Actor-Network Theory

Origins and Framework

ANT—which should be not mistaken for the totally different approach of network analysis—originated at the beginning of the 1980s, and its concepts and assumptions were originally developed at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris by Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law, with the aim of understanding processes of creation of scientific facts and material technologies. Its emphasis on the [Page 4]processual aspects and on the dynamic relations between human beings, things, and symbolic representations constitutes a theoretical linkage to the sociological traditions of ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. The importance devoted to the role of objects in society made ANT a relevant tool in those fields where materiality assumes a crucial role in social interaction, including sociology of culture and consumption studies. From the nineties onward, ANT became popular as a tool for analysis in a range of fields beyond science and technology studies, being applied in organizational analysis, anthropology, feminist studies, economics, and especially in sociology.

The status of ANT is controversial: as the same authors explained, ANT is not exclusively a theory nor a defined methodology (i.e., Latour 2005), and today the authors tend to refer to this approach more in terms of the “after ANT” developments and growths. In fact, ANT does not represent a defined and standardized approach; the lack of orthodoxy in its appropriation by different scholars has caused it to be interpreted and used in a wide range of alternative and sometimes conflicting manners.

One of the crucial arguments characterizing ANT's arguments regards the way it interprets the process of the emergence and stabilization of innovation in society, which is commonly interpreted, in ANT's terms, as a work of translations. Translation can be considered the core characterization of ANT, so much so that this approach is often also referred to as a sociology of translation and consists in a set of negotiations that contribute to the constitution of a network in which both human and nonhuman actors assume shapes and identities according to prevailing strategies of interaction.

The process of translation is constituted by four steps, according to Callon. The first step of translation is problematization, occurring when a central actor defines the identities and interests of other actors, both human and nonhuman, and establishes itself as an “obligatory passage point,” thus becoming an indispensable node of the network that will be shaped in subsequent steps. The second step is interessement, which consists of getting actors to concern themselves with the constitution of the network. At this stage, the primary actor works to induce other actors to make themselves adequate for the roles it has defined for them. The third step is represented by the active enrollment of other actors, which happens when these other actors accept the roles that have been defined for them and start to contribute to structuring the configuration of a relation in a way that is coherent with the perspective of the main actor. The fourth, and last, step is constituted by the mobilization of allies, which consist of the constitution relationships characterized by the delegation of the main actor as the representation of the whole configuration constituted by other actors.

...