Actor-Network Theory

Fundamentals

A key ANT notion is that of the heterogeneous network. John Law, in 1992, describes this as “a way of suggesting that society, organizations, agents and machines are all effects generated in patterned networks of diverse (not simple human) materials” (p. 380). 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 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 as a “semiotics of materiality.”

As under 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 Michel Callon, an actor network is “simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of” (Callon as qtd. in Farias & Bender, 2010, p. 315). This is so because the activities of actors and networks are interdependent. For example, 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 (e.g., aircraft), [Page 19]organizations (e.g., laboratories), agents (e.g., managers), and even knowledge (e.g., relativity theory)—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. It tries to unravel the forces that keep actors “as one,” showing in the process how they are networks which need to be reproduced “moment by moment.”

Motivated by such concerns, 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, and a verb. Analyzing organization(s) in this form—stressing that the noun organization can exist only as a continuous result of organizing—challenges what mainstream organization structure approaches usually accept as given or taken-for-granted. Thus, 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 only be addressed, locally and empirically, as “in the making.”

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