Actor-Network Theory

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

A key ANT notion is that of the heterogeneous network, John Law has described this as a manner of indicating that entities (e.g., society, organizations, machines) are effects generated in networks of different materials (e.g., humans and nonhumans). Also, Law suggests that while entities in their broadest sense are usually conceived of as having stability and uniqueness, ANT, in contrast, advocates that they are essentially a result achieved when different heterogeneous elements are assembled together. As such, the ANT approach, for Law, suggests that things take form and acquire attributes as a consequence of their relations with others. As ANT regards entities as produced in relations, and applies this ruthlessly to materials, it can be thus understood, according to Law, as a semiotics of materiality.

As for ANT, entities always exist in networks of relations, this approach suggests that it is not possible to conceive of actors as in some way separable from networks, and vice versa. Following Callon, actor-networks oscillate between that of an actor and that of a network as they engage in sociopolitics, enroll heterogeneous actants, and thus continuously transform and redefine their constitution. This is so because the activity of actors and networks is interdependent. For example, for Law, all attributes usually ascribed as human (thinking, loving, acting, etc.) are generated in networks comprising materially heterogeneous networks that either pass through or have ramifications beyond the body.

In this way, a central feature of ANT is to explain how ordering effects—such as devices, organizations, agents, and even knowledge—are generated. Its major focus, at least in its original formulation, is to investigate how entities are performed and kept stable. As a consequence, ANT analyzes the strategies through which entities are generated and held together. For Barbara Czarniawska and Tor Hernes, it tries to unravel the forces that keep actors as one, showing in the process how they are networks that need to be reproduced moment by moment.

Motivated by such concerns, for Latour and Law, ANT implies that organizations and their components are effects generated in multiple interactions, rather than existing merely in the order of things. Organization is perceived as continuous and unfinished, precarious, and partial—a permanent process that generates more or less stable effects; a heterogeneous emergent phenomenon; a verb. According to John Law and Bob Cooper, analyzing organization(s) in this form—stressing that the noun organization can exist only as a continuous result of organizing—challenges what mainstream organization studies (OS) approaches usually accept as given or taken for granted. Thus, as suggested by Brian Bloomfield and Theo Vurdubakis, analyzing organizing via ANT is to attempt to address by which means a diffuse and complex system composed of humans and nonhumans becomes networked (for this approach, organizations are outcomes and products of continuing process—relations and practices that are materially complex and whose ordering can be addressed, locally and empirically, only as in-the-making).

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