Paul DiMaggio, New York University Clark Bernier ...

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,


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.


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).


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.


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).


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).


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-


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.


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.


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).


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...”


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


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.

https://www.collaborationjam.com/


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


(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


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.


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


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).


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.


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.


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.


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


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


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.


(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


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


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


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


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***


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


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


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


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.


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.


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


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


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.


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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.


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


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.


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.


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


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***



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***


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***

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