Actor Network Theory

Actor Network Theory (ANT) developed in the 1980s, initially through the works of sociologist Michel Callon (1986) and sociologist Bruno Latour (1988), as an alternative to conventional explanations of the way leadership works. ANT suggests that leadership works not through individuals or groups of people and their separate, compliant, and deterministic technologies and that leadership therefore poses a radical problem for people's views about leadership: Is leadership restricted to humans? ANT suggests two alternative foundation stones: first, that leadership is made up not of arrays of separate elements—people, ideas, machines, animals, chemicals, and so on—but rather of active hybrids composed of networks of associations; second, that people should understand these hybrids on the same analytical basis—in other words, not give priority to the human over the nonhuman. The consequences of this theory for understanding leadership are three-fold: (1) that people should abandon their concentration on “the leader” as a discrete element because there are, in reality, no naked leaders (that is, leaders without any artificial supports) but rather leaders in [Page 6]clothes surrounded by all forms of technical devices, natural resources, and other humans; (2) that the tracing of cause and effect in such a complex equation is an impossible task and that therefore the best that people can hope for is a rich description; and (3) that leadership can be exerted by nonhumans.

Taking the naked leader element first, it should be obvious that leaders are seldom naked—hence all the concern for dressing in a culturally appropriate manner for a leader, whether that is a pinstriped suit, a sports jersey, or a sari (a garment of southern Asian women). Indeed, it is because leadership is conventionally clothed that an inversion of the convention can prove such a powerful symbol. When six hundred Nigerian women occupied the Chevron-Texaco oil terminal at Escravos in southern Nigeria (which produces 400,000 barrels of oil a day) in July 2002, people might have assumed that the occupiers' demands for schools, health clinics, electricity and water supply systems, jobs, and the cleanup of oil-polluted rivers would be brushed aside. However, when the women threatened to take their clothes off, the company agreed to their demands, concerned about the embarrassment caused by the “curse of nakedness” (Branigan & Vidal, 2002, 8). The French emperor Napoleon, as another example, did not achieve his successes by appearing naked on the battlefield alone, but rather as resplendent in his uniform, on a horse, and supported by other clothed and armed soldiers, complete with the support of thousands of animals, food, cannon, ammunition, poor weather, good timing, and so on.

The issue of cause is also important: Napoleon may have been the formal leader of the French army, but this does not mean he was the sole or even the primary cause of its successes and failures. In the ANT approach, people should abandon the notion of human “actors” supported by various bit-part “extras,” such as technology, and instead consider how the technology is also an “actant”—having apparent causal consequences in conjunction with the other elements of particular networks of hybrids. These networks are not robust and wholly material—such as a telephone network, for example—but rather fragile, fluid, and complex. They may involve vacillating humans, unreliable technologies, and ambiguous ideas, all of which need constant replenishment for their reproduction.

...