Latour, Bruno

Bruno Latour (b. 1947), French social theorist of science, technology, and politics, was at the forefront of the development and refinement of actor-network theory (ANT) and the emergence of science and technology studies (STS) in Europe. His work has been influential in North American science studies, and many of his concepts have [Page 434]traveled across disciplinary divides. Latour was born in Beaune in the Burgundy region of France, to a family noted for their wine production. Educated in Dijon, he was trained in philosophy and received his PhD from the University of Tours in 1975. During his military service, which brought him to North Africa, Latour became interested in developing anthropological models to examine modern knowledge-producing institutions and practices. He has developed a critical perspective on not only the production of knowledge in the natural sciences but the social sciences as well. He is deeply concerned with rethinking the relationships between two of the central organizing concepts of modernity: Nature and Society. Latour argues that both the natural and the social are coproduced over different spaces and at different times, leading to the formation of what he terms “collectives.” The collective is not synonymous with society, but rather provides the conditions of possibility for sociality and relations between humans and nonhumans. Latour is critical of the master narratives of modernity, such as progress and transcendence, but he is also skeptical of the claims of radical postmodernists, whom he sees as too pessimistic, and abdicating the work of producing new collectives that could create alternative futures.

Latour's work was introduced in English with the publication of Laboratory Life (1979). In this text, Latour and coauthor Steve Woolgar took on the perspective of a “naïve” anthropologist inside of a neuroendocrinological lab in the United States. By “naïve,” the authors meant that they would pay close attention to the ongoing day-to-day work of scientists as forms of cultural practices. The authors focused on following the scientists across different domains of activity, including running experiments, writing papers, raising money, and speaking to different audiences. Latour and Woolgar argued that rather than being bounded by the traditional divide of science and society, which dominated functionalist sociological explanations of science (à la Robert Merton), scientists actively constructed the boundary between science and society and utilized either side as a resource, depending on the demands of the situation. Thus, “nature” emerges as a product of laboratory work, not as a precondition. However, the authors did not reduce scientific work to the subject; rather, scientists succeed through establishing links with other powerful actors and accumulating scientific credit (or capital), which must be continually reinvested in order to strengthen and expand their network of links. The network sustains and fortifies the actor, but the network is not reducible to static concepts, such as social structure. Latour and Woolgar pointed out that they are opposed to using the concept of “social factors” to explain science, since that replicates and reverses the very problem they are seeking to overcome, namely how to explicate the activity of science without recourse to nature (or society).

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