Actor-Network Theory

Conceptual Overview

Callon and Latour see the origin of ANT in the need for a new social theory adjusted to science and technology studies. Latour, and later on other researchers within this approach, argues that science is politics by other means and there is no special scientific method that guarantees true knowledge and is not influenced by power. Rather, knowledge, including scientific knowledge, as well as agents, social institutions, machines, [Page 28]and organizations, may be seen as products or effects of a network of heterogeneous materials or entities.

Initially, ANT researchers followed the work of scientists and analyzed their day-to-day work in order to reveal the real nature of knowledge and science. In a number of ethnographic studies of laboratory science, they outlined how scientists are constantly engaged in juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, such as manipulations of test animals, interaction with colleagues, laboratory directors and suppliers, reading letters, taking trips to libraries, drafting papers, going to conferences, and writing grant applications. In the course of a typical working day, scientists organize and try to impose coherence on all these materials and activities with the goal to receive some profit from them (i.e., in the form of successful publications). Thus, scientific work is like building up of a story or a version of the world that involves the careful management of these heterogeneous elements. Furthermore, with the help of stories based on texts or inscriptions, such as outputs from recorders, laboratory notebooks, graphs, computer printouts, and published scientific articles, scientists extend their influence over their immediate environment. Such scientific inscriptions are powerful when they contain links to other texts, work, and institutions, and as such make possible the construction of linkages between different entities and the formation of new entities. The success of scientific inscriptions depends on the ability of their authors to enroll others so that the latter accept the picture proposed to them in the text. A successful enrolment gives the authors access to further resources, such as grants and recognition.

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