Business in Action

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert White ◽  
Matt Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Cultural Effects ◽  
Traditional Market ◽  
Social Explanations ◽  
Market Test ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
Transport Logistics ◽  
Australian Company

As market relations become more pervasive, so the classical sociological issue of the tension between ‘economic’ and ‘social’ explanations becomes more salient than ever. Michel Callon has proposed that the Actor-Network Theory (A-NT) developed in science and technology studies provides a useful approach to this tension. In this article we outline his innovatively traditional ‘market test’ of A-NT, and then test and illustrate it through a contract between an Australian company and a transport logistics consortium that it fostered under changing conditions in its market. We exemplify Callon’s case for the co-emergence of calculative and cultural effects, and conclude that business in action is a promising research site for their global reconfiguration.

scholarly journals Is Pokémon GO Feminist? An Actor-Network Theory Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carina Assuncao
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender

The Pokémon franchise has been targeted and has been successful with males and females (Tobin, 2004). In it, cute-looking creatures with superpowers fight each other for the fame and glory of their masters (the players). The franchise includes a plethora of entertainment media. This essay will focus on the recent release, Pokémon GO. This particular game and its location-based technology will be analysed using cyberfeminism and actor-network theory to explore the play space as a context for kinaesthetic awareness and embodiment. The cyberfeminism herein exploited is that of “the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender” (Haraway, 2000, p. 292). Actor-network theory, a strong methodological tradition in science and technology studies, sees actors and the networks they create as completely ‘flat’ and non-hierarchical. ANT has been criticised for its lack of concern with politics and gender (Lagesen, 2012) but, in combination with a feminist lens, ANT has the potential to uncover issues that other approaches in game studies cannot. This original framework can help game studies scholars to see gameplay processes in a new light by following the many actors involved in game design and use.

scholarly journals Discursive Contextures of Science: Euro/West-Centrism and Science and Technology Studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Embryonic Stem ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Knowledge And Practice

Science and Technology Studies (STS) by the very act of showing the multiplicity, contingency, and context-dependence of scientific knowledge and practice, provincialized modern science. Postcolonial interventions within STS have pursued this goal even further. Nevertheless, Euro/West-centrism continues to inflect not only scientific practices and lay imaginaries, but also sociological and historical analyses of sciences. In this article, drawing on my own training within STS – first under J.P.S. Uberoi, who was concerned with structuralist analysis of modernity and science, and thereafter under Andy Pickering, when we focused on material agency and temporal emergence and extensively engaged with Actor Network Theory - I emphasize the continuing role of Euro/West-centric discourses in defining the “self” and the “other” and in impacting epistemological and ontological interventions. More broadly, building on a concept of Michael Lynch’s, I call for excavation and analysis of discursive contextures of sciences. In the second section of the article, through a brief analysis of embryonic stem cell therapy in a clinic in Delhi, I show how with shifting transnational landscape of technoscience certain discursive contextures are being “deterritorialized” and left “stuttering.”

Ecological Democracy and the Co-participation of Things

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Disch
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Material Politics ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Ecological Democracy

Is ecological democracy possible? If so, what would it entail? This chapter first reviews the literature based in deliberative democracy that proposes to extend communicative competence to non-humans, and then traces an alternative constructivist line of environmental political thinking from its beginnings in the strand of science and technology studies pioneered by Bruno Latour and others known as actor-network theory, through two actor-network theory-inspired approaches to political theory, “object-oriented democracy” and “material politics/participation.” Whereas this alternative approach solves some of the conundrums to which the communicative model gives rise, it is neither as radical a departure from politics as it is “normally understood,” nor aspoliticalas its proponents claim.

scholarly journals Recovering critique in an age of datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1135-1151
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Questions

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

scholarly journals On Theory–Methods Packages in Science and Technology Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 016224392110402
Author(s):  
Antti Silvast ◽  
Mikko J. Virtanen
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Theory Method ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Research Designs ◽  
Selection Of

Our review essay contributes to the long-standing and vibrant discussion in science and technology studies (STS) on methods, methodologies, and theory–method relationships. We aim to improve the reflexivity of research by unpacking the often implicit assumptions that imbue research conduct and by offering practical tools through which STS researchers can recognize their research designs and think through them in a new way. To achieve these aims, we analyze different compositions of theories, methods, and empirics in three different STS approaches—actor–network theory, the biography of artifacts and practices, and ethnomethodology—by employing the concept of a theory–methods package (TMP). A selection of theoretical cornerstone texts and case studies in infrastructure research from each tradition serves as our material. Our findings point, first, to differences between the TMPs of the reviewed approaches and to the internal diversity of theory–method relationships in each approach. Second, we found some intriguing similarities between the approaches and discuss potential complementarities of their theory–method fits.

scholarly journals Making Materials Matter—A Contribution to a Sociomaterial Perspective on Work Environment

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Simonsen Abildgaard ◽  
Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen
Keyword(s):  
Work Environment ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Psychosocial Work Environment ◽  
Psychosocial Work ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Changing Economy

This paper aims to discuss the implications of adopting an STS (science and technology studies)- based conceptualization of the psychosocial work environment. We problematize how work environment research presently divides elements of working conditions into separate physical and psychosocial dimensions. Based on actor network theory, a currently dominant perspective in the field of STS, we discuss the concept of sociomaterial work environment. An ANT perspective on work environment is relevant and timely, we argue, first and foremost because more entities are embraced in the analyses. We argue that the ANT perspective leads to a more nuanced understanding of the work environment where it is not a set of predefined categories that is the focus of interest, but rather the work environment as multiple locally performed aspects of agency, translation, and collectively constructed reality. This perspective on work environment, we argue, addresses pivotal issues raised in the work environment debate during the last ten years, for instance of how the work environment as a concept saliently belongs to a social democratic Scandinavian agenda in which the singular employee in a work environment context is predominantly seen as a victim. This trope, which was peaking in the 1970s, is increasingly becoming obsolete in a changing economy with still more flexible jobs. The contribution of this paper is to provide a presentation and a discussion of the potentials and pitfalls provided by a shift toward a sociomaterial work environment perspective, as well as an empirical exemplification of a sociomaterial approach to work environment assessment.

scholarly journals Meaningful Transfer: Tech-Knowlogical Interdependencies in the Digital Built Environment

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Muldoon-Smith ◽  
Leo Moreton ◽  
Richard Kotter
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Explicit Knowledge ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Digital Innovation ◽  
Sustainable Futures ◽  
Analysis Of Knowledge ◽  
Design Construction

This paper engages with ideas of tacit and explicit knowledge, how it is created, transferred, and ultimately translated in contemporary discourses of the digital built environment. The aim is to open a more critical and original dialogue in the digital built environment by (a) interrogating digital innovation as it strives to utilise relatively distilled information to enhance the sustainable design, construction and operation of the built environment and wider urban areas, (b) representing the rights of those whose knowledge is created and transferred in the digital built environment and (c) by further understanding the context of knowledge creation, and thus maximising its potential for scaling up sustainability objectives. The paper considers the conceptual and methodological tools that may help to focus more novel analysis of knowledge production and transfer in the digital built environment. The paper considers three conceptual positions that have hitherto been considered either in isolation or only tangentially connected to each other: (1) Science and Technology Studies (STS), in order to understand how society and technology is intertwined and importantly to form a meaningful backdrop for engagement with knowledge; (2) Organisational Theory (OT) and the concept of “pipelines,” in order to understand how organisations—and more broadly cities—can meaningfully capture and utilise knowledge when transitioning to digitally enabled sustainable futures; (3) Aspects of Actor Network Theory (ANT), in order to understand how knowledge travels and gets translated and institutionalised in new domains. Furthermore, we also use the same conceptual positions to argue how following knowledge can help individuals and society navigate the digital built environment. Our findings suggest that smart technology is a “social prosthesis,” and only works because humans make up for its deficiencies.

scholarly journals Informaatiokäytäntöjen tutkimuksen teoreettisia ja metodologisia mahdollisuuksia

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaakko Louhivuori
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Practice Research ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Information Practices ◽  
History Of

In this article I ponder how the actor-network theory and the practice-based studies can be applied in information practices research. The history of the actor-network theory goes back to the 1970s and 1980s and is linked to sociology as well as science and technology studies. Actually it was not intended to be so much a theory, but more like a method of combining actors into a wider story without preconceived ideas or laws of thought. In recent years, information practice research has paid more attention to the practice-based studies than to the actor-network theory. The quest for the full recognition of nonhuman factors as a part of information generation and its utilisation can be observed as a common ground with these two approaches. I believe, that if we apply the components of the actor-network theory and practice-based studies, we will get a more holistic view of information practices. These views and results may be used to review information practices and to develop the information processes further.

Mobilizing Transport

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Schabacher
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Infrastructure Systems ◽  
Technical Mediation ◽  
Mobility Studies ◽  
Transportation Infrastructures ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Broad Understanding

The article deals with the relationship between media and transportation infrastructures and analyzes their links to the concept of mobility. It examines the assumption that infrastructure systems themselves are mobile, in the sense that they develop and have to be maintained constantly. According to such a perspective, they are to be considered not primarily as “structures,“ but as specific processes of mobilization (infrastructuring) that constitute the basis for mobility in the sense of transport and movement. Drawing on historical knowledge of transportation, it will be shown that a broad understanding of traffic as exchange, communication, and transportation has narrowed in the twentieth century, whereby the originally implied idea of transport as transformation became suppressed. Recent approaches in mobility studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) can be combined in a fruitful way to unfold the specific dynamics of infrastructure as a process of mobilization (Callon) and technical mediation (Latour).

Medium Infrastruktur

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Schabacher
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Media System ◽  
Digital Visual Culture

"Obwohl Medien nur in bzw. als Infrastrukturen greifbar sind, geraten diese erst neuerdings in den Fokus medienwissenschaftlichen Interesses. Dabei bieten die Science and Technology Studies (STS), insbesondere die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (ANT), produktive Ansätze, um die mediale Dimension des Infrastrukturellen zu erschließen. Im Durchgang durch die Infrastruktur-Theoriegeschichte werden drei Hinsichten entfaltet, die für den Zusammenhang von Medien und Infrastruktur aufschlussreich sind: die Frage der In/Visiblität von Infrastrukturen, Probleme von Standardisierung und Metrologie sowie die spezifische Prozessualität von Infrastrukturen. </br></br>In recent years, digital visual culture has confronted film studies with a series of profound questions. These concern a new ontology of moving images, the design of the global media system or the genealogy of digital media. This paper suggests to solve some of these issues by means of the actor-network theory. "

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