two chan-
nels. First, people gravitate to situations in which their EE is likely to be enhanced. Second,
Interaction Ritual Threads ---3---
high levels of EE are associated with greater buoyancy, confidence, attractiveness, and influ-
ence, and shared feelings of conviction and moral rectitude. Interactions are successful when
they produce increased EE for the parties involved.
IRC theory offers an elegant solution to the micro-macro dilemma and a versatile basis
for understanding many sociological phenomena. Not surprisingly, citations of both “Micro-
foundations” (1981) and Interaction Ritual Chains (2003) display a steady rise from publication
through the present. But as IRC theory has evolved, so has the world: much interaction now
takes place through media that were just building up steam when Interaction Ritual Chains was
published in 2003. Then, less than one in ten U.S. adults used a social media site (like Facebook
or LinkedIn); by 2015, 65 percent did (Perrin 2015). Texting on cell phones also grew over that
period, with 73 percent of adults using a cell phone to send and receive text messages by 2013
(Duggan 2013). Computer-mediated interaction is especially prevalent among Americans aged
13 to 17: 80 percent send and receive text messages, the median user exchanges thirty
messages per day, and texting is replacing telephone conversations as the modal form of inter-
action (Lenhart 2015; 2012).
To be sure, with a few exceptions (e.g., online courses taken for credit, or text messages
sent to people in the same home or office) computer-mediated communications complement
rather than substitute for face-to-face interaction (Rainie and Wellman 2012), and people who
use social media more also have more face-to-face friendships (Chen 2013). Nonetheless, the
sheer explosive growth of online communications of many kinds – e-mail, texting, social media
posts, online meetings and discussion forums – now means that computer-mediated interact-
ion represents a significant portion of people’s communicative time budget.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---4---
These trends raise the following question: Does IRC theory apply online? Or is its scope
restricted to settings of physical co-presence?
Why the theory should not apply. Online interaction appears to lack what Collins
(2004:23) identifies as two fundamental ingredients of interaction rituals: “situational co-
presence” and “mutual focus of attention.” “Interaction rituals,” he writes (2004:19) “are
processes that take place as human bodies come close enough to each other so that their
nervous systems become mutually attuned in rhythms and anticipations of each other, and the
physiological substratum that produces emotions in one individual’s body becomes stimulated
in feedback loops that run through the other person’s body.”
Online communications can sustain high levels of shared attention to a common topic,
but they lack the physicality and temporal synchrony that Collins sees as essential to IRCs. By
contrast to face-to-face interaction, computer-mediated textual communication relies on just a
single channel, lacking the multi-sensory information provided by propinquity and depriving
participants of access to the intimacy-inducing rhythms of verbal interaction and physical
synchrony that play such an important role in face-to-face interaction. As Collins puts it, online
communication modalities
lack the flow of interaction in real time; even if electronic communications happen
within minutes, this is not the rhythm of immediate vocal participation...There is little or
no buildup of focus of attention in reading an email, or paralinguistic background signals
of mutual engrossment…the more that human social activities are carried out by
distance media, at low levels of IR intensity, the less solidarity people will feel…” (Collins
2004: 63-64).
Interaction Ritual Threads ---5---
To be sure, the Internet has been shown to play a role in the emergence and spread of
social movements and collective action (Caren and Gaby 2011; Castells 2015). But the Internet
almost always plays an auxiliary role, diffusing information rather than replacing face-to-face
interaction. Bloggers have circulated information about the crimes of a regime (Howard 2010).
Formal applications (e.g., meetup.com, which played an important role in Howard Dean’s 2004
anti-war presidential campaign [Kreiss 2012]) have provided platforms for organizing face-to-
face gatherings (Tukfeci and Wilson 2012). Social-media opinion leaders and organizers have
provided logistic information about the location of public demonstrations. But in all such cases
the Internet matters not as a site of interaction rituals, but because it facilitates bringing people
together, increasing the speed and scope of face-to-face mobilization. Arguably, it is only when
people become co-present that IRC dynamics occur.
If IRC dynamics cannot operate online, then IRC theory should not be able to explain the
considerable variation observable in the success of online communication: e.g., in the number
of “likes” that Facebook posts receive; in the extent to which tweets are liked or retweeted; in
whether or not a post on a discussion board receives any response and, if so, in the length of
the thread it evokes. Notwithstanding the good reasons for skepticism, we believe that IRC
theory can help us understand the patterns by which such variation is structured. We do not
dispute that the multi-channel communication and the biological responses that face-to-face
interaction induces produce particularly deep entrainment and particularly high levels of
emotional energy. But these are not the only factors enabling the operation of IRCs: Even in
their absence, IRCs can form online and have measurable effects.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---6---
Why IRC theory might apply. To Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins’ theoretical progress
we add ideas from the Russian linguist and cultural theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Online commun-
ication forms are examples of what Bakhtin called “speech genres”: contexts for oral or written
language use, linked to specific spheres of human activity, featuring distinctive, conventional-
ized contents, styles, and compositional structures. Although e-mail was barely a gleam in
computer scientists’ eyes when Bakhtin introduced the concept, he could have been discussing
the Internet when he wrote “each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech
genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more
complex” (Bakhtin 1953: 60). Each form of online communication – e-mail, instant messaging,
Internet video telephony, such social media as Twitter and Facebook, and online discussion
forums like those we study here – represents a distinct family of speech genres, each with its
own norms and conventions, developed and reinforced by distinctive speech communities.
Bakhtin makes two points about speech genres that explain why IRC theory’s scope can
extend to online interaction. First, speech genres are conventional: they entail normative
expectations and stylized communicative shortcuts that make them distinctive and facilitate
their interpretation. For online genres, such innovations as hashtags, emoji, “like” buttons, and
acronyms increase the amount of information, especially emotional information, that an online
utterance can convey. This stylization renders speech genres opaque to outsiders, who “feel
quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a
practical command of the generic forms” (Bakhtin 1953:80). Thus command of online genres
may in itself reinforce shared identity, ratifying the ritual character of communication, as was
the case among computer scientists who established online conventions in the 1980s (Squires
2010) and among young African-American cell phone users thirty years later (Lane 2016).
Interaction Ritual Threads ---7---
Second, Bakhtin argues that speech genres are interactive: in all speech genres – not just
oral communication but written as well – the listener or reader (Bakhtin stated that his com-
ments applied to both) enters actively into the process of communication.
[W]hen the listener perceives and understands the meaning … of speech, he simultan-eously takes an active responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. … [The speaker] does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only dupli-cates his own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution and so forth… (Bakhtin 1953: 68-69). In face-to-face interaction, this active stance complements and contributes to ritual dyn-
amics. But even on-line, the reader enters into a conversation, producing an imaginative inter-
action in which IRC dynamics may be activated. To be sure, most people prefer face-to-face to
computer-mediated interaction when the goal is sociability or when important matters are at
stake (Collins 2004: 54-64). But it remains to be seen to what extent such preferences are hard-
wired or instead simply reflect short-term resistance to new technologies that reorganize social
relations.
Lessons from psychology. Collins (2004: 75-80) marshals persuasive evidence from
psychological research that face-to-face communication produces physiological responses that
facilitate especially intense entrainment, as actors use multiple sensory cues to orient their
behavior to one another. These channels are unavailable to people interacting textually, so,
absent alternative mechanisms, IRCs would require co-presence.
That such alternative mechanisms might exist, and that textual experience can be deep-
ly absorbing, is an old idea. Coleridge coined the term “willing suspension of disbelief” in 1817
to refer to the state of mind of people reading poetry or fiction (Tomko 2007). And 19th-cent-
ury social critics believed that novels so engaged readers’ emotions that they endangered men-
tal health and social order (Brady 2011).
Interaction Ritual Threads ---8---
Several lines of recent psychological research provide a scientific basis for such intuit-
ions. Research has revealed that “mirror neurons” implicated in producing physical synchrony
face-to-face can be activated by purely auditory stimuli (Lizardo 2007). Research on memory
details the process of imaginative reconstruction that produces recollections and demonstrates
that memories of interactions carry considerable emotional force (Johnson et al. 2011). Re-
search on reading suggests that we process fictional texts in much the same way as we process
memories, giving stories credence until encountering and engaging disconfirming information
(Prentice, Gerrig and Bialis 1997). Work on “narrative transportation” depicts textual engross-
ment as a kind of entrainment in absentia: readers are more likely to believe a text when they
are deeply engrossed in it (Green and Brock 2000). Other research indicates that reading fict-
ional narratives enhances “theory of mind” (a technical term for empathic intelligence), improv-
ing subjects’ performance in tasks that require understanding emotional states of others (Kidd
and Castano 2013).
Still other studies indicate that participants in online discussions can assess one anoth-
er’s emotional states as accurately as participants in face-to-face groups, with accuracy predict-
ing collective outcomes equally well in both settings (Engel et al. 2014). Finally, consistent with
IRC theory, research on shared attention and “social tuning” (Shteynberg 2015) finds that when
people believe that they focus on an object or event with others with whom they share an id-
entity, they exhibit more accurate memory, greater motivation (if action is called for), and
heightened emotion. Significantly, these effects depend only on belief, and not on physical co-
Interaction Ritual Threads ---9---
presence (Shteynberg 2015: 87-89).2 Taken together, these lines of research suggest that text-
ual communication may produce a subjective experience of absorption, provoke strong emot-
ions, and induce feelings of solidarity without physical co-presence.
Thus we propose that the conventionalization of online speech genres, their use by
specialized speech communities, and readers’ active responses, including imaginative recon-
structions of social situations that posts elicit, enable online discussions to serve as interaction
rituals, the success of which will be governed by versions of the same variables that affect the
success of face-to-face interactions. As computer-mediated communication becomes the
norm, new communicative conventions expand narrow bandwidths, people become better at
reading a richer array of signals and, as they do, they come to view mediated interactions as
highly meaningful. This belief, in turn, enhances their inclination to draw on past experience
and shared symbols to sustain intimacy absent physical co-presence. To be sure, online inter-
action rituals are attenuated versions of their face-to-face counterparts. But even so, they may
be sufficiently compelling for IRC theory to explain online interaction dynamics, including variat-
ions in success, intensity and duration.
Indeed, there is warrant within IRC theory to expect online rituals to be effective, espec-
ially in conjunction with local rituals. Collins emphasizes the importance of shared cultural
resources in facilitating successful IRs and suggests that the production and circulation of new
cultural resources through IRCs can occur when new communications technologies augment the
velocity and reach with which cultural symbols are circulated, and heighten levels of emotional
energy (1981: 1008-10). Although such developments may reduce the intensity of the median
2 Shteyngart argues that the Internet elicits social tuning through shared attention, especially when participants share an identity to which coordinated action is relevant, when there are many participants, and when interaction is experienced as synchronous. All of these apply to the case studied here.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---10---
ritual as interactions shift from face-to-face to online, each extends the reach of IRCs, as well,
arguably compensating for the loss of physical co-presence.
Research relevant to this expectation is limited, suggestive, and inconclusive. Support-
ing the view that online forums produce weaker results than face-to-face equivalents, Baek,
Wojcieszak, and Delli Carpini (2011) found that participants in online deliberative political dis-
cussions reported experiencing more negative emotions and less frequently resolving differ-
ences than did participants in face-to-face deliberative groups. By contrast, a review of re-
search on online communities found that forums organized around shared personal dilemmas
often yielded warm and emotionally rich relationships (Wellman and Gulia 1997). A review of
studies of corporate digital conferencing programs reported that users found them more
satisfactory for exchanging information and ideas than for resolving disputes or developing
personal relationships. Even so, the authors found that online communication did contain
considerable emotional content (Rice and Love 1987).
A few scholars have employed IRC theory to analyze online behavior. The most ambit-
ious effort is Ling’s (2008) book-length study of the implications of mobile communications for
social cohesion. While agreeing that face-to-face conversation is ritually more powerful than
mediated communication, Ling argues that many cell-phone mediated interactions, by voice
and text, strengthen solidarity, and that “once a bond is forged…mediated interaction is often
as effective as co-present interaction” (11). His view, based on interviews with and observat-
ions of cell-phone users, is consistent with our contention that participants in online discussions
imaginatively construct their interlocutors by importing prior experience into their reception of
the utterances they read.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---11---
Two other studies have applied IRC theory to online interactions. Based on analysis of
chat spaces on 22 pro-anorexic websites, Maloney (2013) concludes that participation strength-
ens anorexic identities by providing a common focus and shared vocabulary, and speculates
that similar dynamics operate for other lifestyle minorities. Beneito-Montagut (2015) describes
online counterparts to specific elements of Goffmanian interaction ritual (e.g., expressing
support through such devices as liking, retweeting, or favoriting) in several settings.
The Case and the Data
With the departure of the previous CEO and installation of a new CEO in 2002, IBM had reached
a crossroads. After IBM imperiled its survival by failing to respond to seismic shifts in core mar-
kets in the 1980s and 1990s (Bresnahan, Greenstein and Henderson 2012), its board sought
leadership from outside IBM. Lou Gerstner, a former Nabisco CEO and McKinsey executive
hired in 1993, restored profitability by making significant changes in IBM’s core business model,
selling off parts of the commodity hardware business and building a powerful presence in bus-
iness services.
IBM was famous for a strong and distinctive corporate culture created by founder
Thomas Watson Sr. (Maney 2004). As the company reinvented its business model, many felt
that the old culture had eroded (Gerstner believed it had become part of the problem [Legace
2002]) and that the firm had failed to renew the sense of common purpose that had served it
so well in the past. Moreover, due to sharp cuts to the work force during the crisis, renewed
hiring during the recovery, and acquisition of consulting giant Price Waterhouse Coopers, many
employees had received, at most, inconsistent socialization into IBM’s corporate culture. In
2003, only half of the work force had been with IBM for five or more years, and many staff
worked remotely (Hemp and Stewart 2004).
Interaction Ritual Threads ---12---
When Gerstner retired as CEO in 2002, his successor was Sam Palmisano, a lifelong IBM
employee who had joined the firm when the old culture was regnant.3 Palmisano sought to
build upon the changes Gerstner had made in the firm’s core business, but also to inculcate a
stronger sense of collective purpose. As part of this effort, he proposed to hold a “Values Jam”
-- “Jam,” intended to evoke the improvisatory freedom of a musical jam session, was and is
IBM’s term for online company-wide discussions of strategic issues -- as an opportunity to en-
gage IBM employees in clarifying the company’s mission and values. Palmisano, who agreed
with Gerstner that the old culture had become “part of the problem” (Hemp and Stewart 2004:
63), led a process to draft a new set of values: the Values Jam enabled many employees (prim-
arily executives, managers, sales, technical and professional staff) to offer suggestions that
could help refine or alter the values statement, making it a stronger credo. Indeed, top man-
agement revised it extensively based on the Jam discussion.
The Jam’s benefit was not simply instrumental. It also served as a collective ritual, pro-
viding a means to encourage employees to take ownership of and stand behind, the values that
emerged. As Collins (2004: 38) argues, “one chief result of rituals is to charge up symbolic ob-
jects with significance or to recharge such objects with renewed sentiments of respect,” while
at the same time producing positive affect and excitement among the people engaged in inter-
action. It is also likely that the Jams induced additional local conversations that, in some cases
at least, further energized the company’s staff around a new sense of purpose.4
3 For a useful account of IBM’s renewal under Gerstner and Palmisano, of which the Jams were a part, see Tushman, O’Reilly and Harreld 2015. 4 Although many posts offered suggestions to improve the Jams, many posts evinced enthusiasm. A male manager wrote during the World Jam: “The more jams we have...the % of the population that will participate will increase - simply b/c all the positive of this experience will be heard. Just look at this example...i'm a guy in the lower ranks of the company a few yrs out of college and I have a senior vice president of a 320K person company asking me what I think? How cool is that? People will hear about these awesome experiences and they'll automatically want to involve themselves… [The Jam admin team] are doing wonderful things for this company...”
Interaction Ritual Threads ---13---
Data
Data comprise the text of postings in two company-wide discussions held on the IBM Intranet
in 2003 and 2004. Each discussion was open to all employees, each had a fixed duration, and
each had a specific focus. Employees were required to register in order to view or post in the
discussion, and all were required to post under their own names.
The 2003 Values Jam was a “72-hour global brainstorming event“ that “explored the
company’s fundamental business beliefs and values” (Spangler, Kruelen and Newswanger 2006:
787, 793) in the context of a discussion and review of a new values statement drafted by top
management. That discussion elicited 9,131 posts from 3,722 unique posters (just over 1 per-
cent of IBM employees, posting a mean of 2.45 times each) over 72 hours and led to significant
revisions in the values statement (IBM 2006).
A follow-up, The 2004 World Jam, attracted 31,334 posts from 12,972 unique posters
(nearly 4 percent of the IBM work force, posting a mean of 2.42 times each) over a little more
than 48 hours. (In both Jams, many more employees registered and followed the discussions
without posting.) The World Jam was intended to build on the Values Jam by brainstorming
proposals, several of which were adopted, for putting the new values into practice.
The Jams were divided into forums, loose and overlapping in Values Jam (e.g., What
Values are Essential to what IBM Needs to Become? When is IBM at its Best?), and more specif-
ic and pragmatic in World Jam (e.g., Serving Clients; Innovation) (Yuan 2006). Participants
chose forums in which to post (or to read posts without participating), moving in and out of dis-
cussions as schedules permitted. IBM researchers who interviewed participants described nav-
igation as “an idiosyncratic process, alternating between browsing, searching, revisiting, and
Interaction Ritual Threads ---14---
synthesizing” (Dave, Wattenberg and Muller 2004). Moderators posted “Jam Alerts” that high-
lighted discussions they found especially compelling and were welcome to post their own
views, but were not empowered to remove posts or otherwise intervene.5 IBM data scientists
designed a data-mining process (the Jamalyzer) that produced cumulative and recently trending
themes in real time. Participants could click on a theme to access posts close to that topic’s
centroid (Spangler, Kruelen and Newswanger 2006).6
Jams as Speech Genres
The “Jam” was still relatively new to IBM in 2003, but some conventions had already been
established in three previous online discussions (Spira, Friedman, and Ebling 2001; Dorsett,
O’Driscoll and Fontaine, 2002; Birkinshaw and Crainer 2007). Since 2004, IBM has sponsored at
least seven more Jams (focusing on particular issues like innovation and client relations), and
such online discussions have become relatively routine, both at IBM and at other companies
that have employed the IBM model.
Bakhtin (1953) noted that most speech genres other than everyday speech, which lin-
guists study, and literary genres, which literature scholars analyze, are largely undocumented.
Since then, Goffman (1967), ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel 1967) and socoilinguists (Bernstein
1971; Hymes 1974) have taught us even more about face-to-face interaction, and literary
scholarship has proceeded apace. No comparable body of work exists for multi-party online
5 Moderators were chosen on the basis of expertise and company role, with senior managers moderating forums in World Jam related to their areas of responsibility. Moderators did not screen or censor posts. A senior IBM exec-utive familiar with the Jams could recall only one post being deleted, for assailing a particular supervisor by name. It was replaced by a note indicating that it had been removed for violation of IBM’s “Business Conduct Guidelines.” 6 Only about one in six participants used the Jamalyzer (Dave, Wattenberg and Muller 2004). To get a sense of the Jam experience, see the video description f the current Jam format on IBM’s Jam website https://www.collaborationjam.com/ For detailed descriptions of two earlier Jams, see Spira, Friedman and Ebling 2001; and Millen and Fontaine 2002.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---15---
discussions within a single organization. A detailed account would require ethnographic re-
search, but we can at least identify features of the Jams’ structure, style, and content that facil-
itate comparison to face-to-face interaction.
The “post,” the basic unit of the online discussion, is an example of what Bakhtin refers
to as “the utterance,” the “basic unit” (71) of (oral and written) communication. Bakhtin de-
fines an utterance as any set of words associated with a single writer or speaker with clear
boundaries marking beginning and end. Each utterance follows utterances of other speakers
and is followed either by still more responses or by “the other’s responsive understanding,”
expressed through silence or action.
There are major structural differences between online and face-to-face interaction. In
the former, utterances are distinct, with orderly sequences enforced because the utterance is
observed only when completed and posted. Readers experience utterances visually and spat-
ially (on a screen) rather than aurally and chronologically (as a flow of words in time). Thus
many familiar features of conversation are absent: Speakers do not overlap, utterances cannot
be punctuated by supportive remarks, and neither call-response patterns nor interruptions are
possible (Gibson 2005, 2005b).
Moreover, the temporality of online discussions is far slower than that of conversation,
where rhythms move in fractions of seconds. Participants in corporate Jams fit participation
into their regular work lives, attending to discussions when other responsibilities permit. Thus
many posts are separated from their parent by hours rather than seconds: The median duration
between post and response was 97 minutes in the Values Jam and 77 minutes in the World Jam
(See Table 1). Posts also vary substantially in length: Mean lengths in our data were 36 words
Interaction Ritual Threads ---16---
(Values Jam, median=27) and 38 words (World Jam, median=29), but individual posts ranged up
to 736 words (Values Jam) and 795 words (World Jam).
Unlike social conversations, online conversations can fork, with one post in a thread
receiving multiple answers that themselves receive responses, setting up new threads in which
subsets of the original speakers participate. Although something similar happens at dinner
parties when a common topic of conversation dissolves into two or more conversations among
different clusters of diners, forking is more routine and more difficult to avoid online.
TABLE 1: POST AND THREAD CHARACTERISTICS BY JAM Variable.Name Count Mean StDev Min Quant.25 Median Quant.75 Max VALUES JAM
Number of Posts 9131
Number of Posters 3722 Posts per Poster 2.45 3.79 1 1 1 3 91 Percent Posters Posting More
Than Once
0.44
Length of Thread 1.93 1.05 1 1 2 2 14 Number of Threads, length >1 3634
Duration Between Posts
(minutes)
513.28 844.96 0 25.03 96.98 640.83 4295.45
Post Length (words) 36.45 34.6 2 16 27 46 736 WORLD JAM
Number of Posts 31334
Number of Posters 12972 Posts per Poster 2.42 4.07 1 1 1 2 267 Percent Posters Posting More
Than Once
0.44
Length of Thread 2.02 1.06 1 1 2 3 12 Number of Threads, length >1 13209
Duration Between Posts
(minutes)
390.28 606.21 0 20.11 77.27 509.27 3228.62
Post Length (words) 37.71 35.23 2 18 29 46 795
We use the following terminology: A thread is a set of posts stemming uniquely from a
common ancestor from which no other threads issue. All threads attributable to a common
ancestor together constitute a family, and the path between a common ancestor and terminal
post is a lineage. Posts stemming from a given ancestor, including posts in multiple threads, are
that post’s progeny. By contrast, thread length refers to the number of posts in a single thread,
defined as the chain of responding posts from a single top-level post to a terminal child post
Interaction Ritual Threads ---17---
that receives no responses. The distinction between thread and family is significant: Whereas
thread length ranges from 1 to 14 (Values Jam) and 12 (World Jam), family size ranges from 1 to
142 (Values Jam) and 158 (World Jam).
As Bakhtin notes, each speech genre has a distinctive style. This was true of the Jams,
which were, in a sense, liminal spaces (Van Gennep 1908 [1960]; Turner 1969) in which formal
rules and normal hierarchal relations were relaxed in the interest of producing open and pro-
ductive discussions. This liminality was reflected in the Jams’ style. First, most posts were brief
and informal. Language was relatively casual, sometimes elliptical. Misspellings and grammat-
ical errors, signs of haste, focus on substance over style, and suspension of formalities -- all
characteristic of liminal spaces (Turner 1969) -- were common.
Second, posts, while respectful, rarely marked status differences between posters and
addressees with conventional deference rituals. In contrast to face-to-face encounters (Goff-
man 1956), participants in online interactions cannot signal respect through attentiveness or
bodily coordination, but must do so within their utterance. A common pattern in online for-
ums, often employed in the Jams, is to begin an utterance by acknowledging the previous one
respectfully, asserting agreement or, more frequently, partial agreement, then following up
with criticisms or topic shifts.
Third, some participants alluded to personal identities (e.g., gender, sexual preference,
race or nationality) that are ordinarily not noted in business settings, where people interact in
formal organizational roles. Finally, the fact that Jams had marked beginnings and ends further
underscored their ritual significance and apartness from everyday life.
IBM employees did not produce Jam conventions from scratch, of course. Many feat-
ures (organization by forums, search capacity, use of real names) were designed into the Jam.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---18---
Moreover, two previous Jams, conducted on smaller scale with less at stake, established certain
norms. All participants used e-mail routinely; and many engineers, computer scientists, and
other technical staff had likely participated in technical discussion boards. Perhaps due in part
to the ban on anonymity, the tone was civil. Despite much emotionality and frequent
expression of grievances in the first half of Values Jam, ad hominem speech was largely absent.
Whereas programmers and engineers on technical boards can assume a knowledgeable
readership, Jam participants addressed several audiences: the thread’s previous poster; all par-
ticipants in that forum; readers who might find their post through search; and lurkers who read
posts but do not post themselves. The use of acronyms and casual references to events in IBM
history reflects confidence in a shared stock of knowledge, but the fact that posters addressed
readers in all the firms’ global offices and divisions, rather than just their own office or team,
led to a hybrid of restricted and elaborated code (Bernstein 1971).
Posts represented a kind of performance -- posters knew that whatever they wrote
would be accessible to peers, supervisors, and other superiors – that may have been especially
marked in Values Jam, when many employees were still unfamiliar with the genre and were
experiencing the uncertainty associated with any major leadership transition. Relatively low
posting rates in Values Jam (a rate that World Jam more than tripled a year later) also suggests
that uncertainty may have limited participation.
Online discussions vary in content as well as style and structure. The Jams were meant
to produce actionable insights through collective brainstorming. The focus was on the firm’s
values, policies, and procedures (and not, as in many online discussions, on participants’ per-
sonal experiences or problems). From the standpoint of IRC theory, Values Jam’s focus on first
Interaction Ritual Threads ---19---
principles, the values on which IBM’s business was based, was particularly likely to elicit emot-
ional response and feelings of either alienation or solidarity. Jams differed in this way from ev-
eryday contexts in which the normative frame is purely impersonal and instrumental. The
emphasis on values produced more allusions to personal (extra-work) identities, more use of
personal narrative, and more expression of strong affect (positive and negative) than one would
expect in formal organizational speech (e.g., remarks at a business meeting).7 Indeed, IBM’s
CEO later referred to the tone as “hot and contentious and messy” and said that nothing had
“prepared us for the emotions unleashed by this topic” (Hemp and Stewart 2004: 66).
The World Jam was more instrumental, with fewer expressions of strong affect, espec-
ially of negative affect, and a wide range of operational topics discussed. But it was motivated
in terms of IBM’s new values statement and, beyond its instrumental focus, provided an oppor-
tunity to ratify symbolically the common values and sense of community that the company’s
new leadership had achieved and to which the Values Jam was perceived to have contributed.
Measures and Plan of Analysis
Our goal is to see if Randall Collins’s theory of Interaction Ritual Chains can help us predict the
flow of utterances in an online discussion. Our dependent variable is simple: thread persist-
ence, whether a post is followed by another post or whether it extinguishes the thread. Do
variables associated with IRC theory – focus, entrainment, and identity – influence the
likelihood that a post will receive a response?
This is a fundamental condition: To successfully generate ideas, build solidarity and foster
commitment, an online discussion must persist over time. And the degree of interaction is a
7 Many companies use rituals to build employee solidarity, but rarely in such a dialogic context. More typical are such stylized and stage-managed settings as new-product announcements or annual sales meetings (Biggart 1989).
Interaction Ritual Threads ---20---
cumulative function of the length of many threads, which are in turn products of individual
decisions to respond or not to respond to particular posts.8 Measuring success at the post level
aligns with our theoretical amalgamation of Collins (1981), who emphasizes the emergence of
macro outcomes from micro events, and Bakhtin (1953), for whom the utterance (here, the
post) is the fundamental unit of the speech genre. Thus for each of the 40,465 posts in the two
TABLE 2: FOCAL VARIABLES SUMMARY STATISTICS, BY JAM Variable.Name Mean StDev Min Quant.25 Median Quant.75 Max VALUES JAM Share of Posts that Elicit a
Response 0.33 0 0 0 1 1
Intrapost Topic Focus 0.45 0.17 0.15 0.32 0.41 0.52 1.00
Interpost Topic Focus 0.61 0.19 0.31 0.46 0.63 0.76 1.00
Identity: None 0.08
Identity: I/My 0.08
Identity: We/Our 0.09
Identity: IBM 0.07
Identity: We/Our & I/My 0.11
Identity: I/My & IBM 0.12
Identity: We/Our & IBM 0.14
Identity: We/Our, I/My & IBM 0.29 Excitation (30 Min. HL) 0.33 0.42 0.00 0.00 0.12 0.61 4.45
WORLD JAM Share of Posts that Elicit a
Response 0.34 0 0 0 1.00 1.00
Intrapost Topic Focus 0.41 0.16 0.14 0.30 0.38 0.49 1.00
Interpost Topic Focus 0.60 0.18 0.31 0.46 0.62 0.74 1.00
Identity: None 0.11
Identity: I/My 0.10
Identity: We/Our 0.16
Identity: IBM 0.07
Identity: We/Our & I/My 0.15
Identity: I/My & IBM 0.07
Identity: We/Our & IBM 0.14
Identity: We & I 0.15
Identity: We/Our, I/My & IBM 0.20 Excitation 20 Min HL 0.28 0.36 0.00 0.00 0.08 0.53 2.58
8 A second complication: Forum moderators would occasionally highlight certain posts from ongoing threads of special interest. If our dependent variable were thread length rather than response/nonresponse, then the fact that we have no record of such interventions (which probably lengthened the threads concerned) would be problematic. But because moderators highlighted entire discussions, they likely called attention only to posts that had already received replies.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---21---
Jams we created an indicator variable coded as "1" if the post elicited at least one response and
"0" if it did not. This is the dependent variable in the analyses that follow. 9
Choosing measures of focus, entrainment, and identity – the three variables used to test
our extension of IRC theory to online discussions -- involved more complex judgments, which
we describe at some length. (Descriptive statistics for these measures, as well as for the
dependent variable, are presented in Table 2, separately for Values Jam and World Jam.)
Although IRC theory has many feedback loops, a stripped-down version looks like this:
Conversational focus Entrainment Identity
This ordering is conceptual rather than empirical. Focus is necessary for entrainment, which
facilitates the production of common identity, but entrainment also reinforces shared focus,
and partners who share an identity may more easily sustain a successful ritual. Thus we model
these features as simultaneous predictors of thread persistence.
Internal Topical Focus and Interpost Focus. Utterances can be said to exhibit shared
focus in two ways. The first, which we term internal topical focus (or “intratopic focus” for
short), reflects the extent to which a post is concentrated on a few salient topics. The second,
interpost topic focus, represents the extent to which successive posts in a thread display
thematic continuity.
First, consider internal topical focus. To be compelling, a post has to be about some-
thing. The poster must use the few words she or he has (median post length in both Jams was
less than 30 words, and 75 percent of posts 46 or fewer words) to communicate a cogent and
9 The data set assigned a small number of posts (1 percent in Values Jam and 4 percent in World Jam) to a parent that we could not locate, rendering us unable to determine if they were posted to a thread in progress. This could have resulted from missing posts, but because our count of posts for the World Jam coincides with that reported by the IBM researchers closest to the data (Spangler, Kruelen and Newswanger 2006) we suspect it reflects errors in assignment of children to parents.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---22---
salient message. To identify topics that were meaningful to participants (i.e., topics elicited
from their own words rather than our preconceptions), we used topic modeling, an inductive
method for identifying themes in textual corpora (Blei, Ng and Jordan 2003). First, we fit a
spectrally-initialized 30-topic LDA topic model to the 40,465 combined posts from both jams.10
Before undertaking the analysis, we removed “stop words” (common terms like “and” or “is”)
and added N-grams (recurrent phrases of any length) that occurred more than 25 times in the
corpus at a p<.0001, given the frequencies of their constituent words. The topic model finds
patterns of word co-occurrence within a set of documents that best account for the way that
terms are distributed across posts. In so doing, the model identifies the most common themes
in the corpus of postings and provides a common metric, prevalence across topics, to compare
every post in the discussion. The thirty topics covered a wide range of themes, including client
relations, mentoring, performance incentives, open source technology, IBM’s old values,
project delivery, leadership, and work-life balance.
Once the model was fit, we assigned each word in each post to a single topic based on a
Gibbs draw from the model, and used these word assignments to calculate the prevalence of
each topic in each post. Internal Topic Focus was calculated using the Herfindahl-Hirschman
index (Rhoades 1993), which, for each post, sums the squares of topic prevalence for each
topic. It ranges from a theoretical minimum of 1/30 for a post with an equal share of words
devoted to each topic to a maximum of 1 for a post focused on a single topic. Empirically, the
measure ranges from 0.15 to 1.00 with a mean of 0.45 (Values Jam) and 0.14 to 1.00 with a
10 The spectral LDA program initializes an LDA model using the spectral algorithm described in Arora (2013), as implemented in (https://github.com/mimno/anchor), and then fits the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model using the Mallet software package (McAllum 2002). The thirty-topic model was chosen after inspection of results of models ranging from 15 to 40 topics and application of several diagnostic tools. Although informed by the diag-nostics, the choice was based on substantive criteria: the 30-topic solution hit the sweet spot where few topics are indistinguishable from one another but significant topics present in higher-level solutions are not combined.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---23---
mean of 0.41 (World Jam). Because the topic model captured shared themes that emerged
from the conversation, highly focused posts are likely to be clearer, more straightforward, and
easier to respond to, thus providing a sense of motion and motivation to continue. Therefore:
Hypothesis 1a: The greater the internal topical focus, the more likely a post is to elicit
a response.
We anticipate that this effect will be greater for long posts, for which greater discipline is
required to maintain a constant focus. By contrast, the effect of focus may be less apparent for
shorter posts because, with fewer words, the range of topics that can be assigned will be more
circumscribed. Thus
Hypothesis 1b: The positive effect of internal topical focus on probability of response
will increase with post length.
In IRC theory, it is important that focus be mutual and shared among interacting
parties. Thus we present a second measure, interpost focus, which captures mutuality and
continuity of focus over time. Interpost focus measures the extent to which a post uses the
same topics as the post to which it responds. We calculate interpost focus using Jensen-
Shannon (JS) divergence to measure the distance between the parent post's distribution
across the 30 topics and the focal post's distribution across those topics. For each post
with a parent, the measure of shared focus between parent and child is one minus JS di-
vergence. This measure ranges from a minimum of 1-log(2) to a maximum value of 1.
Interpost focus is conceptually and empirically distinct from intratopic focus: two posts
with similarly diffuse foci across several topics might be high on interpost focus but low on
intratopic focus. And a child post might focus sharply on a particular topic, but shift
Interaction Ritual Threads ---24---
attention significantly from its parent. The two measures are correlated at r=0.012 in
Values Jam and at r=0.054 in World Jam.
Following Collins (2004), we expect that posts that respond directly to their parent
will sustain higher levels of energy than posts that shift gears to a different set of issues.
When two or more posts sustain a shared focus, the thread will build momentum and
attract more contributors. Therefore,
Hypothesis 1c: The higher the interpost topical focus, the higher the probability
that a post will elicit a response.
Excitation. Collins’s notion of entrainment is closely linked to the informational and
neurological effects of co-presence. Entrainment in this sense does not exist online, so we
employ an analog, which we call “excitation,” which measures the rapidity of responses in a
thread at the time a post is made.
Collins has noted that even in face-to-face conversations the socially expected duration
between utterances is culturally variable, arguing that “The key process is to keep up the com-
mon rhythm, whatever it may be. Where this is done, the result is solidarity” (2004:71). He
extended this argument to e-mails in an analysis of online conflict, arguing that a “flurry of e-
mails created a new type of interaction ritual, a virtual IR generating its own rhythm” (2012: 7).
We build on these insights, emphasizing that durations are specific not only to cultures, but also
(and perhaps more so) to speech genres. Thus temporal measures predicting effectiveness
must be scaled to the genre and not generalized from face-to-face conversation.
We expect recent posts to elicit responses more often than older ones, and threads
with lots of recent activity to elicit responses more often than threads without such histories.
This is the case because recent posts are more likely to define a thread as active and worthy of
Interaction Ritual Threads ---25---
participation and because a threads’ previous posters will more likely read new posts if activity
has been sustained and relatively recent.
We measure excitation by summing across an exponentially decaying function of time
for all prior posts in a thread when a focal comment is posted.11 Each post prior to the focal
post contributes log(0.5
ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒)𝑡𝑖 to excitation where ti is the number of minutes prior to the focal
post that post i was posted. For example, if excitation uses a half-life of 10 minutes, excitation
of the second post in a thread will be 1 when ti=0 (if two posts happen back to back) or 0.5 if
the posts are separated by 10 minutes. Because we have no a priori theoretical basis for
selecting a half-life (different discussions are likely to establish their own rhythms) we
examined results based on several half-lives, selecting those that provided the best model fit --
30 minutes for Values Jam and 20 minutes for World Jam.
Hypothesis 2: The higher the level of excitation, the greater the probability that a
post will elicit a response.
Identity. Although Collins (2004) views solidarity as an outcome of successful interaction
rituals (albeit with positive feedback effects), other research views the accomplishment of
shared identity as a prerequisite for successful interaction. In a study of community college
counseling encounters, Erickson (1975) found that interactions were more likely to have suc-
cessful outcomes when participants established comembership – a shared identity based on any
common category, from avocation to common friends. Certain words are more indicative of
solidarity than others. In English, the first person plural “we” implies a sense of common fate
and purpose that unifies speaker and listener, while separating them from other identities
11 We tested and rejected a linear decay model.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---26---
(Helmbrecht 2002; Scheibman 2004). The first person plural is also associated with empathy on
the speaker’s part toward the addressees, resting atop what linguists refer to as the "empathy
hierarchy” (Kuno and Kaburaki 1977). Empathy both reflects and predicts common self-
categorization and social identity, which, in turn, are associated with emotional solidarity and
convergence of cognitive orientations among group members (Turner et al. 1987).
We employ a simple measure of identity presentation based on how posters refer to
themselves and to the company. We treat the term “we” or its possessive form “our,” as an
indication that the poster both identifies with the IBM community and shares a sense of own-
ership over IBM’s performance and reputation. Because of the Jam’s focus on IBM’s values
and business processes, we expect that “we” will ordinarily be used to express identification
with IBM (rather than with a subgroup within IBM or with some external identity group). By
contrast, “I” (or the possessive “my”) holds the self apart from the collective. We view the use
of “IBM,” as a kind of third-person counterpart to “I,” as the poster has chosen to objectify the
company as separate from the self, rather than signifying attachment by using the inclusive
“we.” Thus we interpret the first-person plural "we/our" as indicating greater solidarity than
either the first-person singular "I/my" or reference to “IBM” in the third person.
These are admittedly crude indices. “We” may be used inclusively to refer to everyone
in the world (“We all know that…) or exclusively in one of two different ways: to refer to all
IBM employees as distinct from employees of other firms (“We IBMers share a set of values
….”); or to index a part of IBM in contrast to the whole (“In our division, we have a better ap-
proach”) (Scheibman 2004). The first type of exclusivity reflects and builds solidarity at the
firm level; the second type erodes it on behalf of subunit identities; and the inclusive use (in
which the boundaries of “we” are unspecified) does neither. Fortunately, in reading through
Interaction Ritual Threads ---27---
the corpus we found that “we” was usually used to refer to IBM employees, and less often took
the more specific exclusive form or the inclusive mode. Nonetheless our inability to distinguish
among them introduces noise into this measure.
A second problem inheres in the fact that a single post may include “I” (or “my”), “we”
(or “our”), and “IBM” or any pair thereof. Rather than assume naïvely that an “I” and “we” will
cancel one another out, we recognize that they may interact in different ways. "I" used by it-
self is least likely to evoke solidarity. Referring to the company as “IBM” without using a first-
person plural pronoun represents a linguistic distancing of the poster from the group. For
example: “When ibm [sic] provides the high quality product and better service the customer
will trust IBM. They will buy IBM products again.” On the other hand, posts that combine the
first-person plural “we” with “I” or “IBM” may evoke collective identity. Compare, e.g., this
post from the same forum as the one quoted above: “IBM – we need to keep focus of customer
expectation and even anticipate so to fulfill customer expectations and build a relationship
where customer could eventually surrender to IBM as a trusted brand.” Here the addition of
“we” to “IBM” defines the poster and readers as part of a community responsible for what the
poster believes IBM must do. Or compare these two posts, the first I-only and the second
I+IBM: (1) “I think values are possible. I disagree with the statement that values need to change
with the time.” (2) “I have never been more proud of IBM.”
To address this issue, we include binary variables indexing each of the seven combinat-
ions "I” (or “my”), "we" (or “our”), and "IBM" that may occur in a post, treating "I" or "my" al-
one as the omitted category. We use Tukey's Significance Test to compare pairwise differences
between the eight classes of occurrence/nonoccurence. Because each word is more likely to
Interaction Ritual Threads ---28---
be used the longer a post is, and because we expect longer posts to attract more responses,
controlling for post length is critical.
Hypothesis 3a: Posts that contain the words “we” or “our” are more likely than
those that do not to elicit a response.
Hypothesis 3b: Posts that contain the word “I” or “my,” or “IBM,” without
containing the word “we” or “our” are less likely to elicit a response.
Controls. We employ logistic regression models to predict whether or not a post elicits a
response. Although our discussion focuses on the three variables based on IRC theory – focus,
excitation, and identity – the model must control for a range of other features that affect the
likelihood that a thread will persist beyond the focal post. For example, in both Jams longer
posts received responses more frequently than shorter posts, as did posts from the U.S., posts
in certain forums, posts that prominently represented certain topics, and posts submitted
before the last eight hours of the Jam. For detailed descriptions of the control variables, see
Appendix A; for descriptive statistics see Appendix B.
Results
We focus in this section on the three measures related to IRC theory: focus, excitation, and id-
entity. We begin by describing zero-order relationships of these measures to response and
then present the results of a logistic regression model.
Zero-Order Relationships
To establish zero-order relationships, we carried out separate logistic regressions predicting
probability of response for each set of variables discussed above. The purpose of these models
Interaction Ritual Threads ---29---
Table 3: Zero-Order Associations of Focal Measures with Thread Persistence Focus: Values Focus: World Excitation: Values Excitation: World Identity: Values Identity: World Intrapost Focus 1.385* 1.570*** Log Length in Words 1.214*** 1.113*** Intrapost Focus x Length 1.290 1.048 Interpost Focus 1.659** 1.741*** Excitation: 30m decay 1.354*** Excitation: 20m decay 1.224*** Identity: none 0.842 0.993 Identity: We/our 1.152 1.173** Identity: IBM 1.225 1.149* Identity: We/our & I/my 1.111 1.070 Identity: I/my and IBM 1.296* 1.218*** Identity: We/our & IBM 1.190 1.204*** Identity: We, I & IBM 1.356*** 1.327***
Slashes in identity variable names=OR. Cell values are exponentiated coefficients from separate logistic regression models, for each combination of Jam and focal variables, with response probability as dependent variable. Interpost focus model and excitation model contain controls for top-level post and missing parent. All other coefficients are visible. * P≤.05 **P≤.01 ***P≤.004
is not to test hypotheses, but to examine zero-order associations. (See Table 3.) Those for both
measures of focus are as expected in both Jams: the more focused the post on a particular top-
ic, and the more topically consistent the post with its parent, the higher the probability that the
post would elicit a response. The expected interaction between Intrapost focus and length was
insignificant, however. In both Jams, the greater the level of excitation – i.e. the more recently
posted were the previous messages in the thread -- the higher the likelihood of a response.
Patterns for identity were more complicated. Comparisons are to posts that used only
the word “I” or “my” (the omitted category) without any other identity term. In Values Jam,
posts that included the terms “We” or “Our” were more likely to gain a response than posts
with “I/my” alone only if “We/Our” was accompanied by an “I/My” and “IBM” – terms that
were expected to depress response, but in fact encouraged it. Indeed, posts with “I/my” and
“IBM” together were more likely to yield responses than posts with just “I/My” even without
“We/Our.” These combinations also elicited the strongest response in World Jam, but, in line
Interaction Ritual Threads ---30---
with predictions, “I-only” posts also did significantly less well than posts that included “We/-
Our,” by itself or in combination with other terms.
Full models
To what extent do these associations survive the introduction of controls for other focal var-
iables and for such factors as the poster’s gender and hierarchal position, time and geographic
origin of the post, post length and whether it is a top-level post (rather than a response to a
previous post) or has a missing parent, the forum in which it was posted, and the topic or topics
prevalent in the text. (Coefficients for focal variables appear in Table 4; for the full model, see
Appendix C.) We discuss each of the three sets of hypotheses in turn.
Focus. Hypotheses 1a and 1c receive strong support in both Jams, with very similar pos-
itive coefficients. Both intrapost focus and interpost focus significantly boost the probability
that a post will elicit a response. Hypothesis 1b, which posits an interaction between intrapost
focus and length, is disconfirmed, as the interaction of length and focus is not significant for
Table 4: Focal Variables Predicting Thread Persistence in Models with Full Controls
Values Jam World Jam
Intrapost Focus 1.500* 1.523***
Length in Words (logged) 1.140*** 1.015
Intrapost Focus x Length 1.174 1.014
Interpost Focus 1.496* 1.541***
Excitation (30 min. half-life) 2.185***
Excitation (20 min. half-life) 1.579***
Identity: None 0.862 0.92
Identity: We/our only 1.079 1.111*
Identity: IBM only 1.173 1.02
Identity: We/our and I/my 1.099 1.106
Identity: I/my and IBM 1.185 1.155*
Identity: We/our and IBM 1.077 1.094
IdentitA4:E20y: We/our, I/my and IBM 1.186 1.288**
*Coefficients are exponentiated. * P≤.10 **P≤.05 ***P≤.01
Interaction Ritual Threads ---31---
either Jam. This is not the whole story, however. Figure 2, below, displays standardized coef-
ficients (rather than the exponentiated coefficients in Table 4) with confidence intervals for fo-
cus for posts with different numbers of words. Whereas focus is highly significant in Word Jam
at every word length (i.e., the number of words in the post), in Values Jam the effect of focus
on probability of response rises steadily with word length, and only becomes statistically
significant for posts of fifty words or greater, providing some support for Hypothesis 1a in
Values Jam, but not in World Jam.
Excitation. Excitation measures the extent to which posts build up momentum through
rapid and consistent responses over the course of a thread. Its effect remains highly significant,
rising substantially with the addition of controls. Thus Hypothesis 2 receives strong support. In
separate analyses, we ascertained that the effect of excitation peaked at a half-life of 30
minutes for Values Jam and 20 minutes for World Jam, reflecting the quicker pace of the latter.
To what extent does the history of durations between responses affect the likelihood of
the most recent post receiving a response? To address this question, we included the variable
with and without the contributions to excitation of posts prior to its parent (results available
Figure 2: Results of Regressions with Full Set of Controls: Standardized Coefficients with Confidence Intervals
Interaction Ritual Threads ---32---
upon request). We found no statistically significant difference between the estimated coeffic-
ients of the two measures. Thus the system is semi-stochastic with respect to excitation: it re-
sponds to the length of time elapsed between the focal post and its parent, but is unaffected by
durations before that, except as mediated through the timing of the parent post. We should
not generalize this finding: It is possible that a cumulative effect of previous posts might be ev-
ident were there more cases of posts arriving in rapid succession. But given the distribution of
observed response times in these Jams, only the most recent duration accounts for the
observed effect.
Identity. Hypotheses 3a and 3b were rejected for the Values Jam, as no differences
between either “I/My” or “We/Our” and other identity terms or combinations were significant.
In the World Jam, the hypotheses received some support, in that “We/Our” posts were signific-
antly more likely to receive responses than “I/My” posts. But the support was equivocal, as
posts with “I/My” and “IBM” together also received responses at a significantly higher rate than
posts with “I/My” alone, and they did so whether or not “We/Our” was included.
Discussion and Conclusions
Our analysis demonstrates the utility of IRC theory for understanding the dynamics of online
discussions. In particular, two key elements of IRC theory are strongly supported. First, posts
are more likely to elicit responses, and thus to facilitate the persistence of a discussion thread,
to the extent that they focus on a particular topic and sustain a common focus over time. Even
absent co-presence, common focus matters in the way that IRC theory predicts, if not through
precisely the same mechanisms.
Second, the more quickly a poster responds to the previous post in a thread, the more
likely it is that she or he, in turn, will receive a response. Online discussions have more relaxed
Interaction Ritual Threads ---33---
rhythms than the rapid fire of face-to-face rituals – in this case with excitation half-lives of 20 to
30 minutes -- but they have rhythms nonetheless, and actors who sustain them keep discuss-
ions going. Again, rhythm matters in the way that IRC predicts, even without mechanisms that
require co-presence.
By contrast, the analyses yielded little evidence that shared identity (of which our
measures are admittedly crude) elicits responses. Aside from the advantage of posts with most
identity forms over posts with none (even controlling for length), the only significant difference
was the advantage in World Jam of posts that referred to all three identify forms over those
that referred to just one or two, a result that can be interpreted in several ways.
What conclusions can we draw from this exercise? First, and most important, notwith-
standing its author’s reservations, IRC theory is versatile enough to illuminate discussions
where participants are not co-present. In expanding the theory’s scope, we do not imply that
interaction rituals operate the same way in every setting. Instead we argue, first, that they
work differently in different contexts and, second, that they operate through a broader range
of mechanisms than those that Collins describes.
An implication of this analysis is that one must begin – as Collins does with face-to-face
talk in Interaction Ritual Chains – with an analysis of structural properties of the speech genre in
which one is interested. IBM’s Jams represent a particular family of speech genres (Bakhtin
1953), sharing features with other time-limited, goal-oriented, online discussions within formal
organizations, which differ in important ways from face-to-face conversations. Genre has
important implications for focus, entrainment, and identity.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---34---
In Jams, the fact that the discussion was about a shared employer, IBM, provided a pre-
liminary focus. Beyond that, focus takes two forms. It is internal to particular postings: post-
ings that are self-evidently about something are more likely to sustain a thread. And focus is
sustained between postings within threads: posts that sustain conversational topics are more
likely to elicit responses than posts that change the subject.
Excitation and entrainment are both products of temporal synchrony. Each speech
genre has its own rhythm, including a “socially expected duration” (Merton 1984) between
speech acts, which depends on its structure, boundaries, the number of participants, and other
claims on participants’ time and attention.
With respect to identity, we hypothesized that use of first person plurals as subjects or
possessives would serve as solidarity displays that would elicit a positive response, whereas use
of the first person singular or the name of the company would reduce the likelihood of re-
sponse by distancing the poster from the identities that participants shared. This was not the
case. It may be that identity displays are too complex to be measured by pronoun combinat-
ions, or that richness and complexity in identity displays are more important than gestures of
solidarity. In corporate Jams, participants start with a salient shared identity (as members of
the organization); exchanges may be more productive through disagreement, including refer-
ences to suborganizational (e.g. departmental or professional) identities and concerns, than
through appeals to unity. By contrast, in discussions among heterogeneous groups (e.g., ex-
perimental deliberative discussion groups), defining bases for solidarity is more problematic
and “we” talk may be more important. In still other kinds of online discussion (e.g., non-time-
limited discussion boards for persons with stigmatized identities), a functional emphasis on
mutual support may make solidaristic identity references crucial.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---35---
Much work remains to extend IRC theory to a wider range of speech genres. Different
kinds of online settings vary in the extent to which they are characterized by factors like im-
mediacy, aural or visual access, or critical mass that contribute to interaction rituals’ success.
One might hypothesize that online rituals are most likely to work to the extent they entail
ongoing interaction:
in real time;
among people with a history of face-to-face interaction, or, at least, biographical
knowledge of one another;
about topics in which participants are intensely interested; and that is
accompanied by visual information as well as text;
supported by complementary offline communications; and
bounded, with a beginning and an end
By these criteria, our cases set a moderate bar for IRC Theory as interactions involve many par-
ticipants, few of whom were well acquainted, and did not use visual cues. Participation oc-
curred in real time but was intermittent. The major factors in the Jams’ favor were that they
were time-bounded, that it is possible (though we cannot be sure) that offline conversations
reinforced online activity, and that people care passionately about their jobs and workplaces –
and voluntary discussions select for those who care the most. Overall, however, because of the
absence of co-presence, the Jams put IRC theory to a demanding test, reinforcing the case for
expanding its scope.
Such expansion is only possible, however, if mechanisms that do not depend upon co-
presence can produce analogous results. We have described a range of work in psychology that
creates a strong presumption that people can and do generate emotions, beliefs, and social
Interaction Ritual Threads ---36---
solidarity at a distance. These studies demonstrate the power of the imaginative faculty and
the immediacy and intensity with which people bring the social into their mental lives, suggest-
ing that the lines between seeing and doing, and between imagining and experiencing social
situations, are thinner and more precarious than once believed.
In extending IRC theory’s scope to online interaction, we do not imagine that face-to-
face and online interactions are empirically separable. Humans are often with others when
they are online; and they may talk about what they do and see on their screens shortly
afterwards, or even as they do and see it. As complete as our data are, the fact that we do not
have comparable data on conversations that IBM employees were having face-to-face during
the Jams, and about ideas or sentiments expressed in postings, makes this analysis necessarily
incomplete. A consultant’s report on an earlier jam noted that “many conversations took place
or continued offline”; we assume that this was also true of the two Jams we studied (Spira,
Friedman and Ebling 2001: 19). Would the effects of focus and excitation have been stronger
or weaker had IBM employees been isolated from their peers for the duration of the Jams?
IRC theory has important implications for organizational culture, for it emphasizes that
cultural objects, and moral sentiments around those objects, are produced and reinforced by
interaction rituals. But most such rituals are local, and the division of labor generates differ-
ences in perspective and, at times, interest among different units of the organization (March
and Simon 1958). As Collins (2004: 86) notes, workplaces have frontstage and backstage talk:
the former instrumental, impersonal, to the point and likely to produce company-wide IR
chains; the latter political, often critical, frequently addressing personal reputations, and often
accentuating local in-group loyalties and reinforcing interdepartmental boundaries. When
companies try to build firm-wide cultures without altering communication networks, they face
Interaction Ritual Threads ---37---
a paradox: when carried out at the local level, discussions intended to induce commitment to
and identification with the firm may produce varying understandings that lead to conflict down
the line, or even promote local solidarity at the expense of the collective, engendering resist-
ance or cynicism toward companywide symbols (Kunda 1992; DaCunha and Orlikowski 2008).
Firm-level discussions like the Jam may alter this dynamic by rewiring the networks.
The World Jam was largely an example of the organizational frontstage, focusing on instrum-
ental issues and inducing goal-oriented communication across functional and spatial lines. The
Values Jam, occurring at a less settled time, sometimes effaced the boundary between front-
stage and backstage, bringing festering resentments and anxieties into public view. In both
cases, however, to the extent that the Jams delocalized ritual communication, they short-cir-
cuited the local vs. organizational dynamic that so often undermines culture-building efforts.
Without being able to witness the local conversations that accompanied the Jams –
conversations that, at various times, may have emboldened staff to post critical comments or,
at other times, have created local reservoirs of energy around ideas for innovation that the
Jams produced – we can only speculate. But we think this direction is worth exploring. We
believe that IRC theory will continue to provide insight into computer-mediated communicat-
ion, and into the interaction of online communication with communication face-to-face. The
influence of IRC theory can only continue to grow, as it provides the key to understanding
interaction in a wider range of social contexts.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---38---
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Appendix A: Control Variables for Logistic Regressions Predicting Response: Description Log (length). Longer posts offer more content for potential responders to respond to and may
also act as a signal of the commitment of the poster. Both of these would increase the
probability of a longer post eliciting response relative to a shorter post. We use logged words
to measure post length for two reasons. First, the word length of posts are approximately log-
normally distributed. Second, any effect of post length is likely to be related to the
proportional difference between post lengths, rather than absolute differences in number of
words. Therefore, we would expect the difference in effect size between a 20-word and 40-
word post to be proportional to the difference between a 100-word and 200-word post, rather
the difference between a 100-word and a 120-word post as using raw word count would
estimate.
Forum. Conversations during the Jams happened within particular forums. Because the local
patterns of communication might differ between these forums, we control for in which forum a
particular post was made. The Values Jam was divided into four discussion forums (in
paraphrase): Forum 1: What are the most important values for IBM? What do you think of the 4
proposed values? Forum 2: What we need to *do* to be a great company (emphasis on
action). Forum 3: What does IBM contribute to the world - what would happen if it
disappeared? Forum 4: What makes you proud to be an IBMer? The World Jam was divided
into six forums (theme in paraphrase): Forum 1: Integrated capabilities for clients; Forum 2:
Client expectations and client satisfaction; Forum 3: Innovation at IBM; Forum 4: Innovating on
IBM itself (process improvements); Forum 5: First-line managers’ role; and Forum 6: Personal
responsibility.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---43---
Gender (male, and unknown [female omitted category]). Names of all posters were provided
in the raw data. Before anonymizing the data, we sought to identify the gender of each
participant on the basis of given names. First, we used the genderize.io (http://genderize.io)
API to lookup the probable gender of all participants' first names. Where a first name was
included as an initial, but a second name was present, we used the latter. In cases where there
was a first initial and no second name, or where the second name was also initialized, we
labeled the gender "unknown." Several thousand names were still left unidentified by this API,
however. We submitted still unknown-gender names to the Gendre api
(https://market.mashape.com/namsor/gendre-infer-gender-from-world-names) which has a
wider set of non-English names. Ultimately, we identified 4,330 participants as female, 9,819 as
male, with 1,356 having gender-ambiguous or gender-unidentifiable names.
Time of day of post (in four-hour windows). Posts made during periods of heavy user activity
are likely to receive higher rates of response than posts made at other times. To account for
this, we include a control for which of the six four-hour periods during the day a post was
made. We confirmed that times were Greenwich Mean Time by finding corroboration in posts
that mentioned the time of posting.
Top-Level Comment. This variable indicates posts that were made directly into a forum, rather
than in response to a previous comment. Because top-level comments have no parents, they
cannot add value to our measures of excitation or inter-post focus. Therefore it is necessary to
control for them in the logistic regressions.
Missing Parent. Of the 40,465 posts in the data, 1,445 specified a parent post that was not in
the data set. The Company was unable to identify why these posts had missing parent post ids,
and various tests uncovered no systemic bias in the content or participants associated with
Interaction Ritual Threads ---44---
these posts. Because both the time since parent and excitation measure rely on information
associated with the parent post of a particular post, posts with missing parents have artificial
zero values for those measures. We control for a post having a missing parent so that these
artificial zero values do not affect the fit of the known excitation and time since parent values.
Continent. Data included the name of the country from which the post originated, which we
aggregated into continent, with the expectation that posters from the firm’s main offices in the
U.S. would more often elicit responses. We aggregate these into the continent of each
participant to control for whether the participant was in the North American offices of the
company or in more distant satellite offices. There were 13 participants with no country
information; we created an "unknown" continent category for these participants.
Last Period of the Jam. Posts made during the last 8 hours of each Jam (hours 64-72 of Values
Jam and hours 46-54 of World Jam) were less likely to elicit responses, both because there was
less time to respond and because potential posters may have perceived that their post would
be less likely to receive a response. We include a control for posts made during this window to
account for this.
is.exec and is.manager. The data set included job titles for posters in the two Jams. A total of
1,674 participants were identified as "executive" because their titles contains at least one of
the words, "president", "ceo", "cfo", "chief", "exec", "executive", "vp", "vice president", "dir",
"director", or "treasurer" and neither the word "program" nor "project." There were 2,989
non-executive "managers" identified based on their title containing at least one of the words,
"mgr", "manager", "manages", or "mngr" and neither the word "program" nor "project." The
remaining 11,009 participants were considered "non-managers," including 908 participants
with missing or blank job titles.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---45---
Topic Number. Topic models are mixed-membership models that model each document as a
combination of topics, with words assigned to topics by the spectral-initialized LDA topic model
described in the body of this paper. Dummy variables for each of the 30 topics equaled “1” if
20 percent or more of the words in a post (excluding stop words) were assigned to that topic
and were equal to “0” otherwise. Results for 20 percent were substantively similar for
thresholds of 10%, 15%, 25%, and 30%. In general, posts that addressed collective grievances,
career or family concerns, or technological innovation were most likely to get responses.
Interaction Ritual Threads ---46---
Appendix B: Control Variables for Logistic Regressions: Descriptive Statistics by Jam
Variable Share Values
Jam Share World
Jam Non Manager 0.74 0.66 Manager 0.15 0.2 Executive 0.1 0.14 Female 0.26 0.28 Male 0.63 0.63 Unknown Gender 0.11 0.09 00:00-04:00 GMT 0.09 0.08 04:00-08:00 GMT 0.07 0.09 08:00-12:00 GMT 0.12 0.13 12:00-16:00 GMT 0.23 0.17 16:00-20:00 GMT 0.33 0.3 20:00-24:00 GMT 0.16 0.22 Americas 0.69 0.61 Africa 0 0.01 Asia 0.07 0.16 Europe 0.2 0.19 Oceania 0.04 0.03 Unknown Continent 0.01 0.01 Top-level Post 0.45 0.41 Share Posts Missing
Parent 0.01 0.04
Last 8 Hours of Jam 0.14 0.14 Forum 1 0.44 0.17 Forum 2 0.28 0.16 Forum 3 0.09 0.12 Forum 4 0.19 0.23 Forum 5 0.14
Forum 6 0.19
Values
Prevalence Values Share
Over 0.2 World
Prevalence World Share
Over 0.2 Topic 1 0.005 0.007 0.036 0.061 Topic 2 0.044 0.088 0.022 0.042 Topic 3 0.014 0.026 0.045 0.092 Topic 4 0.018 0.033 0.059 0.097 Topic 5 0.006 0.010 0.028 0.056 Topic 6 0.050 0.116 0.045 0.098 Topic 7 0.011 0.022 0.023 0.048 Topic 8 0.029 0.050 0.019 0.036 Topic 9 0.008 0.015 0.018 0.030 Topic 10 0.006 0.010 0.018 0.029 Topic 11 0.011 0.020 0.015 0.025 Topic 12 0.127 0.195 0.022 0.039 Topic 13 0.013 0.023 0.025 0.049 Topic 14 0.016 0.030 0.024 0.044 Topic 15 0.010 0.018 0.031 0.061 Topic 16 0.161 0.297 0.010 0.020 Topic 17 0.008 0.014 0.035 0.059 Topic 18 0.011 0.020 0.050 0.088 Topic 19 0.005 0.009 0.040 0.071 Topic 20 0.022 0.034 0.020 0.040 Topic 21 0.013 0.023 0.027 0.054 Topic 22 0.016 0.028 0.038 0.076 Topic 23 0.007 0.011 0.018 0.034 Topic 24 0.020 0.034 0.038 0.075 Topic 25 0.031 0.075 0.031 0.083 Topic 26 0.055 0.101 0.037 0.063 Topic 27 0.029 0.048 0.046 0.078 Topic 28 0.091 0.176 0.061 0.119 Topic 29 0.155 0.332 0.091 0.192 Topic 30 0.007 0.010 0.026 0.040
Interaction Ritual Threads ---47---
Appendix C: Results of Full Regression Models Including Controls Dependent variable: Persistence of the Thread
Values Jam World Jam
Intrapost Focus 1.500* 1.523***
Length in Words (logged) 1.140*** 1.015
Intrapost Focus x Length 1.174 1.014
Interpost Focus 1.496* 1.541***
Excitation (30 min. half-life) 2.185***
Excitation (20 min. half-life) 1.579***
Identity: none 0.862 0.920
Identity: We/our only 1.079 1.111*
Identity: IBM only 1.173 1.020
Identity: We/our and I/my 1.099 1.106
Identity: I/my and IBM 1.185 1.155*
Identity: We/our and IBM 1.077 1.094
Identity: We/our, I/my and IBM 1.186 1.288**
Poster is manager 0.892 1.108**
Poster is executive 0.945 1.217***
Gender=male 1.024 1.001
Gender=unknown 1.052 1.008
Time of post: 04-08 GMT 1.093 0.757***
Time of post: 08-12 GMT 1.029 0.705***
Time of post: 12-16 GMT 0.707*** 0.816***
Time of post: 16-20 GMT 0.853 1.130*
Time of post: 20-24 GMT 0.721*** 0.800***
Post from Africa 0.246 0.657*
Post from Asia 0.884 0.819***
Post from Europe 0.885 0.826***
Post from Oceania 1.303* 0.816**
Post from Unknown Location 0.705 0.827
Top-level comment 2.491*** 2.468***
Missing parent 1.730** 1.142*
Last 8 hours 0.451*** 0.415***
Forum 2 0.988 1.003
Forum 3 0.598*** 1.181**
Forum 4 0.645*** 0.981
Forum 5 1.299***
Forum 6 1.451***
Interaction Ritual Threads ---48---
App. C (con.) Values Jam World Jam
Topic 1 (management tools) ≤ 20% 0.824 0.914
Topic 2 (global company)≤ 20% 1.117 0.924
Topic 3 (employees, leadership) ≤ 20% 0.968 1.108
Topic 4 (client solutions) ≤ 20% 1.038 0.917
Topic 5 (Intranet and Jam) ≤ 20% 1.328 1.058
Topic 6 (customer relationships) ≤ 20% 0.910 0.857**
Topic 7 (empowering managers) ≤ 20% 1.047 1.085
Topic 8 (work-life balance) ≤ 20% 1.383** 1.249**
Topic 9 (internal systems) ≤ 20% 1.112 1.077
Topic 10 (open source) ≤ 20% 1.428 1.192*
Topic 11 (auditing & compliance)≤ 20% 1.238 0.885
Topic 12 (the old days) ≤ 20% 1.217** 1.182*
Topic 13 (mentoring newcomers) ≤ 20% 1.215* 1.138*
Topic 14 (solve customer issues) ≤ 20% 0.997 0.956
Topic 15 (innovation) ≤ 20% 1.166 1.117
Topic 16 (the old values) ≤ 20% 0.856 0.851
Topic 17 (customer solutions) ≤ 20% 0.704 0.910
Topic 18 (sales and selling) ≤ 20% 0.910 1.009
Topic 19 (project delivery) ≤ 20% 0.957 0.988
Topic 20 (performance incentives) ≤20% 1.325* 1.225**
Topic 21 (meetings) ≤ 20% 1.269 1.070
Topic 22 (process tools) ≤ 20% 1.085 0.881*
Topic 23 (contracts, pricing) ≤ 20% 0.940 1.022
Topic 24 (employee opportunity) ≤ 20% 1.019 0.996
Topic 25 (time, resources) ≤ 20% 1.251* 1.134*
Topic 26 (IBM’s future) ≤ 20% 0.846 0.943
Topic 27 (budgets and planning) ≤ 20% 0.945 0.948
Topic 28 (IBM culture, trust) ≤ 20% 0.929 0.920
Topic 29 (positive words) ≤ 20% 1.228*** 1.132**
Topic 30 (product development) ≤ 20% 1.075 0.924 Constant 0.340*** 0.327***