Components will certainly become a key concept for the next generation of software architectures because of their impact on effective software reuse, real interoperability and integration. Within the Olan project, we face the difficulty of defining an operational semantics able to reflect the diversity of execution models involved in real applications. Existing process calculi offer the required abstractions such as encapsulation and process equivalences, but they rely on the fundamental assumption that agents are active, i.e autonomously able to initiate communication. However, components, viewed as software pieces with explicit interfaces, require a notion of passive composition that allows, for instance, several components to be traversed by a same process. In this paper, we introduce a calculus, named ICCS, which extends the Milner's CCS calculus with (1) an operator for passive composition, and (2) selective interactions. While preserving the powerful theory of process equivalences established for CCS, this calculus provides an operational definition of passive components and allows thus to establish the basis of an operational semantics for the Olan Configuration Language.