Copiers ano

Faculty & Research

d Water Coolers: The Ecology f Informal Interactions

by AL. Fayard

and J. Weeks

2004/02/OB

Working Paper Series

Copiers and Water Coolers The Ecology of Informal Interactions

Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks INSEAD

Boulevard de Constance 77305 Fontainebleau, France

+33 1 60 72 40 00

anne-laure.fayard@insead.edu john.weeks@insead.edu

5 January 2004

This paper benefited from the helpful comments and advice of Austin Henderson, Gerry De-Sanctis, Charlie Galunic, Martin Gargiulo, John Van Maanen, David Krackhardt, and Roberto Fernandez. We would also like to thank the members of all of the organizations studied for their patience and forbearing letting us listen in on their informal interactions.

Copiers and Water Coolers The Ecology of Informal Interactions

Abstract Sociologists and organization theorists have long recognized the importance of informal in-teractions in organizations. However, while we know a great deal about the consequences for individuals, groups, and organizations of different patterns of informal interaction and we know a fair amount as well about with whom a given individual is more likely to interact in-formally, very little has been written about how the environment of particular physical spaces either facilitates or impedes informal interactions. That is, we know much about the what, why, how, and who of informal interactions. This paper sketches a grounded theory of where informal interactions are most likely to occur. Building on an ethnographic study of several white-collar office environments, we develop a model of the ecology of informal interactions. That is, we describe the pattern of characteristics that a particular environment must offer for informal interactions to flourish. This pattern contains three important elements: privacy, legitimacy, and spontaneity. The elements are not independent, they partially oppositional, and we argue that the co-presence of all three is characteristic of the space is often referred to figuratively as “around the water cooler.”

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Introduction Sociologists and organization theorists have long recognized the importance of informal in-

teractions in organizations. Important need not mean beneficial of course. From a Taylorist

perspective of scientific management (Taylor 1947), these informal interactions are a source

of inefficiency and waste that should be eliminated if possible. In the 1950s and 1960s,

however, a series of landmark studies by Dalton (1959), Blau (1963), Burns and Stalker

(1961), Katz and Kahn (1966), and others, suggested that informal interactions are inevitable

and consequential even in large bureaucratic organizations (Blau 1963) and that, while they

are more important in some contexts than they are in others (Burns and Stalker 1961), they

provide an essential lubrication without which the gears of bureaucracy or any organizational

system would grind to a halt (Dalton 1959; Katz and Kahn 1966). In more recent years, the

burgeoning literature on social networks has shed light on the specific individual and group-

level consequences of informal interaction patterns. Informal ties, or their absence, have

been found important for finding a new job (Granovetter 1973), for career mobility (Podolny

and Baron 1997), for promotions and bonuses (Burt 1992), and for job satisfaction

(Krackhardt and Porter 1985). It has been indicated that frequent interactions promote group

integration and trust among group members (Coleman 1988) and that positive group out-

comes, such as increased output and decreased project time, are associated with increased

informal communications either within the group (Reagans and Zuckerman 2001) or between

groups (Hansen 1999). Studies of virtual teams have noted the challenges raised in such

teams by the fact that informal interaction is difficult and rare (e.g.. Kiesler and Cummings,

(2002); Kraut et al., (2002)).

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The importance of informal interactions has also been highlighted in studies that have

focused on the “invisible” part of work—the practices that appear in no official job descrip-

tion and which are seldom formally rewarded but which are essential for the organization to

function (Wadel 1979; Becker 1982; Strauss 1987; Nardi and Engeström 1999). In recent

years, however, this importance of informal interaction has received increasing visibility.

The wisdom of increasing the amount of managers’ own informal interactions and those

among their subordinates has been packaged for sale in practitioner-oriented self-help manu-

als such as Peters and Waterman (1982), Baker (1994), Hill (2003), and countless others.

Organizational ethnographers have described in rich detail a multitude of different

way that informal interactions are made sense of and socially constructed by the actors them-

selves. They may help your career, but more proximately they are ways to pass the time

when stuck a boring job (Roy 1959-60); they are acts of defiance against an over-controlling

employer and over-demanding customers (Van Maanen 1991); they are a chance to complain

about the organization and to affirm shared suffering (Weeks 2004); they are welcome or

unwelcome interruptions to the “real work” of the organization (Perlow 1997); they are

method of problem-solving (Orr 1996); they come to define over time the institutionalized

roles and structures of the organization (Barley 1986). Thus we know quite a bit about the

consequences of informal interactions in organizations—what they produce as outcomes and

why they occur—and about how they are interpreted and defined. There has also been a fair

amount of research examining with whom is a given individual likely to informally interact.

A consistent finding in network studies is that of homophily: people tend to interact more

with people who are similar to themselves demography. Several explanations have put for-

ward for network homophily in organizations (see, for example, Blau (1977) and Marsden

(1988) for details) and significant differences have been noted between men and women in

this regard (Ibarra 1992; Ibarra 1997). Feld (1981) broadens the argument from demograph-

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ics to argue that people are more likely to have informal interactions with others who share

foci in the social environment. Thus, individuals are more likely to interact with others in the

organization who also go to the same church or have children in the same school or partici-

pate in the same philanthropic institution or with fellow smokers. A more strictly geographi-

cal approach to the question of who interacts with whom comes from Allen (1977) who

showed that people are exponentially less likely to interact informally with people with of-

fices further away from their own with an asymptotically low probability of interaction

reached within 25 to 30 meters. Propinquity matters enormously when it comes to informal

interactions; we interact most with those located nearest to us.

Thus, over the past 50 years we have learned much about the what, why, how, and

who of informal interactions. Surprisingly, however, little has been written about the when

and where. There is a practical stream of literature (e.g., Becker (1995); IDEO (2003)) aimed

at helping managers and architects design office spaces that facilitate informal interactions.

But little, if anything, has been written in the organizational literature about what makes one

space more conducive than another to informal interactions. Allen’s (1977: 248) work does

touch on the subject. Noting that it is not always possible for all offices to be within the 25-

30 meter propinquity limit from each other, he advocates the creation of centrally located “in-

teracting-promoting facilities”—shared facilities that people must use during the day, such as

rest rooms, coffee machines, laboratory equipment, copy machines and the cafeteria. Allen

argues as if it were self-evident that such shared central facilities would automatically facili-

tate informal interaction. And, indeed, it seems that the subject has been taken for granted in

the literature. In part, perhaps this is because it seems merely like a matter of common-sense.

People congregate around the water-cooler, they talk in the corridor, they stand and chat at

the copier machine, they debrief each other (if not literally) in the rest room. Everybody

knows this. Given the importance consequences of informal interactions for individuals and

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groups and organizations, though, it is worth asking what we really know. Our project is to

expose this supposed “common sense;” to make it explicit and to understand it analytically.

We ask: Why the water cooler? In popular usage, “water cooler” has become a figure of

speech. In these days of bottled water and beverage diversity, many offices may not even

have a physical water cooler, and the metaphorical “water cooler” may instead be a coffee

machine or a copier or a bulletin board. It is a technology in a space around which people

feel it natural and comfortable to gather and gossip. But what characterizes such environ-

ments?

This paper sketches a grounded theory of the organizational ecology of informal in-

teractions. That is, a theory of the relationship between people and their organizational envi-

ronment—specifically, a white-collar office environment—that produces informal

interaction. It is an attempt to explain the necessary and sufficient conditions for informal

interactions to occur in a particular environment. The theory is grounded upon ethnographic

data collected through fieldwork in several settings, centering on the close study—including

videotaping—of copier rooms in three different organizations conducted by the first author.

The three sites studied were: the research center of a large publicly-owned utility (which we

shall refer to as RC); a department within a commercial publishing house (PH); and an aca-

demic department of a business school (BS). All three organizations were located in France,

in or around Paris. In each case, the group under study was small (consisting of 10-20 peo-

ple) and consisted of a mix of professionals and administrative staff. The data were collected

over a 24 month period, first at the Research Center and then concurrently at the Business

School and the Publishing House. During this period, interactions in the three sites were ob-

served and videotaped, and informants were interviewed, sometimes quickly and informally

immediately following an observed interaction and sometimes more formally at a later time.

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We say more about the methods used to collect and analyze the data in the Methods section

of the paper.

Our aim in data collection was to videotape and closely observe patterns of interaction

at the three sites, and this required difficult choices to be made upfront about where to locate

the observations. The copier room was a natural choice for reasons that, as we shall describe,

echo the reasons that copier rooms turn out to be such fostering environments for informal

interactions. First, the copier room is a public space that nevertheless offers a degree of pri-

vacy. Copying is not a specialized task and so the copier room is regarded as accessible to

people at all levels of the hierarchy and there is an expectation that anyone may use the cop-

ier (although, naturally, certain people use it much more often than others). The copier room

afforded the researcher, with her video camera, a place from which to observe the interaction

of a wide range of people that was sufficiently unobtrusive (unlike, for example, the middle

of a corridor) that she did not call undue attention to her presence but also sufficiently public

(unlike, for example, someone’s office or a restroom) that her presence did not cause discom-

fort or unease to those being observed.

Second, the copy machine itself offered a form of legitimacy for the research, a

“cover story” (Van Maanen 1991: 35). This was important because the advantages of close

observation over other methods—experimentation, for example—of studying the influence of

environment on informal interaction is the ability to capture normal and natural patterns of

interaction. This advantage will be compromised to the extent that people act differently than

normal because there is a researcher watching and taping them. Short of hiding the camera,

there is no way completely around this. Reviewing the tapes, however, it is observable that

people took less notice of the camera the longer it was there. Thus the long duration of the

fieldwork helped to create conditions where the researcher and camera came to be more or

less taken for granted and ignored. Even time may not have been enough to create this fly-

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on-the-wall effect, however, had the ostensible purpose of the research been simply to ob-

serve people informally interacting with one another. By ostensibly studying instead how

people use the copy machine, informants may have been less self-conscious about talking to

each other with the camera rolling and less concerned that the research was a form of moni-

toring by their management. Because both copying and waiting for the copier to be free are

considered valid work tasks and because copying requires constant physical presence but

only intermittent mental attention, the copier room provides people who would interact

within them (and people who would observe those interactions) both opportunity and legiti-

macy. Third, the copier room afforded a good deal of spontaneity. The researcher could

come and go as her schedule required. The room was used throughout the day (unlike, for

example, the office cafeteria) and required no coordination with others to begin and end spe-

cific periods of observation.

Building on the work of the influential architecture theorist, Christopher Alexander

(1979), we set about to create from the observations in the copier rooms of how and under

what circumstances informal interaction occurred, and from the less detailed comparative

studies of several other organizational contexts described later in the paper, a model of the

necessary and sufficient characteristics for an office environment to foster informal interac-

tions. To use Alexander’s (1977) terminology, the model provides a pattern language for

spaces where informal encounters occur. Alexander’s (1979: 92) key insight is that there is a

tight relationship between a pattern of events and the pattern of space in which those events

occur. It is not that the pattern of space determines the pattern of events—any more than the

pattern of events determine the pattern of space—but rather the patterns of space and events

need to be taken together as an element of people’s culture. As he puts it:

It is certainly not enough merely to say glibly that every pattern of events resides in space. That is obvious, and not very interesting. What we want to know is just how the structure of the space supports the patterns of events it does, in such a way that if

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we change the structure of the space, we shall be able to predict what kinds of changes in the patterns of events this change will generate (Alexander 1979: 83).

The idea of a pattern language for a space is to derive through induction a small, transpos-

able set of essential characteristics of a space for it to support a certain pattern of events. To

say that the characteristics are essential means that all of them must be present simultane-

ously, even though, as Alexander notes and as we shall see in our case of the characteristics

of informal encounters, they may be partially contradictory and pull against each other. Each

characteristic is simple; complexity arises from the necessity of combining more than one

characteristic and the nuances of their combination.

The pattern language describing the ecology of informal interactions consists of three

characteristics or, as Alexander (1979: 220) calls them, rules all three of which must be in

place for a space to foster informal interaction. The first is privacy. A space must offer peo-

ple enough privacy that they can maintain the boundaries of their conversation—i.e., hear

each other and avoid being overheard by unwanted others. Without sufficient privacy, sus-

tained informal interaction is unlikely to occur. Too much privacy, however, can cause prob-

lems for the second necessary characteristic. A space must afford sufficient legitimacy for

people to be there and to stay there long enough to interact with one another. Legitimacy and

privacy need not be mutually contradictory, but in practice they often are. In many cases it

may be a source of embarrassment to be discovered with a co-worker in a private place.

Without sufficient legitimacy, people are unlikely to feel comfortable staying in a space and

talking there to others. Too much legitimacy, however, can cause problems for the third nec-

essary characteristic. A space must allow for sufficient spontaneity that encounters there

with others feel informal and not part of the normal workload. If my legitimacy for being

here is high because I am, in fact, forced to be here with you, then formal interaction is more

likely between us than informal interaction. If my legitimacy for being here is high because I

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am occupied here in a task requiring my full concentration, then spontaneous conversation

between us requires an interruption and is less likely. A person must feel freely able both to

enter the space, and the conversation with others present, and then to leave the space and the

conversation when he or she wishes. A space offering too much spontaneity, however, likely

does not offer sufficient privacy. Thus, the three rules tend to work against each other and

spaces that foster informal encounters are those that balance the three demands. Our claim,

based on the analysis of the data we have collected, is that spaces that foster informal interac-

tion have these three characteristics and spaces that fail to foster informal interaction fail to

do so because they lack one or more of these characteristics.

Privacy, legitimacy, and spontaneity are cultural characteristics, of course, not purely

physical ones. Which physical attributes provide privacy will vary (though not without con-

straint) from one cultural setting to another. The same is true for legitimacy and spontaneity.

That is the sense in which the rules are, must be, transposable (Bourdieu 1990: 53). What is

needed to make sense of this three-part pattern language, then, is thick description of actual

settings revealing these rules (or their absence) in action. This skeletal model needs to be

fleshed out in order to be evaluated.

Data and Methods As outlined earlier, the first author conducted observations of informal interactions in the

copier rooms of three different organizations over a period of 24 months. Some observation

sessions were videotaped. In an addition, informants were questioned: sometimes informally

immediately following an observed informal interaction, sometimes later more formally. All

three sites were located in France; all consisted of small departments (10-20 people) within

larger companies; all were white-collar office settings with a mix of professionals and admin-

istrative staff. Each site had a room, the copier room, containing not only a copier but also a

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fax machine and a shared computer printer. In each case, the copier casually operated: i.e.

operating the copier was not the main role or job of the individuals who used it, and the cop-

ier was a means to accomplish other tasks, copying was not a primary task in itself. In other

ways, however, the three sites were quite different. Below, we provide below a brief descrip-

tion of each of the three settings, focusing especially on the salient aspect of the copier rooms

in each. In addition, a summary of the key differences among the three copier rooms is pro-

vided in Table 1.

----------------------- Insert Table 1 Here -----------------------

The Research Center

The first site studied was the research center (RC) of a large publicly-owned utility. At RC,

the copier room is centrally located. It is on the main floor of the department, next to eleva-

tors, near the mailboxes and across from the space used both as a meeting room and a coffee

room. There is much traffic past the copier room and people commonly turn their head as

they walk past to see who is in making copies. The department spans two floors, the third

and fourth floors of the building. The copier room is on the third floor, the reception floor of

the department. Between 8:45 and 9:00 in the morning, people from both floors pick up their

mail and have coffee and talk in the coffee room. They may go to the copier room on pur-

pose or stop as they pass by if they hear voices inside. The corridor that the copier room

opens on to leads to all the offices of the third floor as well as down to the exits and up to the

fourth floor. One must pass the copier room twice each day, in other words (arriving and

leaving) and, in practice, people pass it several times a day.

----------------------- Insert Map 1 Here -----------------------

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The Publishing House

The second site (PH) was a department within a commercial publishing house. The copier

room in PH is similar to RC in terms of location and layout. It stands in a busy location in

the middle of a web of offices. The copier room in PH also contains the fax machine, the

mailboxes, and the coffee machine. Thus, in the morning (between 9:00 and 9:30, in this

case), the copier room is extremely lively as people come to pick up their mail and stay to

chat and have a cup of coffee. When people arrive in the morning, they walk past the copier

room on their way to their offices to set down their coats and bags. The copier room has a

window looking onto the corridor as well as door, so there is a lot of exposure: you can see

who is already there and they can see you as you pass by. Those who arrive late will almost

always find someone already in this multipurpose copier room when they get there. There

was a second coffee machine located in a kitchen on the other side of the area housing the

department. It was used but seldom as a place to stand and chat.

----------------------- Insert Map 2 Here -----------------------

The Business School

The third site (BS) was an academic department of a business school. The copier room at BS

is quite different located and laid out that those at RC and PH. Unlike the copier rooms there,

in BS the copier room is rather isolated. It is at the end of a corridor, beyond the secretaries’

office and remote from the elevator and staircase that people use to come to the department’s

floor. Few people use the copier other than the three secretaries who share the office next

door, and rarely would anyone enter the copier room except to make copies. To avoid having

to stand waiting, the secretaries carefully coordinate their copying so that there is only of

them in the copier room at a time. The copier room, in other words, is not a hub of informal

interaction.

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----------------------- Insert Map 3 Here -----------------------

Data Collection and Analysis

Inductive qualitative techniques of grounded theory building were used to analyze the data

(Glaser and Strauss 1967; Eisenhardt 1989; Strauss and Corbin 1990). As is typical in induc-

tive field studies, we interpreted the data first by constructing narratives describing each set-

ting based on the fieldnotes, notes taken while reviewing the videotapes and notes of the

interviews conducted. From these narratives, or case studies, several themes emerged as be-

ing particularly important in understanding the different patterns of behavior observed in

each of the three sites. With these themes in mind, we then went back to two of the sites, PH

and BS, to collect some additional observations including observations outside of the copier

rooms themselves.

As our theory began to emerge about the key environmental characteristics fostering informal

interaction and became informed by the theoretical work of Alexander (1977; 1979), we cast

our net wider in an effort to push the theory. This meant we sought to observe additional set-

tings that might directly falsify the emergent theory, to draw upon qualitative data gathered in

other studies that might help us refine the theory and question its generalizability, and to con-

tact informants in the three focus sites directly to get their feedback on our hypotheses. In

this, we were influenced by Becker’s (1998) idea of theoretical sampling: that, if the test of

any ethnographic theory is that it is able to explain every observed case, iteration is required

between data collection and theory building so that subsequent periods of data collection can

focus on settings or timing or characteristics that might falsify the budding theory. Hence, in

order to generalize our observations and to test our model, we complemented the field studies

with additional—broader but more superficial—data collected through informal interviews in

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different organizations in the copier rooms as well as in other locations such as near coffee

machines and even on train commutes. In this way was the theory honed and built up.

Summary of Findings From the analysis of the data, we derived what Alexander (1977) calls a pattern language for

spaces where informal encounters occur. That is, a model describing the set of characteristics

that a space must have (or a set of rules that an architect or designer must build in, as archi-

tects such as Alexander think of it) for informal interaction to be fostered there. We argue

there are three characteristics of such an environment that are necessary and sufficient: spon-

taneity, legitimacy, and privacy. Each in isolation is simple both to conceive conceptually

and to achieve practically. But all must be present simultaneously and, as we will show, they

tend work against each other, pulling in opposite directions. Below, we discuss each charac-

teristic in isolation, but we also consider the complications of combination.

Spontaneity

The first and deceptively obvious characteristic of a space that fosters informal interaction

has to do with its location. The space must be easily entered and existed. It must, in other

words, afford spontaneity to interactions that may occur there. People pass by regularly and

can see each other. They may stop to chat without fear of feeling trapped and having to stay

longer than they intend. Spaces in locations that require a special trip, that are out of the way,

are less spontaneous. Spaces that are in the path of heavy traffic flows will offer more spon-

taneity. Thus, as Allen (1977) and others (e.g., see Alexander (1977: 410) for a discussion

and references) have shown, physical centrality is an important factor in spontaneity. The

closer a space is to their office, the more likely they will visit it.

Other aspects of location may be decisive as well, however: collocation with the en-

trance and exit of a group space, proximity to restrooms or other often-visited resources. Jef-

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frey Pfeffer, the well-known Stanford organization theorist, famously tells a story (as yet un-

published, we believe, and possibly even apocryphal) about how Glen Carroll, the well-

known Berkeley organization theorist, became as influential at Berkeley as he is: he had an

office near the restrooms and so people passed by his office all day and would stop and chat

with him. According to Pfeffer’s tongue-in-cheek telling of it, that’s why Carroll knew eve-

rything and everyone. He was central in all networks in exactly the same way that the bath-

room is central in of all of our lives. Upon reflection, this story illustrates that there are still

other important elements to spontaneity. Access and egress, for example, and visibility. It

matters that Glen Carroll’s office door was often open, that his desk didn’t face away from

the door. Copier rooms are inviting to the extent that their doors are always open, that they

have windows onto the corridor allowing people to easily see in and out, that they are not

quickly crowded but spacious enough to allow several people to stand comfortably.

Taken together, we can see these different elements of spontaneity producing much of

variation observed among the three copiers at RC, PH and BS. At RC, the copier is located

centrally and people always check who is the room as they pass in the hall. Heavy traffic

passes by it because of its position very near the elevator and the meeting room also used as a

coffee room and next to the mailboxes. Similarly in PH, where we also observed a high level

of interaction action around the copier, the copier room is centrally located near offices.

You could see through its window onto the corridor and its open door how lively it was in the

morning as people would get their coffee from the kitchen nearby and take it into the copier

room to get their mail (more on the importance of the secondary activities like coffee drink-

ing and mail collecting in a moment). In BS, on the other hand, the copier was remote and

typically the only interaction in the copier room was between a person and the machine. As

an interesting aside, Blomberg (1987) showed that centrality matters for copier machines in

other regards as well. Users reported a higher level of acceptance of and satisfaction with a

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copier machine when it was located near them and copiers remained at higher level of service

with fewer paper jams and higher supply inventory when it was located near both the users

and the key operators who were responsible for maintenance because of the two-way infor-

mal interactions of users and key operators.

Spontaneity, afforded by virtue of the location, access, visibility, spaciousness, and

other physical characteristics of a space, then, is one necessary elements for informal interac-

tion to be fostered in that space. However, spontaneity alone is not enough. Two other ele-

ments must also be in place. The space must offer not just spontaneity but also legitimacy

and privacy as well.

Legitimacy

In order for a space to foster informal interaction it must offer legitimacy for the people in it

being there. In other words, people must not fear embarrassment or discredit if they are dis-

covered in the space. The space must offer some reason for people to go there, to stay there

for a period of time and to be able to talk to one another while they are there. In office set-

tings where everyone makes their own copies, the copier machine offers almost an ideal

situation of legitimacy for people in the copier room. Making copies is a legitimate act of

work as is waiting to make copies. Meanwhile, operating the machine requires constant

physical presence but little mental energy. Conversation under those circumstances is natu-

ral.

When we think of other archetypal locations that foster informal interaction, many of

them share the characteristic of housing a shared resource or technology that provides legiti-

macy: the water cooler, the coffee machine, the mailboxes, the cafeteria, the restroom.

Sometimes multiple sources of legitimacy can complement each other. At both RC and PH,

the copier room shelters all the shared machines (copier, printer and fax) and the information

resources (mailboxes and bulletin board). Therefore, many social interactions not necessarily

15

linked to the copier take place around the copier. It frequently happens that while someone is

making copies, someone else comes to make a copy, pick up a printed job or send a fax, and

they start talking—about what, we’ll discuss in a moment. On the contrary, at BS, because

the secretaries did most all of the copying and because they could easily coordinate among

themselves to avoid waiting at the copier, there was little legitimacy being in the copier room

except to make copies or pick up faxes or printouts. It was a source of surprise and note if

others—even those with the ostensible right to use the copier, as indicated by their position of

a copy card—were discovered by a secretary in the copier room talking.

Legitimacy is not just a matter of having a reason or excuse to be in a space, however,

it is also about having a reason or excuse to talk to someone there. An analysis of the con-

versations people had around the copy machine shows the importance of the machine itself—

and, perhaps not incidentally, its propensity to breakdown or work improperly—as a conver-

sational ice-breaker. Thus, many of the conversations and interactions we observed began

with a discussion about the copy machine or the process of copying itself, but then shifted

into more personal topics. Table 2 gives a sample summary of the topics discussed during

the periods of observation. It is worth going into somewhat more detail with examples of the

variety of topics to give an micro-level indication of how the copier and copier room afforded

legitimacy that made these interactions possible and natural there.

------------------------ Insert Table 2 Here ------------------------

Copier-related Discussion

The conversational elements we observed that were focused on the copier had four basic pat-

terns. First, people collaborating to solve a problem. For example, a user and a colleague

worked on a copying task together. They discussed the job, and interleaved their control ac-

tivity (taking turns pushing buttons and reaching displays). Second, people helping each

16

other (sometimes invited, sometimes uninvited). At RC, for example, a researcher operating

the copier was displaced at the controls by someone who wanted to help, even though the

“helper” was not invited to do so. On another occasion at RC, someone who was watching

“reached in” and pushed buttons which he or she thought would solve the problem that they

understood the operator to be having. In many cases, we saw people willing to jump in and

help when they saw others having trouble using the copier. Sometimes this seemed genu-

inely in a spirit of helping, other times a more selfish impatient motive was in evidence.

The third pattern was people watching others to learn more about using the machine.

For example, at PH, a publisher stood behind a colleague and watched an attempt to demon-

strate a difficulty previously encountered. In another situation, at PH, the assistant of the di-

rector was making stapled copies. Another employee was standing near the copier, waiting

for making copies, and she said, “oh let me see how you do that. I don't know how to do sta-

pled copies.” Fourth, people negotiating access to the machine. We noticed many situations

at the Research Center and at the Publishing House, where the resource—access to the ma-

chine itself--was in short supply, forcing people to queue and to negotiate the terms under

which one person might overtake another in the line because they had a very quick job to do,

or were in a big hurry, or had higher status. We observed no overt power struggles, however,

at RC and PH, it was understood that the department boss’s jobs, whether being done by the

boss himself or by his (and they were both men in these cases) or their assistants, were to take

priority.

Work-related Discussion

Sometimes, copier-related discussion would lead to work-related discussion. Often, how-

ever, the copier room setting itself inspired other forms of work-related discussion to be initi-

ated. Especially in RC and PH where the mailboxes were collocated with the copier or were

very nearby, the morning mail might trigger a conversation as might the content of what was

17

being copied itself. At PH, for example, an employee was making a copy of an article which

reviewed a book recently published by the company. She showed it to a colleague who had

come in to pick up her mail and they discussed the success of this book and continued talking

then about other books published by PH, comparing their successes and failures.

At RC, on several occasions, researchers looked over the shoulder of someone mak-

ing a copy and asked for a copy of the paper, or started discussing research ideas: “Oh, you’re

reading that paper, could you do a copy for me?” “Oh, I did not know you were working on

that topic, have you read the paper by Thoenig? It might be interesting for you”. In fact, in at

least one case that we observed, collaborations started this way from conversations about

what was being copied. We also saw existing collaboration coordinated in the copier room as

people use the opportunity provided by the chance meeting to remind or prod people in an

informal way. For example, in RC, a researcher was making copies and asked a colleague

entering the copier room if he had heard from their client concerning a joint project: “Oh, I

wanted to send you an email, have you heard from Mr. Thomson?” The newcomer replied

negatively, but said he would call him by the end of the week if he had not come back to

them.

There was also a lot of organizational gossip exchanged in the copier room. People

discuss the internal politics of the company. For example, in RC: “I heard that they want to

transform our department into a profit center and get us out of the research and do more con-

sulting work.” In PH: “Agnes told me that we might be downsized and incorporated in the

Literature Department and relocated in the Headquarters building.” They exchange opinions

about colleagues, reveal who they like and who they don’t like, who should be trusted and

who cannot and why. “You can trust Jean-Pierre, he is very reliable, I worked on several

projects with him.” “You know what the head of the department told her during her evalua-

tion?…” “I am going to ask to work on another project, because I have really a hard time

18

working with Sylvain as a project manager.” As we shall see in the next section, the degree

of privacy afforded by the copier room—where you could not easily be overheard by some-

one unseen—was important for facilitating gossipy conversations such as these.

Life-related Discussion

Talk about the copier or about work often shifted to talk about other, non-work-related topics

that we call “life-related” for lack of a better label. Other times, especially in the mornings at

RC and PH when people would greet each other in or near the copier room, they were spon-

taneous comments on the appearance of people, asking how they are doing. Some examples:

“You look great.” “Is that a suntan?” “You look exhausted, are you all right? Any plans to

go for holidays?” “I like your new hair cut.” In either case—whether the conversation was

initiated with copier or work-related discussion or with spontaneous questions and comments

about appearance and well-being—the next move, if it came, was to discuss more personal

topics: holidays, children sick and waking up during the night, likes and dislikes and exper-

tise concerning movies and sports, views on current events heard on the radio on the way to

work. These discussions provide people a sense of attitudes and values of their colleagues

and their similarities and differences with them. They are not work-related—yet their impor-

tance for work should not be ignored as Hughes, Randal and Shapiro (1992) argue in their

study showing that colleagues who meet regularly in the bar at lunch time but never exchange

a single word related to their work establish and develop a relationships that affect the way in

which they provide work services for each other at other times. But they are legitimated by

the “at work” context of the copier room.

Further legitimacy (and spontaneous opportunity), came from the bulletin board

housed in both the copier rooms of RC and PH where people posted (and were allowed to

post) non-work related information: ads for summer camps for children, announcements of

births, and so forth. One day at RC a researcher noticed the card announcing the birth of one

19

of the researchers’ baby and said to one of her colleagues sending a fax: “Oh I did not know

she had already given birth! A month old already! He’s cute.” The researcher sending a fax

followed up telling her a story about another of their colleagues who had a baby a few

months old. In another situation from RC, three researchers started discussing about one of

their colleagues who wrote a novel, as one of them noticed the newspaper article announcing

the publishing of her second novel, posted on the board.

Privacy

The sensitive nature of many informal interactions and the possibility that any discus-

sion may eventually lead into sensitive areas make a degree of privacy an essential character-

istic of a space that fosters informal interaction. What is important is that people be able to

control the boundaries of their conversation—be heard by only those they want to hear them

and be sure they are not overheard. Informal interaction in the absence of such privacy—

talking in a corridor, for example—risks being silenced or broken up by the appearance of

others with concerns raised about what the person might have heard. Weeks (2004), in his

study of a British Bank, notes that the lack of privacy in the open office architectures did not

prevent informal interaction, but rather inhibited it. The spontaneity of the setting was ideal

for almost chitchat as was the legitimacy provided by the mindless nature of most of the

clerical work they were undertaking. Informal interaction—especially complaining to each

other about the little aggravations they together suffered—was a way to pass the time and

make the work more enjoyable. However, sensitive topics mandated lowered voices, scan-

ning eyes looking for eavesdroppers and, when that limited level of privacy was inadequate,

other measures were taken. For example, people retreated to the little kitchen which was en-

closed with a door to talk while the kettle boiled (legitimacy being ever necessary) or stayed

in file room talking on the pretext of finding a particular file.

20

This points to the importance of conceptualizing this model as a pattern language, a

small set of characteristics that must all be present at the same time to create the pattern of

behavior, in this case, informal interaction. A space for informal interaction must offer a de-

gree of privacy but if it offers too much privacy it is likely not to offer sufficient spontaneity

or legitimacy. In Weeks’s (2004) bank, the file room offered considerable privacy but sus-

pect levels of legitimacy: two people noticed in the file room for too long were sure to trigger

informal discussion about them. The kitchen, meanwhile, was legitimate but offered privacy

only to the extent that it did not offer spontaneity—the more that people were regularly com-

ing in and out, the less private it was.

For this reason, Alexander (1977) describes good spaces for supporting communica-

tion and informal interactions as being “half-private,” and advocates the use of alcoves to

create such spaces that allow for private conversation while offering visibility and easy ac-

cess and egress. Egress, the ability for people to leave a space, is important. It is in the na-

ture of informal interaction that there are not formal rules concerning when people may join

or leave a conversation. We may be unlikely to begin a casual conversation if we fear we

may be trapped into talking longer than we wish or about a subject we don’t wish. At RC, for

example, there was a coffee machine located in a dark corridor on a third floor that was be-

tween the two main floors of the department. For security reasons, there could be no offices

on this floor. The windowless rooms on the floor held archival materials. The location of the

coffee machine there was much more private than that of the coffee machine near the copier

room on the other floor. People who used the middle floor coffee machine tended to go pick

up their coffee and go back to their office immediately. We asked why and people said that

when they stayed for a quick chat, and someone else arrived, they found it difficult to leave

because of the isolated and enclosed nature of the space. People tended to feel “stuck”, espe-

cially when some of the managers came to pick up a coffee. Probing, we found that the very

21

factors that made a space private—the low likelihood of someone else coming in or passing

by—make leaving more difficult because there is no one who will interrupt or take over the

conversation for you or give you and excuse to join them on their way. There is a similar dif-

ference between a seated conversation in an office with the door closed and a standing con-

versation with the door open where someone passing by in the hallway may stop and join.

Too much privacy can result in too little spontaneity for the interaction to feel informal.

A different example comes from a small study we did of an media agency which had

a copier room located centrally among a hub of offices. The copier room had two doors and

housed not only the copier as well as printer, fax, and supplies, but also a coffee machine and

a vending machine. What we observed was that while people chat in this room, they don’t

stay as long as the door in either RC or PH, and they don’t gossip. An informant told us: “the

copier room is too public; you don’t feel like gossiping or talking freely. You never know if

[the boss] might come in to buy a coffee or a snack.” He added: “It was not that way in an-

other agency where I worked previously: there, the copier room was also central, but the

managers never went there so we felt ‘safe’ to talk there.” It turned out that the reason the

managers didn’t go in the copier room was that they did not do their own copying and so they

had no legitimate reason to go in there. The coffee machine, in that case, was elsewhere. It

was the copier room—safe from spontaneous managerial intrusion—was where the gossip

was shared. In other words, sometimes too much spontaneity and legitimacy can result in too

little privacy. Again, though, this can tip the other way: in settings where only certain people

do the copying (as in BS) privacy is high in the copier room but legitimacy for being there is

too low for most people for the space to foster informal interactions.

Complications of Combination

The three characteristics of spontaneity, legitimacy, and privacy thus tend to pull against each

other. Spontaneity and legitimacy, for example, have been shown by Goffman (1966) to sel-

22

dom exist together in our society outside of specially designated exceptions where lolling and

loitering—the extreme forms of spontaneous readiness—are permitted, such as cafés. Nor-

mally, we need an excuse to stand around talking, the source of legitimate excuse provided

by a cigarette, for example. Smoking is a mindless activity with a defined duration: the ciga-

rette will burn to the filter, and then you are free to light another cigarette, to linger or to

leave. It offers a good balance, then, between spontaneity and legitimacy and even privacy in

the sense that as most office settings have become non-smoking it is legitimate for smokers to

be standing far enough away to be out of earshot.

Conferences offer another interesting—and apropos—example. Conference partici-

pants we have spoken to seem to agree that the most valuable interaction takes place outside

of the formal sessions, in the lounges and waiting areas surrounding the meeting rooms. Yet

even those who find the formal sessions irrelevant in terms of content and wish there was

time for spontaneous encounters of colleagues they haven’t seen recently, say that the formal

sessions are necessary to legitimize the informal interaction that happens outside them. Too

much spontaneity creates too little legitimacy. In that sense, the copier room is an interesting

setting as it provides legitimacy—more than the water cooler or the coffee machine because

it is genuinely work-related and so prolonged presence there is acceptable—while allowing

spontaneity including easy egress. Not only are copying and waiting to use the copier mind-

less activities that allow people the freedom to talk, copying is a task which has a clear be-

ginning and end (as are sending a fax, or picking up a printed job). Hence, once your copies

are made you can leave or choose to stay to finish a line of conversation and then leave. Le-

gitimacy has a time-limit in a copier room and that helps create spontaneity.

So, spontaneity can pull against legitimacy, but the opposite is true as well. If the le-

gitimacy of being in a setting is too high, spontaneity may suffer. The interaction may come

to feel more formal than informal or expectations of informal interaction may make egress

23

difficult. A small example from BS helps clarify the point. The first author joined a group of

faculty and staff who commute between Paris and the little town where BS is located. This 45

minute commute provides a good context for informal interactions. In fact, talking with the

BS commuters revealed that they saw the commute as an opportunity for networking, and the

commuters are known on campus as a group that socialize together despite differences of de-

partment and seniority. In the train, people talk about their teaching and their research, they

gossip about BS, and they talk about life-related matters as well, similar to the topics raised

in the copier rooms of RC and PH. The train ride provides a legitimate context for these dis-

cussions in a way that the copier room at BS does not. However, the enclosed nature of the

space and the long duration have an impact on spontaneity. It creates an expectation that

people will talk to one another, an expectation of informal interaction that makes the situation

seem less informal. Some faculty and staff alike admitted sometimes pretending not to see

someone they recognized, to sit in another carriage in order that they might read or sleep or

just gaze out the window without having to be social. Obviously, privacy is also an issue on

a train with so many passengers affiliated with BS where being accidentally overheard is

likely. Different spaces will foster different patterns of informal interaction depending on the

particular balance of the three characteristics—spontaneity, legitimacy, and privacy—that

they afford the people in them. All three are always required to some degree, but different

levels and combinations create the variety we see in different spaces and correspondingly dif-

ferent patterns of informal interaction.

Discussion and Implications In this paper we have proposed a theory of the ecology of informal interactions. Following

Alexander (1979), we have structured the theory as a pattern language, a small set of ele-

ments characterizing a space—or rules for architecting such a space—necessary and suffi-

24

cient to foster the pattern of behavior under consideration, informal interaction. We have

identified three such characteristics—characteristics that are both cultural and physical in na-

ture. They are: spontaneity, legitimacy, and privacy. We have shown how these three char-

acteristics tend to pull against each other, with more of one often implying less of another,

and we have described how different patterns of informal interaction observed in different

spaces can be understood in terms of the different balance in those spaces of these three char-

acteristics.

The power of any pattern language lies in its ability to help us do two things. First, a

pattern language helps us to understand how the physio-cultural structure of a space supports

a pattern of events such that we are able to predict, or explain, how the pattern of behavior

will change if the structure of the space changes. Second, it helps us to build better spaces to

foster the behaviors we desire. Ethnography is not a predictive method and the purpose of

this paper is inductive and exploratory: building a theory, not testing it. However, the poten-

tial of the theory is suggested in a few interesting, though necessarily short, examples.

Take first the copier room in BS which, as we saw, does not foster informal interac-

tions because it fails to provide spontaneity or legitimacy to a sufficiently large group of peo-

ple. We might compare this copier room to another in a different department of BS—thus

holding constant the norms about who does the copying, namely that it is primary the admin-

istrative assistants who do. There are, naturally, several copier rooms on campus and we

would expect those whose design somehow affords more spontaneity and legitimacy would

be those that see the most informal interaction within them. That is indeed what we found in

our survey of the different copier rooms. Most of the copier rooms in BS are not places

where informal interaction occurs. Some are, however, and one in particular was identified

by colleagues at BS as being a hub of sociability. This copier room is centrally located and

25

near both a (real) water cooler and the restrooms and contains not only the copier, fax,

printer, and supplies but crucially also a coffee machine. The coffee machine provides a rea-

son for being in the space whose legitimacy is enhanced by the other, more work-related, re-

sources and technologies in the room. The space provides more privacy than, for example,

the area outside the room, around the water cooler. Spontaneity, legitimacy, privacy are thus

in balance in this copier room and informal interaction is the result. Interestingly, a shared

workstation connected to a scanner was introduced into this copier room and this had the ef-

fect of increasing the legitimacy of being in the room, but increased it to a point where the

spontaneity and the privacy afforded by the room suffered: whenever someone was at the

workstation, needing to concentrate on their work, the informal interaction of others in the

room were muted.

Consider a second anecdotal example, this one from the psychology department of a

Paris university. As the story was told to us, a ritual emerged some time ago in this depart-

ment where whoever happened to want coffee first in the morning (there was no formal turn-

taking, but they tended to trade off) would start the coffee brewing using the old-style coffee

maker that was located in a meeting room. On their way to do so, that person would stop by

the offices of whoever was around to announce that he or she was going to make coffee.

Within ten or fifteen minutes, most of the department present would have assembled around

the coffee maker, exchanging ideas, telling stories and chatting. There is a good deal of nos-

talgia now about this, but apparently even at the time it was recognized as a nice and benefi-

cial ritual for the community. In fact, the department head felt that having coffee together

was important enough to warrant using some of the funds at his discretion to upgrade the old

coffee maker, which didn’t really make very good coffee and was inconvenient to use and

clean, with a nice new machine that dispensed a variety of different types of high quality cof-

fee, automatically, one cup at a time. What happened? People were able to get their coffee

26

when they wanted and bring it back to their desk. The legitimacy of all being there to-

gether—because they had to be in order to get hot coffee—was lost. There are still informal

interactions in the coffee room among two or three people at a time. The spontaneity of that

space has been increased. But the pattern of informal interaction is different because of a

small change that altered the balance between spontaneity and legitimacy (privacy remaining

unchanged in this case).

Small changes, then, in the technology—broadly conceived—of a space can produce

a rebalancing of the spontaneity, legitimacy, and privacy offered by a space and thus the pat-

tern of informal interactions present there. Changes in norms can do the same. We inter-

viewed a creative director working in a self-styled “idea factory” where the idea behind the

design of the entire space was to create informal discussions among people working inde-

pendently on different projects. Such discussions were seen as important to the creative

process. The coffee room in the building was centrally located but more important, accord-

ing to the creative director, was the fact that sitting having coffee and talking casually with

others was seen not just as legitimate but as imperative. He described it as the raison d’etre

of the place; the reason to pay for an office there. There is a problem, however, when legiti-

macy becomes so high as to become a requirement: spontaneity suffers. Companies trying to

build their social capital and encourage informal interaction by installing expense coffee bars,

no matter how well-designed and intended, may find the results disappointing for either of

two reasons: first, because people understand that the underlying norms of the organization

have not changed and being seen lounging and chatting still count against your reputation; or,

second, because the underlying norms of the organization have changed so completely that

chatting over a cup of coffee starts to feel like a work requirement and loses its spontaneity

and its informality.

27

In a sense, these examples are precious, they prove nothing: they reflect neither the

rigorous methods of the data on which our theory is grounded nor the systematic survey that

will be required adequately to test the theory. Yet, they are suggestive of the power of this

pattern language to help us understand the link between an physical and cultural environment

and the pattern of informal interaction it supports and, in a practical vein, its power to help

organizational architects—even amateur ones—to design spaces that facilitate informal inter-

action. The point, obviously, is not about copier rooms; although, for the reasons we describe

above, the copier room may be as good a candidate as any for the modern-day “water

cooler.” Instead, if we agree with Alexander (1977: 618) that, “No social group—whether a

family, a work group, or a school group—can survive without constant informal contact

among its members,” then the point is to understand why some office spaces foster a lot of

informal interaction and others, similar in many respects, fail to do so. Our hope for this

grounded and exploratory theory to that it may help us think about and design spaces that

don’t require a special, deliberate effort to go there, that afford spontaneity of access and con-

tact and, importantly, egress as well. Spaces that the provide a legitimacy for being in them,

and talking in them, to the people there. Spaces that offer sufficient privacy for the bounda-

ries of important, although informal conversations to be maintained. Spaces that, by achiev-

ing a balance of all three of these characteristics, provide a healthy ecology for informal

interaction.

28

Table 1. Main dimensions of comparison between the copier rooms at the three sites

Research Cen-ter

Publishing House

Business School

Spatial organization

Organization of depart-ment offices

Distributed on two floors One floor Distributed on

two floors

Location of the copier room Central Central Isolated

Pedestrian traffic past copier room Heavy Heavy Light

Actors

Size of the department 20 people 8 people 20 people

Who makes the copies? Everybody Everybody Mostly the three secretaries

Other functions of room

Coffee machine No Yes No

Fax machine Yes Yes Yes

Shared printer Yes Yes Yes

Office supply cabinet Yes Yes Yes

Mailboxes No Yes No

Bulletin board Yes Yes No

Informal Interactions

Degree of informal inter-action in copier room Many Many Very few

29

Table 2. Sample topics of discussion in the copier room

Copier-related Work-related Life-related

Helping Collaborating

Teaching Learning

Negotiating access

Exchanging information Collaborating Following up Story telling Gossiping

Hobbies and leisure (Sports, movies, TV, etc.)

Family News

Politics

30

Map 1. The Research Center

31

Map 2. The Publishing House

32

Map 3. The Business School

33

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