Actor Network Theory

Actor network theory (ANT), also known as enrolment theory or the sociology of translation, emerged during the mid-1980s, primarily with the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law. ANT is a conceptual frame for exploring collective sociotechnical processes, whose spokespersons have paid particular attention to science and technologic activity. Stemming from a Science and Technologies Studies (STS) interest in the elevated status of scientific knowledge and counter to heroic accounts or innovation models, ANT suggests that the work of science is not fundamentally different from other social activities. ANT privileges neither natural (realism) nor cultural (social constructivism) accounts of scientific production, asserting instead that science is a process of heterogeneous engineering in which the social, technical, conceptual, and textual are puzzled together (or juxtaposed) and transformed (or translated). As one of many anti-essentialist movements, ANT does not differentiate between science (knowledge) and technology (artifact). Similarly, proponents do not subscribe to the division between society and nature, truth and falsehood, agency and structure, context and content, human and nonhuman, microlevel phenomenon and macrolevel phenomenon, or knowledge and power. Nature and society, subjectivity and structure, and fact and fiction are all effects of collective activity. ANT advances a relational materiality, the material extension of semiotics, which presupposes that all entities achieve significance in relation to others. Science, then, is a network of heterogeneous elements realized within a set of diverse practices.