The Actor Network Resource:
Thematic List

Version 2.2

(April 2000)

Please note that:

This is a legacy resource that has not been updated since 2000.
The resource is divided thematically. Please click on the appropriate topic, and use the ‘back’ button of your browser to retrace your steps.
For the full alphabetical list of articles see http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sciencestudies/actor-network-resource-alphabetical-list/

A. Theory
Introductory Precursors ‘Early Theory’ Substantial Theoretical Contributions After Actor-Network?	Edited Collections Textbooks Commentaries, Criticisms, Assessment Method, Methodology
B. Substantive Studies
Agency and Subjectivity Animals and Nature The Arts Cartography and Representation Disability Economics Gender Materialities	Medicine Organisation and Work Politics Power Science Scientometrics Spatialities Technologies
C. Related Issues
Ambivalence Difference and Fractionality Otherness	Performance Miscellaneous

Theory

Introductory

Law (1992), `Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity’
A good place to start for interested readers who have not previously encountered the approach.

Law (1997), `Traduction/Trahison: Notes on ANT’
Appears on these web pages. Explores the development of actor-network theory through examples, from 1985-1995, arguing that it has changed, that it is not singular but multiple in character, and that defences of (or attacks on) a fixed position called ‘actor-network theory’ miss the point, since what is interesting is the displacements, and the issues that arise in debate.

Calás and Smircich (1999), `Past Postmodernism? Reflections and Tentative Directions’
A clear and concise account of the implications of ‘postmodernism’ for the theorising of organisations, which offers, as posssible post-postmodernisms, feminist theory, narrative analysis, actor-network theory, and post-colonial theorising.

Precursors

Latour and Woolgar (1979), `Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts’
The first major study of the building of facts in a laboratory in any theoretical tradition, and a landmark book in the sociology of science. Written before the term ‘actor-network’ was invented, and drawing on a range of resources including semiotics and ethnomethodology, it nonetheless catches important ANT moves, for instance in its account of the ways in which facts move through modalities as they gather allies to become more and more solid – and less and less attached to the contingencies which generated them in the first place.

Latour (1983), `Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World’
An important pre-cursor paper in which it is argued that large scale ‘macro’ phenomena are not different in kind from small scale ‘micro’ phenomena, and should be analysed in the same terms. Hence an attack on the ‘macro’-‘micro’ distinction in social theory.

Serres (1974), `La Traduction, Hermes III’
The notion of ‘translation’, the action of making equivalent which is also a betrayal, was drawn by Michel Callon (1980) from the writing of Michel Serres

`Early Theory’

Callon (1980), `Struggles and Negotiations to define what is Problematic and what is not: the Sociology of Translation’
An early, perhaps the first empirical, example of the ‘sociology of translation’, using the case of the véhicule électrique. Derives the term ‘translation’ from Michel Serres (1974).Callon and Latour (1981), `Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: how actors macrostructure reality and how sociologists help them to do so’
An important pre-cursor paper in which it is argued that large scale ‘macro’ phenomena are not different in kind from small scale ‘micro’ phenomena, and should be analysed in the same terms. Hence an attack on the ‘macro’-‘micro’ distinction in social theory.

Callon and Law (1982), `On Interests and their Transformation: Enrolment and Counter-Enrolment’
Argues the social interests are constructed in networks of heterogeneous relations.

Substantial Theoretical Contributions

Callon (1986), `Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay’
One of the most discussed papers in actor-network theory. This presses ‘symmetry’ between different entities including fishermen, various technologies, and scallops. Much commented on, much criticised. (See Collins and Yearley (1992))Callon (1998), `An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic Externalities Revisited by Sociology’
Introduces useful new terminology for exploring the simplifications that are implicit in the formation of economic (and any other) actors.

Callon and Rabeharisoa (1999), `Gino’s Lesson on Humanity’
An exploration of the implications of interviewing a person with muscular dystrophy for the character of politics and appropriate political participation. Suggests that the interview tends to produce a particular form of violent political participation.

Latour (1988), `Irréductions, published with The Pasteurisation of France’
A tightly written philosophical-theoretical statement which rigorously develops the implications of the irreducibility of different entities, and the worlds that are formed when these link together into chains or networks. A crucial theoretical resource

Latour (1988), `The Pasteurization of France’
A large-scale semiotic analysis of ‘Pasteur’ who is understood as a set of strategies, arrangements and mobilisations of different entities into a more or less coherent and more or less fragile network, of which Pasteur the person is a spokesperson. Accordingly, Pasteur is an effect, rather than a prime mover, an individual genius.

Latour (1990), `Drawing Things Together’
Set up as a discussion of the division between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, this article rejects the idea that there was a decisive event or moment which led to the division, but instead locates this in a series of small technologies which generated simplified and manipulable representations or ‘immutable mobiles’ which thereby generated centres of control. These include printing, cartography and visual depiction. The argument is somewhat reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s understanding of surveillance in the disciplinary or modern episteme.

Latour (1999), `Politiques de la Nature: Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie’
A successor to ‘We Have Never Been Modern’, which explores the possible character of a non-modern constitution which would dissolve the distinction between facts and values (science and politics) with a more flexible and revisable process in which what is and what is good (and can live together) are negotiated. This book will appear in translation in English in 2000 or 2001.

Callon (1991), `Techno-economic Networks and Irreversibility’
An exploration of the formation and dynamics of heterogeneous networks which attends, in particular, to they strategies which secure the relative irreversibility of those networks.

After Actor-Network?

Callon and Rabeharisoa (1998), `Reconfiguring Trajectories: Agencies, Bodies and Political Articulations: the Case of Muscular Dystrophies’
Explores the configurations of bodies, materials and collectivities involved in the disabilities of certain muscular dystrophies. An example of ‘after ANT’ at work which combines ANT concerns with some of the insights of phenomenologyde Laet and Mol (2000), `The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology’
Considers a ‘fluid technology’, and treats its strength as a function of that fluidity rather than a structured and stable network.

Latour (1993), `We Have Never Been Modern’
Modernity claims to be clear and pure, to distinguish with clarity between the human and the non-human, while in reality it is full of hybrids, quasi-human, quasi-non-human. This is the secret of its remarkable dynamism: that in practice it generates hybrids in profusion, while insisting that there is really a fundamental distinction between human and non-human.

Latour (1996), `Petite Réflexion sur le Culte Moderne des Dieux Faitiches’
A study of ‘factishes’ which combine the property of being real, and being created. A further exploration, then, of the ‘hybrids’ considered in Latour (1993c)

Latour (1996), `Social theory and the study of computerized work sites’
Reviews developments in social theory and information technology. Uses actor network ideas and studies but also refers to other important theoretical influences in the context of new information technologies.

Law (1994), `Organizing Modernity’
An organisational ethnography of the management of a large scientific laboratory which is also a theoretical exploration of the links between actor-network theory and other theoretical traditions including Foucauldianism and symbolic interaction. It is also critical of the tendency towards managerialism and ‘centering’ of some parts of actor-network theory.

Law and Hassard (1999), `Actor Network Theory and After’
A book which attempts, in the same mode as this resource, to argue that actor-network has moved on, and that the interesting issues which arise have to do with questions arising (which are often shared with other traditions) rather than defending (or attacking) ANT. Includes papers by Steve Brown and Rose Capdevila, Michel Callon, Anni Dugdale, Kevin Hetherington, Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion, Bruno Latour, John Law, Nick Lee and Paul Stenner, Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser and John Law, Marilyn Strathern and Helen Verran.

Law and Singleton (2000), `This is Not an Object’
Explores an object (alcoholic liver disease) which turns out to be enacted in different locations in different ways overlapping and partially connected performances. It is argued that this means that it is not an object

Mol (2001), `The Body Multiple: Artherosclerosis in Practice’
‘After actor-network’, rather than ANT. On the multiplicity of objects, the distribution of difference performances over different sites, the forms of co-ordination between them and their different dependencies.

Mol (1999), `Ontological Politics: a Word and Some Questions’
How are worlds, realities, performed into being? This is an ANT question. Here an ‘ontological politics’ is imagined.

Star (1992), `The Trojan door: Organizations, work, and the ‘open Black Box”
One of the earliest ‘After Actor Network’ papers: Draws on a variety of theoretical traditions which form a promising assemblage of ideas for studying organisation, technology and work.

Teil and Latour (1995), `The Hume Machine: Can Association Networks Do More Than Formal Rules?’
Another attempt of a scientometric approach to describing associations – draws on ANT to a crtain extent but is rather ‘After Actor Network’.

Urry (1998), `The Concept of Society and the Future of Sociology’
Uses the notion of ‘fluids’, themselves developed as an alternative to the (actor) network metaphor, to retheorise the nature of society

Edited Collections

Law (1991), `A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination’
This collection includes a variety of theoretical approaches to the social shaping of technology, but many adopt an actor-network approach.

Bijker and Law (1992), `Shaping Technology, Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change’
This collection includes a variety of theoretical approaches to the social shaping of technology, some of which adopt an actor-network approach.

Meadel and Rabeharisoa (1996), `Représenter, Hybrider, Coordoner’
A series of empirical and theoretical papers by members and those associated with the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the École des Mines de Paris.

Gadelha and Nazaré Freitas Pereira (1997), `A Caixa Preta de Pandora’
This Portuguese volume collects together a number of important articles in actor-network theory, concentrating in particular on pieces by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon.

Brenna, Law et al. (1998), `Machines, Agency and Desire,’
A collection of essays on materialities, desires and technologies, influenced by a variety of (mostly post-structuralist) theoretical approaches, including actor-network theory. It concludes contributions by Anni Dugdale, Celia Lury, Mike Michael, Ingunn Moser and John Law, and Bernike Pasveer and Madeleine Akrich.

Hetherington and Law (2000), `After Networks: Special Issue of Society and Space’
A collection of articles in an ‘after network’ mode, with special reference to spatiality and movement.

Textbooks

Latour (1987), `Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society’
The only ANT textbook? – though the extent to which Latour uses the notion of ‘actor-network’ is limited. Nevertheless, an important account of the method, in particular in its application to science and technology.

Commentaries, Criticisms, Assessments

Albertsen and Diken (2000), `What is ‘the Social?”
A sympathetic exploration of strategies and approaches in contemporary social theory in terms of a double distinction between purity and hybridity on the one hand, and order and chaos on the other. Actor-network is one of the approaches so considered.

Amsterdamska (1990), `Surely, You Must be Joking, Monsieur Latour!’
Critical commentary on the non-humanism of actor-network theory.

Ashmore (1993), `Behaviour Modification of a Catflap: a contribution to the Sociology of Things’
An analysis, in equal measure rigorous and humorous, which explores the extent to which is possible to sustain generalised symmetry between a cat, a person and a catflap.

Brown (1992), `Organization studies and scientific authority’
A review of ANT in organisation stuies from a methodological perspective.

Button (1993), `The curious case of vanishing technology’
Critical comment on ANT from an ethnomethodolical position in the context of work and technology. Questions the arbitrary nature of ANT accounts and the ANT preference for processes rather than actions.

Callon and Latour (1992), `Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley’
A reply to Collins and Yearley (1992).

Callon and Law (1995), `Agency and the Hybrid Collectif’
An attempt to review and come to terms with some of the criticisms of actor-network theory by commentators such as feminists for its tendencies towards centering and monological form.

Callon and Law (1997), `After the Individual in Society: Lessons in Collectivity from Science, Technology and Society’
An attempt to review and summarise some of the major preoccupations of actor-network theory, and relate them critically to sociological theory.

Callon and Law (1997), `L’Irruption des Non-Humains dans les Sciences Humaines: quelques leçons tirées de la sociologie des sciences et des techniques’
An attempt to review and summarise some of the major preoccupations of actor-network theory, and relate them critically to sociological theory.

Collins and Yearley (1992), `Epistemological Chicken’
Argues against the generalised symmetry of actor-network, preferring in the interpretive sociology tradition to treat humans as ontologically distinct language carriers (See Callon, 1986b; Callon and Latour, 1992)

Constant (1999), `Reliable Knowledge and Unreliable Stuff’
An exploration of the character and limits of constructivist analysis of engineering and technological knowledge. Argues that these approaches focus too much on the micro, are unable to theorise the increase of such knowledge, and proposes a Bayesian model for understanding the increase in reliable knowledge. See the response by Law and Singleton (2000).

Elam (1997), `Living Dangerously with Bruno Latour in a Hybrid World’
Notes similarities between Bruno Latour’s (1993b) use of the notion of hybridity and the use of the term in US State Department discourse. Argues that the notion of hybridity is a way of securing the purity of basic terms, categories.

Engestrom and Escalante (1994), `Postal buddy: Mundane tool or object of affection? The rise and fall of the postal buddy’
Activity theory study of a failed automation attempt at US post offices. Employs and critically reviews ANT concepts.

Escobar (1994), `Welcome to cyberia: Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture’
Uses ANT concepts (and a range of other theoretical traditions) to develop an anthropology of cyberculture.

Haraway (1991), `A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’
This is not within the actor-network tradition, and neither does it comment on it. We include it to point to the similarities and differences between actor-network and important feminist writing on sociotechnical relations. The heterogeneity of such relations is assumed in both approaches, but Haraway is much more explicit (a) about her political commitments, and (b) about the irreducibility of cyborgs to networks that might be ‘captured’ and described overall.

Haraway (1994), `A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies’
Perhaps the metaphor of network is too restricted? There are untidy relations that might be understood using other metaphors: for instance, that of the ‘cat’s cradle’.

Haraway (1997), `Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.Female_Man©_Meets_Oncomouse™: Feminism and Technoscience,’
Included not because it belongs to actor network theory, but because it is the best-known example of the different and partially related radical feminist technoscience alternative to actor-network theory. The ‘after-ANT’ studies in this resource in many cases owe as much or more to Haraway as to ANT itself.

Kaghan and Phillips (1998), `Building the Tower of Babel: Communities of Practice and Paradigmatic Pluralism in Organization Studies’
The paper compares reductionist and irreductionist interpretations of the work of Thomas Kuhn. The paper argues that the organization studies community would benefit from paying greater attention to the irreductionist interpretations found in ANT and other schools in science and technology studies.

Latour (1999), `On Recalling ANT’
Like a faulty car, ANT needs to be recalled since all of its main terms (actor, network and theory) are flawed, or at least are too easily misunderstood. It is best seen as a theory of space or circulation in a non-modern situation.

Law (1991), `Introduction: Monsters, Machines and Sociotechnical Relations’
An attempt to link the distributions of concern to sociology (such as class and gender), with those (such as the human/non-human divide) that have been explored in STS including actor-network theory.

Law and Singleton (2000), `Performing Technology’s Stories’
A commentary on Constant’s analysis of the failings of constructivism. Suggests that ANT and feminist technoscience analyses owe less to construction than a turn to performance.

Law (2000), `Objects, Spaces, Others’
Considers the spatial implications of networks, regions and fluids, and argues that objects may be understood as interferences between different spatial systems.

Law (2000), `Networks, Relations, Cyborgs: on the Social Study of Technology’
In an ‘after actor-network’ mode, argues that networks should not be understood as centred and functional in character. It is relations that are crucial, and these may be understood in partial and incompletely centred modes.

Lee and Brown (1994), `Otherness and the Actor Network: the Undiscovered Continent’
A sympathetic but critical commentary of the tendency of actor-network theory to colonise or homogenise the ‘Other’, and therefore deny to this its otherness. This also implies that actor-network studies often enough take a ‘God-eye’ view.

Michael (1998), `Co(a)gency and the car: Attributing Agency in the Case of the ‘Road Rage”
Where is agency located? How is it attributed? Michael looks at the hybrid actor of the driver and the motor car for the case of road rage.

Nowotny (1990), `Actor-networks vs. science as self-organizing system: A comparative view of two constructivist approaches’
Critically reviews two constructivist traditions that attempt to explain science: ANT and Complexity Theory.

Star (1991), `Power, Technologies and the Phenomenology of Conventions: on being Allergic to Onions’
If we are all heterogeneous engineers, then some find that this is much more difficult to accomplish than others. This engages with the tendency of 1980s actor-network studies to explore the strategies of the powerful, rather than attending to the difficulties of women, people of colour, or others who do not conform to the standard conventions.

Strathern (1996), `Cutting the Network’
Not primarily about actor-network, this raises important questions about the character of relatedness, and the neutrality of the notion of ‘network’ as a descriptor.

Suchman (2000), `Human/Machine Reconsidered’
Links the ethnomethodological concern with situated knowledges to a reconsideration of non-human agency in work practices.

Method, Methodology

Akrich and Latour (1992), `A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies’
A concise description of a possible semiotic vocabulary for undertaking symmetrical studies of the relations between entities, and thus the ways in which these are constituted.

Brown (1992), `Organization studies and scientific authority’
A review of ANT in organisation stuies from a methodological perspective.

Callon and Rabeharisoa (1999), `La Leçon d’Humanité de Gino’
An exploration of the implications of interviewing a person with muscular dystrophy for the character of politics and appropriate political participation. Suggests that the interview tends to produce a particular form of violent political participation.

Escobar (1994), `Welcome to cyberia: Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture’
Uses ANT concepts (and a range of other theoretical traditions) to develop an anthropology of cyberculture.

Latour (1988), `The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative’
Exploration of reflexivity. Rejects the idea that this is self-contradictory, but also rejects the approach of most reflexivists, arguing for a modest ‘infra-reflexivity’’.

Latour, Mauguin et al. (1992), `A Note on Socio-Technical Graphs’
Extends the sociology of translation, and in particular the arguments of Latour (1987) to the field of scientometrics.

Law (2000), `On the Subject of the Object: Narrative, Technology and Interpellation’
Explores the relations between subjectivity and objectivity in an after ANT mode, in part by using Althusser’s notion of interpellation.

Substantive Studies

Agency and Subjectivity

Akrich (1992), `The De-Scription of Technical Objects’
A study of the ways in which competences and attributes are attributed to agencies and artefacts in a study of third world electrification, and which, as a result, stabilise a sociotechnical network.

Akrich and Pasveer (1998), `Narrating Childbirth’
Explores different narratives of childbirth and their distribution of agency and mediation. ‘After’ ANT.

Callon (1998), `An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic Externalities Revisited by Sociology’
Introduces useful new terminology for exploring the simplifications that are implicit in the formation of economic (and any other) actors.

Cussins (1998), `Ontological Choreography Agency for Women Patients in an Infertility Clinic’
Draws on actor-network theory and a range of other theoretical resources to explore the way in which agency, corporeality and technologies are ordered in an infertility clinic. Argues that medical technologies are not necessarily dehumanising.

Law and Moser (1999), `Managing, Subjectivities and Desires’
Explores the male-gendering of managers in a formalorganisation, arguing that there are multiple forms of male performance.

Mol and Law (2001), `Situated Bodies and Distributed Selves: on Doing Hypoglycaemia’
Explores the performances of hypoglycaemia in diabetes, arguing that these are multiple, and correspondingly generate multiple bodily (and other material) specificities, and multiple ‘selves’.

Moser and Law (1998), `’Making Voices’: Disability, Technology and Articulation’
On the implications of material heterogeneity for subjectivities in disability, and the notion of ‘voices’ or representations. After ANT

Moser and Law (1998), `Notes on Desire, Complexity, Inclusion’
Using Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between rhizome and arborescence, argues that desire as lack and desire as intensity are mutually dependent.

Moser and Law (1999), `Good Passages, Bad Passages’
An analysis of the materiality of dis/ability, which explores the multiplicity of such dis/ablings, the ways in which these link together, and the manner in which they perform subjectivities.

Suchman (2000), `Organizing Alignment: a Case of Bridge Building’
Explores the human and non-human engineering work and practices involved in the design of a bridge.

Singleton (2000), `Made on Location: public health and subjectivities’
Explores the partially connected performances which both alter and at the same time reaffirm public health advice for the case of sudden infant death syndrome.

Animals and Nature

Brown (1998), `Ordering Hope: Representations of Xentransplantation – and Actor/Actant Network Theory Account’
An account of xenotransplantation, posed both in narrative and in actor-network terms.

Callon (1999), `Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay’
A reprint of the article previously published in 1986.

The Arts

Hennion (1989), `An Intermediary between Production and Consumption: the Producer of Popular Music’
Chains of translations produce, or demand, intermediaries. This is explored for the case of popular music.

Hennion (1996), `Les Jambes d’Hercule: Des Oeuvres et du Gout’
Tastes change, notions of authenticity change: the result is that the notion of what counts as an authentic work of art is also displaced. The cellars of museums are now full of Roman sculptures that have lost favour with the curators. ‘After-actor network’.

Cartography and Representation

Bowers (1992), `The politics of formalism’
Draws on ANT to describe the inherently political nature of artefacts, especially information technologies. Also a useful introduction to ANT concepts such as immutable mobiles, obligatory passage ponts, etc.Bowker (1988), `Pictures from the Subsoil, 1939′
An empirical and theoretical study of the juggling of representational ambiguity for strategic reasons. Is quite strongly informed by actor-network assumptions, though not reducible to these.

Callon (2001), `Writing and (Re)writing Devices as Tools for Managing Complexity’
Explores the ways in which textual technologies iteratively constitute supply and demand (consumers) for two classes of enterprises.

Hutchins (1995), `Cognition in the Wild’
Detailed study of the organisational and material aspects of navigation on a navy vessel. Not ANT – this study is located within a cognitive anthropology/distributed cognition framework – but similar in many ways in its crossing of allegedly obvious boundaries between the human and the non-human.

Law and Benschop (1997), `Resisting Pictures: Representation, Distribution and Ontological Politics’
Considers the ways in which subjects and objects are constituted in representations, arguing that such relations are not given in the order of things. ‘After actor-network’.

Turnbull (1993), `Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas’
Related to some concerns of actor-network theory, and drawing on it in part, this is a study of the conventional character of cartographic representation.

Disability

Callon and Rabeharisoa (1998), `Articulating Bodies: the Case of Muscular Dystrophies’
Explores muscular dystrophy by considering how the ‘collective patient’ is created and reshaped in the course of tests and trials which extend from the flesh through technologies to other persons and organisations. The body, it is argued, can only be understood by examining such trials.

Stollmeijer, Harbers et al. (1999), `Food Matters: Arguments for an ethnography of daily care’
An account of food and death by starvation in patients suffering from senile dementia which explores the legal and medical discourses before considering the material complexities of regimes of care and the possibility that particular objects and practices have ‘merits’ or ‘virtues’ which might be used in a non-normative ethics.

Winance (1999), `Trying out the Wheelchair: the Mutual Shaping of People and Devices Through Adustment’
Carefully explores the way in which a person with muscular dystrophy and a wheelchair are mutually adgusted to produce an assemblage which departs from both in their initial conditions.

Economics

Callon (1998), `The Laws of the Markets’
An edited volume on the creation of markets, bringing together authors from a variety of theoretical traditions. Most are concerned with the material construction of markets – and market-related subjectivities. ‘After ANT’.

Callon (1999), `Actor-Network Theory: the Market Test’
How might the actor-network approach be applied to such seemingly simple forms of agency as that of economic actor in the market?

Gender

Berg (1996), `Digital Feminism’
A study of the relationships between gendering and technologies, especially information technologies, which draws in part on actor-network theory, though more extensively on feminist writing, and on the social construction of technology.

Dugdale (1999), `Materiality: Juggling Sameness and Difference’
How is ‘closure’ achieved, for instance in policy? Examining the case of the IUD in Australia, this paper suggests that it does not imply coming to rest,but rather an oscillation, performed in material circumstances, between singularity and multiplicity.

Law and Moser (1999), `Managing, Subjectivities and Desires’
Explores the male-gendering of managers in a formalorganisation, arguing that there are multiple forms of male performance.

Singleton (1993), `Science, Women and Ambivalence: an Actor-Network Analysis of the Cervical Screening Campaign’
Combines resources from actor-network theory and feminism to explore the ambivalences that are built into, and help to constitute, the British Cervical Screening Programme.

Singleton and Michael (1993), `Actor-networks and Ambivalence: General Practitioners in the UK Cervical Screening Programme’
Argues against the centering tendencies of 1980s actor-network theory, to suggest that decentering and indeed inconsistency or ambivalence are do not necessarily detract from the overall cohesion of a network

Singleton (1996), `Feminism, Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Postmodernism: Politics, Theory and Me’
How to think about ‘decisions’ in a world where there is endless undecidability and ambivalence.

Materialities

Anderson (1994), `Representations and requirements: The value of ethnography in system design’
A critical analysis of computer scientists` misunderstandings of ethnography. Uses ANT and ethnomethodology to show the importance of materiality in ethnographic accounts.

Latour (1988), `Mixing humans and nonhumans together: The sociology of a door-closer’
Latour, writing as Jim Johnson, performs a rather humorous introduction to key concerns of ANT.

Latour (1991), `Technology is Society Made Durable’
How is society sustained if networks are precarious? The answer lies in the different durability of different materials. Technologies embody social relations: they may be understood as translations of those relations into different material forms.

Latour (1992), `Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts’
There are no purely ‘social’ relations. Instead, there are ‘socio-technical’ relations, embedded in and performed by a whole range of different materials, human, technical, ‘natural’, textual.

Law and Mol (1995), `Notes on Materiality and Sociality’
Explores a semiotic understanding of materiality: that it is a product of relations between entities which thereby achieve their material form. Traces this through actor-network theory to the less coherent materialities which are implied in the postructuralist fragmentation that follows the ‘loss’ of grand narrative.

Suchman (2000), `Organizing Alignment: a Case of Bridge Building’
Explores the human and non-human engineering work and practices involved in the design of a bridge.

Medicine

Akrich and Pasveer (1996), `Comment la Naissance Vient aux Femmes: le Technique de l’accouchement en France et aux Pays Bas’
After actor network! A comparative study of pregnancy and childbirth in the Netherlands and France, which uses a symmetrical approach to explore the relations which constitute subjectivity, corporeality and technology in the two countries.

Akrich and Pasveer (1998), `Narrating Childbirth’
Explores different narratives of childbirth and their distribution of agency and mediation. ‘After’ ANT.

Berg (1997), `Rationalizing Medical Work: Decision Support Techniques and Medical Practices’
A study of the relationship between medical decision support techniques and the local practices of physicians and others. Draws on actor-network theory.

Bloomfield (1991), `The role of information systems in the UK National Health Service: Action at a distance and the fetish of calculation’
Case study that used ANT ideas to describe the politics of information technology to change the NHS.

Garrety (1997), `Social Worlds, Actor-Networks and Controversy: The Case of Cholesterol, Dietary Fat and Heart Disease’
Compares ANT and symbolic interactionism as theories for explaining protracted controversies. Argues that the latter is better able to accommodate actants such as cholesterol, that remain elusive and ambiguous despite many attempts at enrolment.

Mol (1998), `Missing Links, Making Links: the Performance of Some Artheroscleroses’
‘After actor-network’, rather than ANT. Explores the material specificities of different atheroscleroses, to make the point that these are multiple – that the object is decentred – and that these different object-positions are more or less well linked in the arrangements of the hospital.

Mol and Berg (1994), `Principles and Practices of Medicine: the Coexistence of Various Anaemias’
‘After actor-network’, rather than ANT. Explores the specificities and the relations between different anaemias.

Mol and Elsman (1996), `Detecting Disease and Designing Treatment. Duplex and the Diagnosis of Diseased Leg Vessels’
Explores the differences between two methods for performing atherosclerosis, and the ways in which these are related in practice in a hospital.

Mol and Law (1994), `Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology’
A topological analysis of the spatial forms performed in the disease ‘anaemia’, distinguishing between regions, (actor-)networks, and proposing a further topographical form, that of the fluid. Argues that practices are multi-spatial.

Mol and Mesman (1996), `Neonatal Food and the Politics of Theory: Some Questions of Method’
A methodological, theoretical and political comparison of symbolic interaction (which follows people) and semiotics (or actor-network theory) which may also follow inanimate objects – such as food.

Mol (1997), `Wat is Kiezen? Een Empirisch-Filosophische Verkenning’
Inaugural lecture on ‘what is choosing?’ which explores the implications of distributed ‘decisions’ in a world of multiplicity for the case of medicine.

Mol (2001), `Cutting surgeons, walking patients: Some complexities involved in comparing’
Comparison as an effect of specific and loal practices which perform sets of assumptions, but which are nevertheless partially connected.

Pasveer (1992), `Shadows of Knowledge: making a representing practice in medicine: x-ray pictures and pulmonary tuberculosis, 1895-1930′
Uses a variety of theoretical resources, including actor-network theory, to trace the processes by which new entities were constitute in and through radiography.

Pasveer and Akrich (1996), `How Children are Born: Technologies of Giving Birth in France and the Netherlands’
A summary in English of the study reported in Akrich and Pasveer (1996).

Prout (1996), `ANT, technology and medial sociology: An illustrative analysis of the metered dose inhaler’
A study that introduces ANT to a medical sociology audience by analysing a medical artefact used to treat asthma.

Willems (1998), `Inhaling Drugs and Making Worlds: a Proliferation of Lungs and Asthmas’
Drugs produce similarities and differences, defining diseases and reorganising the body. A study in performance and multiplicity.

Organisation and Work

Brown and Duguid (1994), `Borderline issues: Social and material aspects of design’
Key paper of special issue on Context in Design. Uses ANT only marginally but gives an critical review of similar theoretical approaches to the social, material and political aspects of information technologies.

Cooper (1992), `Formal Organization as Representation: Remote Control, Displacement and Abbreviation’
An analysis of organisation, or modes of organising, which draws on actor-network theory, and in particular the analysis of centres of calculation developed by Bruno Latour. See Latour (1990)

Cooper and Law (1995), `Organization: Distal and Proximal Views’
Organisations may be seen both as discrete and bounded entities (the ‘distal’) and as continuous and fuzzy processes (the ‘proximal’). The latter are related to the network processes of actor-network theory.

Gherardi and Nicolini (2000), `To Transfer is to Transform: the Circulation of Safety Knowledge’
An empirical and theoretical account of organisational decisionmaking, which uses, in part, actor-network theory. See the commentary by Law (2000).

Law and Moser (1999), `Managing, Subjectivities and Desires’
Explores the male-gendering of managers in a formalorganisation, arguing that there are multiple forms of male performance.

Law (2000), `Comment on Suchman, and Gherardi and Nicolini: Knowing as Displacing’
In a comment on Suchman (2000) and Gherardi and Nicolini (2000), explores the character of organisational knowing from a monadological point of view, distinguishing between ‘knowing as distinction’, and ‘knowing as obsurity’.

Suchman (2000), `Organizing Alignment: a Case of Bridge Building’
Explores the human and non-human engineering work and practices involved in the design of a bridge.

Politics

Barry (2001), `In the middle of the network’
Explores the uses of network metaphors and practices in the creation of the European community.

Bloomfield and Vurdubakis (1994), `Boundary disputes: Negotiating the boundary between the technical and the social in the development of IT systems’
Uses ideas of actor network theory to explain the continuous renegotiation between thesocial and the technical when information technology systems are designed.

de Laet and Mol (2000), `The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology’
Considers a ‘fluid technology’, and treats its strength as a function of that fluidity rather than a structured and stable network.

Mol (1999), `Ontological Politics: a Word and Some Questions’
How are worlds, realities, performed into being? This is an ANT question. Here an ‘ontological politics’ is imagined.

Power

Clegg (1989), `Frameworks of Power’
An analysis of the sociological literature on power which develops a general theory which draws in certain respects strongly on actor-network theory.

Latour (1986), `The Powers of Association’
Develops a translation model of power, in which it is argued that power is an performative effect, a product of associating entities together, rather than something which is possessed by actors.

Law (1986), `On Power and Its Tactics: a View from the Sociology of Science’
An empirical and theoretical account of the ways in which allies are assembled into networks in a scientific laboratory in order to produce texts which may then be transported to other sites. Explores the tactics or the strategies of power and domination.

Law (1986), `On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India’
An account of the precarious networks of global domination as these were elaborated by the Portuguese in the 15th and 16th centuries. Draws on and exemplifies Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘immutable mobile’, by examining maritime and navigational technologies.

Law (1991), `Power, Discretion and Strategy’
Links the sociology of power (including ‘power to’ and ‘power over’) with the textures of power, as explored by Michel Foucault and by actor-network theory.

Thrift (1996), `Spatial Formations’
Uses actor-network theory, together with a wide range of other resources, to explore the character of geographical spatiality, often in relation to power and distribution.

Science

de Andrade and Gonçalves (1995), `Os Acelerados Lineares do General Argus e a sua Rede Technocientífíca’
An account of the development of linear accelerator projects in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, exploring decisionmaking, heterogeneity, and their eventual destablisation.

Latour (1999), `Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World’
Reprint of the paper which originally appeared in 1983

Pickering (1995), `The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science’
Not an actor-network study – but is included because it shows another, in some ways comparable, approach at work, in which objects, persons and technologies are all treated as malleable.

Scientometrics

Callon, Law et al. (1986), `Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World’
A collection of papers which offers theoretical grounding for the co-word method of mapping the relationship between concepts and actors in science and technology, locating this in actor-network theory.

Callon (1993), `Variety and irreversibility in networks of technique conception and adoption’
Reviews different network approaches to the study of variety and irreversibility in technique conceptio and adoption.

Latour, Mauguin et al. (1992), `A Note on Socio-Technical Graphs’
Extends the sociology of translation, and in particular the arguments of Latour (1987) to the field of scientometrics.

Spatialities

Hetherington and Law (2000), `After Networks: Special Issue of Society and Space’
A collection of articles in an ‘after network’ mode, with special reference to spatiality and movement.

Law (1992), `The Olympus 320 Engine: a Case Study in Design, Development, and Organisational Control’
A further study of heterogeneous sociotechnical networks, attending to the spatiality and scale effects of such networks, as well as to their disruption.

Law and Mol (1998), `On Metrics and Fluids: Notes on Otherness’
An empirical study of the topological differences between counting and specificity on the one hand, and uncountable continuities on the other. A study, therefore, of ‘Otherness’ where matters cannot be drawn together and summarised.

Law (1999), `After ANT: Topology, Naming and Complexity’
‘Actor-network’ is an oxymoron, the two parts of the term being in tension. But that tension has often been lost in simplifications. It is recommended that the tensions of complexities be retained.

Technologies

Akrich (1993), `Inscription et Coordination Socio-Techniques: Anthropologie de Quelques Dispositifs Énergétiques’
An extended study of the development of electricity-related networks in both Third and First-world contexts.

Bowker (1988), `Pictures from the Subsoil, 1939′
An empirical and theoretical study of the juggling of representational ambiguity for strategic reasons. Is quite strongly informed by actor-network assumptions, though not reducible to these.

Callon (1986), `The Sociology of an Actor-Network: the Case of the Electric Vehicle’
A further, more developed, analysis of the véhicule électrique.

Callon (1987), `Society in the Making: the Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis’
A further, more developed, analysis of the case of the véhicule électrique. In this the notion of the ‘engineer sociologist’ is developed: the notion that engineers are engaged in analysing and ordering social relations.

Escobar (1994), `Welcome to cyberia: Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture’
Uses ANT concepts (and a range of other theoretical traditions) to develop an anthropology of cyberculture.

Hughes (1986), `The Seamless Web: Technology, Science Etcetera’
Does not belong to actor-network theory, but is included to show some of the similarities between the work on large technical systems and ANT – and in particular, the important of the ‘seamless sociotechnical network’ to both.

Hutchins (1995), `How a cockpit remembers its speed’
Another case study in the distributed cognition tradition which argues – not unlike ANT – for a rethinking of the ‘unit of analysis’ we use for analysing socio-technical systems; in this case the organisation of work on the flightdeck of a modern aircraft.

Latour (1988), `The Prince for Machine as well as Machinations’
Where are the missing masses? The argument is that machines are missing from political and social theory.

Latour (1992), `Aramis, ou l’Amour des Techniques’
A multi-vocal account of a transport technology, in which a range of actors, including the technology itself, find a voice and debate the translations and negotiations which led to the final demise of the project.

Latour (1993), `La Clef de Berlin, et autres Leçons d’un Amateur de Sciences’
A collection of essays on the semiotic approach to association, translation, and the importance of the technical and machine in what are more commonly thought of as ‘social’ relations.

Latour (1993), `Ethnography of a ‘high-tech’ case: About Aramis’
A summary of the main theoretical arguments of the ARAMIS case study – in some ways more focused than the book, especially on the construction of the concepts of truth, efficieny and productivity in modern science and technology.

Latour (1996), `Aramis, or the Love of Technology’
A translation of Latour (1992a). A multi-vocal account of a transport technology, in which a range of actors, including the technology itself, find a voice and debate the translations and negotiations which led to the final demise of the project.

Law (1988), `The Anatomy of a Sociotechnical Struggle: the Design of the TSR2′
A study of the heterogeneous sociotechnical networks in which a military aircraft was implicated.

Law and Callon (1988), `Engineering and Sociology in a Military Aircraft Project: A Network Analysis of Technical Change’
Technologies are shaped in and help to perform networks of materially heterogeneous relations. It is possible to trace these as they evolve, which is done for a military aircraft in this paper.

Law and Callon (1989), `On the Construction of Sociotechnical Networks: Content and Context Revisited’
Similar to Law and Callon (1989), except that it is more detailed, and develops the idea that the technology in question (here an aircraft) has a ‘variable geometry’ as the networks in which it is located change their configurations.

Suchman (2000), `Organizing Alignment: a Case of Bridge Building’
Explores the human and non-human engineering work and practices involved in the design of a bridge.

Related Issues

Ambivalence

Difference and Fractionality

Cooper (1995), `’Assemblage’ Notes’
Draws on ANT as one way (among others) of thinking about movement and fractionality. One of our online documents on these pages.

Law (2001), `Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience,’
‘After’ actor-network, or partially outside it; this builds on a number of its assumptions to explore ‘the problem of difference’. The argument is semiotic: subjects and objects make themselves together. If this is so, then as Annemarie Mol has pointed out, there is not an objective world, but rather multiple object positions. How are they co-ordinated? Do we have the languages we need to make sense of decentred object which are more than one and less than many?

Otherness

Performance

Gomart and Hennion (1999), `A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs and Drug Addicts’
An ‘after ANT’ exploration of subjectivity, which explores, for the case of musical amateurs and drug-users, how subjectivities emerge in generative ‘dispositifs’ or heterogeneous attachments that are collective and have to do with objects, techniques and constraints.

Mol (1999), `Ontological Politics: a Word and Some Questions’
How are worlds, realities, performed into being? This is an ANT question. Here an ‘ontological politics’ is imagined.

Miscellaneous

Castells (1996), `The Rise of the Network Society’
Included not because it refers to actor-network theory, but as an example of the popularisation of the notion of ‘network’ as applied in the context of globalisation. The differences between this style of theorising and that of ANT (and after) are noteworthy.

The Actor Network Resource: Thematic List

Version 2.2

Theory

Introductory

Precursors

`Early Theory’

Substantial Theoretical Contributions

After Actor-Network?

Edited Collections

Textbooks

Commentaries, Criticisms, Assessments

Method, Methodology

Substantive Studies

Agency and Subjectivity

Animals and Nature

The Arts

Cartography and Representation

Disability

Economics

Gender

Materialities

Medicine

Organisation and Work

Politics

Power

Science

Scientometrics

Spatialities

Technologies

Related Issues

Ambivalence

Difference and Fractionality

Otherness

Performance

Miscellaneous

The Actor Network Resource:
Thematic List