Understanding the Actor Network Theory

Actor network theory (ANT) is a family of approaches to social analysis that rests on six core assumptions. First, it treats institutions, practices, and actors as materially heterogeneous, composed not only of people but also of technologies and other materials. Second, it assumes that the elements making up practices are relational, achieving their shape and attributes only in interaction with other elements. Nothing is intrinsically fixed or has reality outside the web of interactions. Third, it assumes that the network of heterogeneous relations and practices is a process. If structures, institutions, or realities are not continuously enacted then they disappear. Fourth, it therefore assumes that realities and structures are precarious in principle, if not in practice. Fifth, this implies that the world might be different, a suggestion that opens up interesting political possibilities. And sixth, it explores how rather than why realities are generated and maintained. This is because even the most obvious social causes are relational effects and therefore themselves subject to change.
ANT developed initially in the 1980s in Paris with the work of such authors as Michel Callon, Bruno Latour (Science in Action, 1987), and John Law (Organizing Modernity, 1994). It grew (and grows) through empirical studies of technologies, science practices, organizations, markets, health care, spatial practices, and the natural world. Indeed it is not possible to appreciate ANT without exploring such case studies. Philosophically, it owes much to Michel Serres (1930–5) and is generally poststructuralist in inspiration. It thus shares with the writing of Michel Foucault an empirical concern with material–semiotic patterns of relations, though the patterns that it discerns are smaller in scope than those identified by Foucault. The approach is controversial. First, since it is non-humanist it analytically privileges neither people nor the social, which sets it apart from much English-language sociology. Second, since it offers accounts of how rather than why institutions take shape, it is sometimes accused of explanatory weakness. Third, political critics have suggested that it is insensitive to the “invisible work” of low-status actors. Fourth, it has been accused in some of its earlier versions of a bias towards centering, ordering, or even managerialism. And fifth, feminists have observed that it has shown little sensitivity to embodiment (see body). Whether these complaints are now justified is a matter for debate. Indeed, ANT is probably better seen as a toolkit and a set of methodological sensibilities rather than as a single theory. Recently there has been much interchange between ANT, feminist material-semiotics (Donna J. Haraway) and postcolonial theory, and there is newer “after-ANT” work that is much more sensitive to the politics of domination, to embodiment, to “othering,” and to the possible multiplicity and non-coherence of relations. A key issue remains politics. Such “after-ANT” writers as Annemarie Mol (The Body Multiple, 2002) and Helen Verran argue that relations are non-coherent and enact overlapping but different versions of reality, so there is space for “ontics,” or an “ontological politics” about what can and should be made real. This means that alternative and preferable realities might be enacted into being or made stronger: reality is not destiny.