9789144138879 by Smakprov Media AB

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND ORGANIZING BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA TOR HERNES (EDS)

This book has previously been published by Liber AB. The second edition is published by Studentlitteratur AB.

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Art. No 40963 ISBN 978-91-44-13887-9 Second edition 2:1 ÂŠ Authors and Studentlitteratur 2020 studentlitteratur.se Studentlitteratur AB, Lund Design: Jesper SjĂśstrand/Metamorf Design Group Layout: Team Media Sweden AB Cover design: Jens Martin/Signalera Cover illustration: Ljubov Popova Printed by Interak, Poland 2020

Contents

Preface 13 Actor-Network Theory and Organizing 13

1 Constructing Macro-Actors According to ANT 15 Barbara Czarniawska & Tor Hernes

2 Technological Strategy As Macro-Actor 25 HOW HUMANNE SS MIGHT BE MADE OF S TEEL

Kjell Tryggestad

A genealogy of strategy 25 Humanness as a given – in contemporary strategy research 26 Humanness as produced – a performative perspective on strategy 31 Recontextualizing strategy through fieldwork 36 Strategies transforming plans into anti-plans 36 Strategies transforming non-humans into actors and humans into objects 39 Implications for research and practice 41

3 The Little Engine That Could 45 ON MANAGING QUALITIE S OF TECHNOLOGY

Marcus Lindahl

250 tons of steel 47 250 tons in the field 50 250 tons and the project process 53 250 tons at HQ 55

Genealogy of an engine 56 Engine and anti-Engine programs 59 Engine programs and project management 61 A commentary to “The little engine that could” – 15 years later 62

4 Artifacts Rule 67 HOW ORGANIZING HAPPENS IN OPEN SOURCE SOF T WARE PROJEC T S

Theory: interaction, inscription, and evolution 70 Open source software projects are interactive systems, not organizations 70 Human agency and interaction are inscribed in webs of artifacts 73 Open source software projects evolve through variation, selection, stabilization 76 Inscribing organization into artifacts 77 How the source code organizes the programmers’ production task 77 How mailing lists organize interaction and record the development process 85 How the copy-left inscribes the rules of the open source game 88 Open Source: A technology-based regime 91

5 Organizational Routines and the Macro-Actor 95 Martha S. Feldman & Brian T. Pentland

Why use ANT to understand routines? 99 Macro-actors and organizational routines 102 Constructing routines 102 Constructing organizations 105 Constructing organizational fields 107 Power and routines 111 Stability and change in organizational routines 112 Conclusion 115

6 Contents

Giovan Francesco Lanzara & Michèle Morner

6 The Organization as Nexus of Institutional Macro-Actors 117 A S TORY OF A LOP SIDED RECRUITMENT C A SE

Tor Hernes

Institutions as macro-actors 120 On translation and analysis 122 The story in brief 124 The institutional macro-actors 126 The oddity of the consistent lopsidedness 129 How institutional macro-actors were enrolled and how the enrollment influenced the unfolding of the events 131 Final remarks 134

7 Powers in a Factory 137 David Vickers & Stephen Fox

Core sets 138 The Burnsland case 142 Who’s in and who’s out 144 Up close and personal 145 The discussion 148 Conclusion 153

8 Macro-Actors and the Sounds of the Silenced 155 Claes-Fredrik Helgesson & Hans Kjellberg

Being heard depends on whether and how you speak … 157 … and whether someone is listening or not 161 Metrological apparatuses amplifying and muting 161 We don’t want to know that you know what the bottles contain 163 The power of ignorance 166 On annulling or detaching potentially anti-programmatic behaviours 168 Who (or what) is to hang up the phone? 168 The power of deferral or are weapons safe? 169

Contents

Dissonance: On the difficulty of inter-associated multiple peripheries 171 A case of split cases 171 Multiple peripheries 172 Concluding remarks 174

9 Materiality and Organizing 177 AC TOR-NE T WORK THEORY RE V ISITED

IT, organizational change and actor-network theory 179 Study site and the studied object 183 Tracing the actor-network 185 Introducing Powerplay 185 Translation 186 Inscription 195 Actor-networks and non-human agency 198

10 The Internet Web Portal as an Enrolment Device 203 Lars Norén & Agneta Ranerup

Markets and tools 206 Talking about tools – a methodology 209 Two web portals for information and guidance 210 The Swedish National Labour Market Administration (AMV) 211 The Swedish National Agency for Education (NAE) 215 Disentanglement and entanglement 218 Framing of an individual agency 218 Construction of the interest of the individual agency 219 Enrolment of the individual agency 221 Conclusions 222

8 Contents

Jonny Holmström & Daniel Robey

11 The Making of Knowledge Society 225 INTEL L EC T UAL C APITAL AND PAR ADOXE S OF MANAGING KNOWL EDGE

Jan Mouritsen & Kirsten Flagstad

Prologue 225 Knowledge society and intellectual capital 226 Macro-actors and black boxes 227 Black boxing intellectual capital 229 The motivation to engage in the intellectual capital project 231 In search of a referent – discovering intellectual capital 234 Inscribing the knowledge society 239 The guideline 239 Leaky black boxes 241 The sociality of intellectual capital 243 Seduction 243 Intellectual Capital statements as fragile technology 244 End of story 247

12 The Re-formatting of Electricity, and the Making of a Market 249 THE OB JEC TIFIC ATION OF EC ONOMIC S BY ANT

Per Ingvar Olsen

The case: The Norwegian electricity market reform in the 1990s 251 Short historical background and presentation of macro-actors 253 The Market macro-actor: its roots, logics and associations 256 The making of a functional market system 258 Re-formatting macro-organizational structures 260 The re-formatting of electricity into tradable financial contracts 262 Shaping governance technologies: Accounting, economic reports, and transformation of ownership and control 263 Inventing the economy of the market system infrastructure 265 Shaping the natural monopoly regulation and control system 267 Regulating market behaviours, organizational changes and market access 269 Concluding remarks: How many become one 271

Contents

13 Productive Power, Organized Markets and Actor Network Theory 275 Negative power in organizational economics and economic sociology 277 Organizational economics 278 Economic sociology 279 Structural-functionalist and radical perspectives on power 281 Ant, Foucault and productive power 282 Foucault and positive/productive power 282 Toward an ANT of the economy and markets 284 Three takes on power in the formation of the Finnish forest harvesting business 286 Take one: legitimate and illegitimate power 287 Take two: power as a structure of domination 288 Take three: power as identity construction and interest translation 289 Markets and power as products of the “econo-sciences” 292

14 Actor-Networks 295 EC OLOGY AND ENTREPRENEURS

Silvia Gherardi & Davide Nicolini

Two versions of Actor-Network Theory 296 Entrepreneurial tactics of translation 299 Introducing Wasser 301 A framework of problematization 303 How interessement is performed 304 Trials and failures of enrolment 305 Mobilization and closure 307 The entrepreneurial version of ANT 308 Ecological tactics of translation 308 The bandwagon is put in motion 309 The emergence of heterogeneous actors 310 The actor-network fails to produce a standardized practice: the obligatory point of passage is not that obligatory after all 312

10 Contents

Tuomo Peltonen & Henrikki Tikkanen

Twice around 313 Closure and its enemies 315 The ecological version of ANT 316 Concluding remarks 317

15 Net-working on a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit 321 THE BABY A S V IR T UAL OB JEC T

David Middleton & Steven D. Brown

How is human agency made relevant? 323 What stops networks from expanding infinitely? 328 How blankness affords sociality 331 The baby as quasi/virtual object 334 Blankness and cutting the network 337 Conclusion 343

16 Actor-Network Theory, Organizations and Critique 345 TOWARDS A P OLITIC AL ONTOLOGY OF ORGANIZING

Rafael Alcadipani & John Hassard

What is “critical” in management and organization studies? 347 ANT and after: bringing politics back in 349 Conclusions 354 References 357 About the Authors 383

Contents

Chapter 1

Constructing Macro-Actors According to ANT Ӽ Ӽ BA R BA R A C Z A R N I AWSK A & T OR H E R N E S

In 1981, Michel Ca llon and Bruno Latour published a chapter in a book edited by Karin Knorr Cetina and Aaron Cicourel, Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro Socio logies. The title of their chapter was “Unscrewing the big Leviathan or how do actors macrostructure reality and how sociologists help them to do so”. Callon and Latour began by evoking Thomas Hobbes and his idea that social order was possible through a contract between individuals, who agree to become associated with one another, and to express their wishes through a common spokesperson. Thus emerges a “Leviathan”, a super-actor that seems to be much larger than any individuals that constitute it, and yet it is but an association – a network – of these individuals, equipped with a “voice”. Callon and Latour have pointed out that the difference between micro-actors and macro-actors is not due to their “nature”, but to negotiations (including wars) and associations. The process of creating the alliances that form the basis of the construction of macro-actors is poorly understood, as macro-actors wipe away any traces of their construction, presenting themselves through their spokespersons as being indivisible and solid. Social scientists contribute, often unwillingly, to this construction process by increasing this solidity and consistency in their descriptions.

Barbara Czarniawska & Tor Hernes

Two sources of inspiration can easily be detected in Callon and Latour’s chapter and in many of their subsequent works. The first is the actant theory, a version of structuralist analysis introduced by the French semiologist of Lithuanian origin, Algirdas Greimas (see e.g. Greimas and Courtés, 1982 and Czarniawska, 2004). Greimas introduced the notion of narrative program: a change of state produced by any subject affecting any other subject. Greimas spoke of grammatical subjects, which may or may not reveal themselves as persons. Accordingly, he replaced the term “character” with the term “actant”: “that which accomplishes or undergoes an act” (Greimas & Courtés, 1992: 5) because it applies not only to human beings but also to animals, objects, or concepts. This replacement of words highlights the process of actants changing roles throughout a narrative: an actant may acquire a character and become an actor or may remain an object of some actor’s action. Narrative programs become chained to one another in logical succession, thus forming a narrative trajectory. These elements of Greimas’ version of structuralism made it attractive to scholars of science and technology. They wanted to elevate machines and artifacts to a more significant position in their narratives and felt encumbered by the notions of “actor” and “action”, which so clearly assumed a human character and an intentional conduct. “Actant” and “narrative program” could be better at describing the construction of macro-actors. Such use of the Greimasian model was visible in Bruno Latour’s “Techno logy is society made durable” (1992a), in which he described the history of the invention of the Kodak camera and the simultaneous emergence, from the point of view of Eastman, of a mass market for amateur photography as a sequence of programs and anti-programs. The question that interested Latour, and the reason he conducted this Greimasian analysis, was the question of power: “Is the final consumer forced to buy a Kodak camera? In a sense, yes, since the whole landscape has been built in such a way that there was, at that time, no course of action left but to rush to the Eastman company store. However, this domination is visible only at the end of the story. At many other steps in the story the innovation was highly flexible, negotiable, at the mercy of a contingent event.” (p. 113). Thus, Latour concluded that an innovation is but a syntagmatic line

(i.e. a line connecting programs to further programs) containing human and non-human actants that were recruited to counter the anti-programs. Each time an anti-program emerged or was introduced (e.g. by competitors), Eastman Kodak managed to recruit new actants for their next program. In this way Eastman Kodak has become an important actor, a macro-actor – but only at the end of the story. Contrary to many heroic narratives, there was nothing in the “nature” of Eastman Kodak at the beginning of the story that could help the observer foresee its final success. It was an actant as any other, and it became an actor because it succeeded in recruiting many other actants to its cause. But many a time during the story, Eastman Kodak could have shared the fate of other entrepreneurs who ended up bankrupt and unknown. Later on, Eastman Kodak’s has become a story of the demise of a macro-actor, suggesting its inability to mobilize networks to stem the dominance of digital photography. One could therefore summarize the Latourian/Greimasian procedure, which became known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), as follows. It begins with an identification of actants (those which act and are acted upon). Then one follows the actants through a trajectory – a series of programs and anti-programs – until they become actors, acquiring a distinct and relatively stable character. Which actants have the opportunity to become actors? Those with programs that succeeded in combating anti-programs; or, alternatively, those with anti-programs that won, as in the stories of opposition and resistance. This success, Latour suggested, is due to association: the formation and stabilization of networks of actants, who can then present themselves as actor-networks. But how is it possible for many to become one? It is possible thanks to translation, a phenomenon which is not limited to constructions of macro- actors but necessary to their construction. Here enters another important source of inspiration for ANT: the notion of translation as introduced by Michel Serres1 and applied to sociology by Michel Callon (1975). Translation was, for them, much more than a linguistic term. They interpreted it literally from Latin trans-latio: moving something from one place to another while transforming it (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1993): Thus translation becomes 1 Steven D. Brown (2002) wrote an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Michel Serres.

Chapter 1 Constructing Macro-Actors According to ANT

2 The speech and the papers have been published in Law, John and Hassard, John (eds.), Actor Network Theory and After, Blackwell, 1999.

Barbara Czarniawska & Tor Hernes

a way of describing movement and transformation of different forms – of knowledge and cultural practices, but also of technology and artifacts. This notion has become known to English readers via Callon’s story of the fishermen and researchers who attempted – successfully – to introduce scallops into their network, constructing a macro-actor of “cultivated scallops”. In many contexts in which the notion of translation has been used, the issue of power and construction of macro-actors becomes secondary (see e.g. Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996; 2005). In the meantime, the concept of Actor-Network Theory has become an object lesson in the unbound translation. As John Law has pointed out, “[t]he term started in French as ‘acteur reseau’. Translated into ‘actor-network’, the term took on a life of its own.” (1999:5). Actor-Network Theory has been variously interpreted as “actors and their networks”, “actor’s network”, and sometimes, as it happened to the “grounded theory” in the 1980s, it has been attached to whatever approach an author happened to favor at the point of writing the text. Curiously, the approach has often been accused of lacking a power perspective – a truly surprising allegation, given that it has been constructed with a view toward revising traditional approaches to power. Traditional theories take power to be the cause of events and actions, whereas ANT takes it to be the effect or result. Commenting on all these interpretations, Bruno Latour said provocatively in his keynote speech at the workshop “Actor Network and After”, at Keele University, in July 1997: “There are four things that do not work with actor-network theory: the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!”2 One might note that Latour never explained what was wrong with the hyphen, so we kept it. Alcadipani and Hassard, whose chapter has been included in this second edition, addressed the political dimension of ANT and especially allegations of its “political neutrality”. They suggested that ANT represents politics “in the making”, enacted through practices, processes and associations rather than being a separate identity. In their opinion, the “ANT and After” offered exactly the type of reflexive and critical thinking it has been criticized for not expressing.

John Law wrote what may be considered his final text on ANT in 2009. It starts with the following definition (observe that Law never uses the hyphen used by other authors in “Actor-Network -Theory,” and that he maintained the existence of two worlds):

Actor network theory is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. (Law, 2009: 141)

He continued with qualifications, three of which are worth repeating. First, it is possible to describe ANT in the abstract, but this maneuver misses the point, because it is an approach meant for field studies. Second, it is an approach, not a theory (ANT proponents repeat this dictum, albeit with little effect). Third, ANT actually covers a large diaspora of approaches (thus, Law himself would prefer the label “material semiotics,” which he used in the title). Annemarie Mol joined ANT in 1982/1983, when she attended an STS research seminar conducted by Callon and Latour (Mol, 2010). In 1995, she wrote a paper with John Law related to his idea of “semiotics of materiality.” They closely read several STS studies (their own and those of other authors), looking for proof that sociality needs materiality if it is to be sustained. They also noted that many narratives about science use a strategy consisting of “pulling material differences together into a single kind of story” (p. 287), homogenizing heterogeneous assemblies. Their recommendation was a “patchwork strategy”: sewing together “partial and varied connections between sites, situations and stories” (p. 290) – a strategy favored by Annemarie Mol in her studies. She, too, claimed that ANT is “a term that stopped working a long time ago” (Mol, 2010). She analyzed – and problematized – the three elements: the notion of actor, the notion of network, and the notion of theory. She added, however, in agreement with John Law, two other elements of the ANT approach not always covered by the label: ordering (or aligning) and coordination. These two activities may be important to study – especially in management and organization studies, as aligning and coordination are what the management and organization studies (MOS) scholars call organizing.

Chapter 1 Constructing Macro-Actors According to ANT

Barbara Czarniawska & Tor Hernes

In spite of Law and Mol’s opinion that ANT has outlived its utility, the approach is popular as perhaps never before, not least in organization studies. Bruno Latour has summarized it in his book Reassembling the Social (2005), the first edition of the present volume was published the same year, and then came Andréa Belliger and David J. Krieger’s Organiz ing Networks: An Actor-Network Theory of Organizations (2016) and Mike Michael’s Actor-Network Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations (2017). Thus, we decided that it is a good time to update our volume. Without laying claim to the superiority of its own translation, the present volume narrows this aporia of translations to the specific field of organization studies, and to a specific interpretation: an approach that makes it possible to show how power emerges through organizing. The volume is primarily concerned with the emergence of power and macro- actors, and different patterns by which they may evolve over time and space. Such macro-actors could be formal organizations, social and political institutions, or markets. The issues of representation are also given special attention. We begin by directing the reader’s attention to the most provocative aspect of ANT: its symmetric treatment of humans and non-humans, and its special focus on artifacts. As a result, it is possible to show the frequent anthropomorphization of objects in various organizing attempts, and to ponder its consequences. Here, Kjell Tryggestad has a sad story to tell. An apparently big and muscular artifact, a Numeric Control system, died, or perhaps was killed, because nobody loved it enough to care for it and allow it to flourish. Some engineers treated it as their “baby”, but they were too few and too poorly connected; that is, their connections did not hold in the face of adversity. The Numerical Control system was never introduced. But although this artifact was a member of an emerging and relatively fragile network, other networks assume strategic importance, as Tryggestad reveals. Indeed, in the construction of diesel power plants, everything revolves around one very heavy engine, says Marcus Lindahl. It dictates the ways of organizing more autocratically than any dictator would; it avoids negotiations and determines hierarchies of people and objects. Although in this case the literal and symbolic weights of the artifact are inextricably intertwined, artifacts

need not be heavy in order to be important. In fact, Giovan Francesco Lanzara and Michèle Morner show how artifacts organize open-source software projects: softly but decisively they coordinate and govern technological projects of unprecedented scale and complexity. Instead of a book of rules or a manual, the source code, mailing lists, and license agreements (“copy lefts”) contain inscriptions instructing network participants how to proceed with their technological research, how to create groups, and how to relate to their institutional context. But organizing involves more than humans and things; it also involves quasi-objects, such as organizational routines. Martha Feldman and Brian Pentland show that routines can be seen as quasi-objects that stabilize networks such as organizations – as well as much bigger networks, such as organization fields. In this sense, routines perform a double service: in their performative aspect, they are simply a part of the daily practice of organizing, whereas their ostensive aspects perform a stabilizing role. It could happen, therefore, that an organizational routine becomes an arena for a tug-of-war in which the contestants engage field institutions to be on their side. Tor Hernes tells the story of such a tug-of-war within a university routine, in which institutions are enrolled in a battle for influence over a recruitment case. Hernes makes the point that organizations may be seen as nexus in which macro-actors operate, with micro-actors as their intermediaries and translators. The tug-of-war metaphor serves as a reminder that there always exist micro-actors who contest the emerging macro-actor – sometimes in order to construct a competing macro-actor and sometimes just for the fun of it. Stephen Fox and David Vickers tell the story of a small group of local workers, managers, and unions – a David who created a network to outsmart a Goliath, the representative of a transnational company – and thus won, perhaps not the whole war, but at least a battle. Successful resistance might be less dramatic and even unplanned, say Claes-Fredrik Helgesson and Hans Kjellberg. In a mundane tug-of-war between consumers and marketers, consumers use many tactics of resistance without formulating a strategy: they merely pick onions out of their burgers or use loyalty cards in a disloyal way. ANT’s postulate of symmetry makes a researcher much more observant of such non-heroic measures, but it is important not to

Chapter 1 Constructing Macro-Actors According to ANT

Barbara Czarniawska & Tor Hernes

re-create the inherited dichotomies, warn Helgesson and Kjellberg: much happens between programs and anti-programs that has never been programmed by anybody. At this point we return to software programming, which attracts a great deal of attention in our book. In fact, we see it as an embodiment of the spirit of the times. The wave of enthusiasm about e-government and e-democracy has caused many public administrations to turn their interest towards the exploitation of information technologies. Jonny Holmström and Daniel Robey studied the use of on-line analytic processing in the municipal government of Umeå, a city in northern Sweden. They show how the tool changed with use and users: it has been adapted so as to attract various interest groups and micro-actors. For all its flexibility and the will to please, the tool remained in control: the database underlying the application remained unchanged and shaped a more economic, cost-based approach to public decisions. Studying the construction of educational portals by governmental agencies, Lars Norén and Agneta Ranerup demonstrated an interesting paradox: conceived of as tools to give autonomy and agency to the citizens/users, the portals were actually shaping (or educating) the users according to the preferences of the principal – the government. Whether such “education” happens by design or default remains an open question. There are cases, however, where there is no doubt about the intention of a macro-actor that tries to construct another, subordinate macro-actor. In the case recounted by Jan Mouritsen and Kirsten Flagstad, the Danish government undertook from scratch – from a word – the creation of a macro-actor called “Intellectual Capital”. The construction proceeded in fits and starts, but not without success. Its problems concerned the activity of the construction itself rather than any anti-programs, when a change of political majority brought the project to an abrupt end. Or so it seemed, until it transpired that Intellectual Capital was in fact living a modest but robust life of its own; when foreign delegations wanted to see it, its ressurection became highly probable. The Danish government enrolled researchers into the project; the Norwegian government employed them to design and supervise the construction of a macro-actor – a Market Reform of the electricity system in Norway. Per Ingvar Olsen shows how the emerging actor successfully competed with

other two – a Cooperative system and a Hierarchical system – and how economists actualized their models in practice. In contrast to the stories of Lindahl and of Lanzara and Morner, the enormous artifact – the electricity system – remained silent and was never actively involved in programs and anti-programs. Tuomo Peltonen and Henrikki Tikkanen compare ANT to other theories of organizing, demonstrating how ANT can help researchers to observe, describe, and interpret the formation of power. This does not mean that ANT needs to become the final theory of organizing; like all theories, it will gain viability by extensions and problematizations. Silvia Gherardi and Davide Nicolini point out that modern organizing is not best captured in a fairy tale format, for the contemporary organization landscape is populated by dispersed centers of calculation rather than distinct heroes. Thus, an ecological version of ANT might be more adequate. In a similar fashion, David Middleton and Steve Brown suggest that a complete symmetry, although a democratic project, can obfuscate some properties of certain objects that may have an impact on their role in the network. A baby, for example, apparently a weak link in a neonatal network of care, might be central in that network because it is a blank object – an object upon which enormous potentialities can be inscribed. As pointed out by Lee and Hassard (1999), “ANT ‘overcomes its limits’, not by enforcing its boundaries – its view of what belongs and what does not – on others, but by removing from itself any terms and conditions that might serve to exclude others”. In the same spirit, the boundaries of this book are primarily practical – a book must end at some place. In our search for contributions, we looked for studies following ANT’s main precepts, as underlined by Lee and Hassard: an epistemological pragmatism and an ontological tolerance, or what Latour called “variable ontologies”. In other words, less fuss about “the method”, but a greater caution when apportioning the world into inherited categories.

Chapter 1 Constructing Macro-Actors According to ANT

Barbara Czarniawska (ed.) is Professor of Management Studies at the Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Economics and Commercial Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Tor Hernes (ed.) is Professor of Organization Theory at Copenhagen Business School and Adjunct Professor at USN Business School, University of South-Eastern Norway.

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND ORGANIZING Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has over the past few decades developed into a practical, challenging and intriguing tool for studying organizing. Its unique approach brings to light the multiple ways that people, artifacts, institutions and organizations become intertwined. ANT-inspired studies illuminate connections, complexities and interactions that are left obscure by mainstream views. This second edition of the 2005 book shows anew how ANT may be applied to the study of aspects of organization as diverse as technology, organizational change, routines, virtual organization, strategy, power, market mechanisms, consumer behavior, public administration and knowledge management. The book is suitable for researchers and higherlevel students, and serves as an excellent primer for those wanting to learn about ANT through the lens of organization theory. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) started with stories about strange worlds inhabited by scallops, microbes or Portuguese caravels sharing their lives with human beings. It is now a wide field of research explicitly open to new contributions, translations and problematizations. This innovative book writes a new chapter in the ANT saga. Based on a series of field studies, it shows very convincingly how this now widely recognized approach might be helpful to revisit notions like power, organization and market. Michel Callon, CSI, Ecole des Mines de Paris

Second edition Art.nr 40963

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