Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
A working introduction to Latour's vocabulary for tracing how documents, buildings, software, and objects help assemble the social worlds we study.
Actor-network theory is liberating or disorienting on first encounter, usually both at once. I will argue that ANT earns its place in organizational research by giving you a vocabulary for the work objects already do in your field site. I will show this through four concepts: the actant, translation, inscription, and the difference between an intermediary and a mediator.
Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law developed ANT in science and technology studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The central claim is that social life is not made only by human intentions and structures; it is assembled through associations among human and non-human actors: technologies, texts, bodies, spaces, policies, materials.
Latour's favorite example is the automatic door closer. The device enforces a norm (close the door behind you) that a human doorman would otherwise enforce in person. It has no consciousness, and it still makes a difference to what happens. Anything that makes a difference is an actor, or more precisely an actant, a term borrowed from semiotics to stay neutral about whether the thing in question is human.
The move from actor to actant is where people get vertigo, so be precise about what it commits you to. ANT asks for analytical symmetry, not moral symmetry. Nobody claims a spreadsheet matters as much as a person. The claim is that spreadsheets are moral documents, and that human intention is not the only real cause of outcomes. Two actants come to mind from my own working life: the printer, which senses urgency and responds by running out of cyan, and the fax machine, the oldest technology in any office and the one handled with real ritual care.
Translation is the process by which actors redefine, align, and enroll other actors into a network in ways that serve particular interests. Callon's study of scallop fishermen at St. Brieuc Bay traces how scientists enrolled fishermen, scallops, and an ecosystem into one research network by representing scallop survival as aligned with everyone's goals at once. Translation is never neutral; it reroutes trajectories and links fates. When a congregation adopts new software, what happens is not adoption but translation. A nonprofit database translates relationships into columns, rows, and fields.
Inscription names the way values and assumptions get built into objects. A building without accessible entrances has inscribed ableism into its architecture, not by intent, but by design choices. A grant template inscribes assumptions about what counts as evidence and which work is legible. Pick up the template and the template picks up you.
Black boxing names what happens when a network becomes so stable that it disappears. The electrical grid is a black box to most of us; we flip a switch and ignore the infrastructure, labor, and policy behind it. The research opportunity comes when the box cracks open: the internet goes down, the vendor folds, the building floods, and the network turns visible because it is broken. Callon's obligatory passage point is the related power concept, the person, procedure, or credential every other actor must pass through. In a congregation that is often the pastor.
Latour separates intermediaries from mediators. An intermediary transports meaning or force without transforming it. A mediator transforms, distorts, or modifies what passes through. Handing over a plain text file is an intermediary; a Word document or an HTML page is a mediator, because it adds styling and structure to the glyphs. We constantly assume intermediaries where we are dealing with mediators. A policy document does not simply communicate an intention; it transforms that intention as it travels toward implementation. Where are things transformed rather than transmitted? That is usually where the scholarship is.
There is a theological cousin here, since materiality is my home discipline. Genesis calls the physical world good in itself, and the incarnation doubles down. The word became sarx, bodily flesh, subject to hunger, to the weight of the wood, to Roman administrative procedure, to fishing boats and loaves and coins. Augustine's vestigia Dei, traces of God in creation, holds that the material world arrives already inscribed with meaning. An incarnational theology is well prepared to affirm that things help assemble reality.
So: what are the non-human actors in your research site, and what are they doing? Follow that question further than feels comfortable.
The Postmodern Terminal >_