[1] Although it is best known for its controversial insistence on the capacity of nonhumans to act or participate in systems or networks or both, ANT is also associated with forceful critiques of conventional and critical sociology.
Developed by science and technology studies (STS) scholars Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, the sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a "material-semiotic" method.
[3] The 1984 book co-authored by John Law and fellow-sociologist Peter Lodge (Science for Social Scientists; London: Macmillan Press Ltd.) is a good example of early explorations of how the growth and structure of knowledge could be analyzed and interpreted through the interactions of actors and networks.
Initially created in an attempt to understand processes of innovation and knowledge-creation in science and technology, the approach drew on existing work in STS, on studies of large technological systems, and on a range of French intellectual resources including the semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, the writing of philosopher Michel Serres, and the Annales School of history.
Its grounding in (predominantly English) science and technology studies was reflected in an intense commitment to the development of theory through qualitative empirical case-studies.
[7] Under the framework of ANT, the principle of generalized symmetry[8] requires all entities must be described in the same terms before a network is considered.
Traditionally, nonhuman entities are creatures including plants, animals, geology, and natural forces, as well as a collective human making of arts, languages.
[9] In ANT, nonhuman covers multiple entities including things, objects, animals, natural phenomena, material structures, transportation devices, texts, and economic goods.
In his widely debated 1986 study of how marine biologists tried to restock the St Brieuc Bay in order to produce more scallops, Michel Callon defined 4 moments of translation:[8] Also important to the notion is the role of network objects in helping to smooth out the translation process by creating equivalencies between what would otherwise be very challenging people, organizations or conditions to mesh together.
[1] For the rethinking of social relations as networks, Latour mobilizes a concept from Michel Serres[15] and expands on it in order “to locate the position of these strange new hybrids”.
[17] What is decisive is circulation and participation, from which networks emerge, examples for quasi-objects are language, money, bread, love, or the ball in a soccer game: all of these human or non-human, material or immaterial actants have no agency (and thus, subject-status) in themselves, however, they can be seen as the connective tissue underlying – or even acticating – the interactions in which they are enmeshed.
The approach is related to other versions of material-semiotics (notably the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and feminist scholar Donna Haraway).
Similarities between ANT and symbolic interactionist approaches such as the newer forms of grounded theory like situational analysis, exist,[19] although Latour[20] objects to such a comparison.
But taken as mediators these fabrics would have to be engaged with by the analyst in their specificity: the internal real-world complexities of silk and nylon suddenly appear relevant, and are seen as actively constructing the ideological class distinction which they once merely reflected.
[12] His argument addresses the limitations of reflexivity as traditionally conceived in relativist epistemologies and replaces it with a pragmatic, relational approach tied to ANT's broader principles.
This grounded form of reflexivity enhances the observer’s role as a "world builder" and reinforces ANT’s emphasis on the relational and dynamic nature of knowledge creation.
[7] Recently, there has been a movement to introduce actor network theory as an analytical tool to a range of applied disciplines outside of sociology, including nursing, public health, urban studies (Farias and Bender, 2010), and community, urban, and regional planning (Beauregard, 2012;[23] Beauregard and Lieto, 2015; Rydin, 2012;[24] Rydin and Tate, 2016, Tate, 2013).
[29] Empirically, IR scholars have drawn on insights from ANT in order to study phenomena including political violences like the use of torture and drones,[26] piracy and maritime governance,[30] and garbage.
She claims that Latour's model has the capacity to allow "us to wiggle out of the straitjacket of suspicion," and to offer meaningful solutions to the problems associated with critique.
[35] Others have used the ANT to speak of the structures and placements of religious buildings, especially in cross-cultural contexts, which can see architecture as agents making God's presence tangible.
Despite the fact that these applications vary greatly, all of the scholars cited below agree that the theory provides new notions and ideas for understanding the socio-technical character of information systems.
[39] Bloomfield present an intriguing case study of the development of a specific set of resource management information systems in the UK National Health Service, and they evaluate their findings using concepts from actor-network theory.
[10] Some critics[48] have argued that research based on ANT perspectives remains entirely descriptive and fails to provide explanations for social processes.
argue that the importance of particular actors cannot be determined in the absence of "out-of-network" criteria, such as is a logically proven fact about deceptively coherent systems given Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Key early criticism came from other members of the STS community, in particular the "Epistemological Chicken" debate between Collins and Yearley with responses from Latour and Callon as well as Woolgar.
[50] Whittle and organization studies professor André Spicer note that "ANT has also sought to move beyond deterministic models that trace organizational phenomena back to powerful individuals, social structures, hegemonic discourses or technological effects.
They argue that ANT's ontological realism makes it "less well equipped for pursuing a critical account of organizations—that is, one which recognises the unfolding nature of reality, considers the limits of knowledge and seeks to challenge structures of domination.
Likewise, for organization studies, Whittle and Spicer assert that ANT is, "ill-suited to the task of developing political alternatives to the imaginaries of market managerialism."
Critics including figures such as Langdon Winner maintain that such properties as intentionality fundamentally distinguish humans from animals or from "things" (see Activity Theory).
"[1]: 9 He further remarked how he had been helpfully reminded that the ANT acronym "was perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler"—qualitative hallmarks of actor-network epistemology.