Latour - Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory

REASSEMBLING THE SOCIAL

The Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies are jointly organised by Oxford University Press and the Sad Business School. Every year a leading international academic is invited to give a series of lectures on a topic related to management education and research, broadly defined. The lectures form the basis of a book subsequently published by Oxford University Press.

CLARENDON LECTURES IN MANAGEMENT STUDIES:

The Modern Firm
Organizational Design for Performance and Growth
John Roberts

Managing Intellectual Capital
Organizational, Strategic, and Policy Dimensions
David Teece

The Political Determinants of Corporate Governance
Political Context, Corporate Impact
Mark Roe

The Internet Galaxy
Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
Manuel Castells

Brokerage And Closure
An Introduction to Social Capital
Ron Burt

Reassembling the Social
An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
Bruno Latour

Science, Innovation, and Economic Growth (forthcoming)
Walter W. Powell

The Logic of Position, The Measure of Leadership
Position and Information in the Market (forthcoming)
Joel Podolny

Global Companies in the 20th Century (forthcoming)
Leslie Hannah

An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

Bruno Latour

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Bruno Latour 2005

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To the doctoral students I had the good fortune of accompanying through some of their travails

Figure 1

This book has passed through many avatars. It began almost thirty years ago when I had the chance of being taught primate sociology by Shirley Strum and her baboons in Kenya. Although that project with Shirley has remained in limbo, it has been the staple of my teaching of sociology to young engineers at the School of Mines in Paris. When, in 1996, I was offered to give the Leclerc lectures in Louvain-la-Neuve, I decided it was about time to synthesize what I had learned from Michel Callon, John Law, Madeleine Akrich, Andy Barry, Annemarie Mol, Antoine Hennion, and many others in what had become known as Actor-Network-Theory. Time and again, I have found that readers were puzzled not so much by our views on scientific practice and various other topics, but rather by the unusual meaning we gave to the words social and social explanations. And yet, this alternative social theory has never been the object of a systematic introduction. Instead of complaining that this small school of thought had become a monster that had escaped its Frankensteinian makers, I decided it might be fairer to present interested readers with its intellectual architecture.

It was only in 1999, when Barbara Czarniawska asked me to give a crash course in social theory compatible with the needs of organization studies, that I began to write down a complete draft. Although the present text has not made use of the transcript Barbara had so kindly arranged for, I owe much to her and to her Gteborg students for the organization of the material that, in addition, had been rehearsed at the London School of Economics in the Department of Information Systems in the winters of 1999, 2000 and 2001. When my old friend Steve Woolgar, through the auspices of the Sad Business School, asked me to give the Clarendon Lectures in the fall of 2002, I wrote another draft which has since been discussed in varying degrees of detail by Andrew Barry, Howie Becker, Geof Bowker, Franois Cooren, Didier Debaise, Gerard de Vries, Emilie Gomart, Fabian Muniesa, Noortje Marres, Shirley Strum, Albena Yaneva, Benedikte Zitouni, and Edgar Whitley that has resulted in this new version. Finally, it was submitted to a second round of critiques by Michael Flower, Jean-Toussaint Leca, Michael Lynch, Paolo Quattrone, Isabelle Stengers and Eduardo Vargas. I wish I could say that all remaining defects are theirs and not mine.

My greatest debt goes, however, to the doctoral students who have participated over the years in my thesis-writing workshops. In a discipline in which I have never been trained but to which I have never despaired of contributing, they have been my best and most patient teachers.

I hope that such a protracted and idiosyncratic genesis goes some way toward explaining the opinionated nature of this piece of work. Now that this alternative social theory has been presented in an orderly fashion, readers can decide to put it to use, to distort it beyond recognition, or, most likely, to drop it altogetherbut this time knowingly! As for me, I have finally discovered in writing this book the conditions under which I could be proud of being called a sociologist.

T he argument of this book can be stated very simply: when social scientists add the adjective social to some phenomenon, they designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon. There is nothing wrong with this use of the word as long as it designates what is