Abstract
Belliger and Krieger understand “organizing” as creating organizations through communication. From Actor-Network Theory (ANT), however, they borrowed what they call “a non-linguistic concept of communication” (p. 18): communication via artifacts. Having thus narrowed their field of interest, they tell their story, giving priority to a narrative form.
Their story begins with a clipping from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. A Space Odyssey, in which apes that use tools win over their antagonists. (Clearly the authors share von Clausewitz’s opinion that war is politics; that is, communication by other means.) They also ignore ANT’s credo that “social” is not “stuff” but a relation (though later they quote just this statement), and speak of “social things” versus “technical things”. (They are not alone in this – apparently, the old idea that “social” is the stuff of which humans are made survives in spite of any number of protests.) This introductory chapter ends with a conclusion that it is the existence of organizations that makes human society different from animal societies.
On to the emergence of organizations, which are “communicatively constituted”. The theories evoked here are Weick’s sensemaking, Scott’s version of new institutionalism, McPhee and Zaug’s “four flows” theory, and the Montreal School (Taylor, Van Every, Cooren), which is the one most obviously inspired by ANT.
The next chapter is dedicated primarily to Goffman, as it deals with “staging”, which is being translated (rightly so) into “localizing and globalizing”. Latour, Law, but also Weick and cognition scholars, are included in the dialogue.
These three chapters serve mostly as a frame to the main theme of the book: organizations in the age of digitalization. Here, the authors interpret ANT suitably for their point of view: “An actor-network is held together by, or rather, made up of information. The network can become the actor precisely because only actors are capable of meaning” (p. 149). I am not sure I agree, but this is certainly an innovative and intriguing interpretation. Thereafter, the authors describe “the new media revolution”, with Castells as the main reference.
The longest chapter, “Organizing Networks in the Digital Age”, describes networks being created in the fields of business and social entrepreneurship, education and health care, public sector and social movements. Here, I found the part on e-health most interesting, because it was most novel as a phenomenon.
The last chapter contains not so much conclusions as summaries of previous chapters. This seems to be a general tendency, as the last chapter in the other book I am reviewing has the same format.
In Mike Michael’s take, ANT truly becomes a “body multiple” (a multiple body of knowledge, in this case). The purpose of the book, the author declared, is “to provide a set of possible relations through which one can engage productively with ANT” (p. 5).
After the introductory chapter (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 presents what could be called a genealogy of ANT. It depicts the schools of thought that ANT opposed (though “structural functionalism” is here called “functionalism” – two quite different approaches), and those from which it grew: the sociology of scientific knowledge and the works of such philosophers as Whitehead and Serres. Next, Chapter 3 presents the best-known early ANT works, leading to a definition of basic concepts to be used throughout the book. A review of criticisms and of competitive but close approaches follows in Chapter 4. Chapter 5, “ANT and some big sociological questions”, ends by contrasting ANT with three famous sociological schools of thought: those of Bourdieu, Giddens, and Elias.
Chapter 6 may be of particular interest to non-sociologists, as it discusses the application of ANT in other disciplines – primarily cultural geography, management and organization studies, and the new economic sociology.
Chapter 7 contains descriptions of the “post-ANT” works, which include later works of such early ANT-ers as Latour, Callon, Law, Mol, and Stengers, along with other authors, less directly associated with ANT, but clearly if partly inspired by it.
In the final chapter, Chapter 8, Michael fulfills his promise and gives practical advice to ANT aspirers. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the chapter also contains an extended summary of the book (which, like the similar introduction, was likely inserted as a response to the publisher’s demand). It is a pity, as I would prefer reading more about potential difficulties the novices trying out this approach may encounter. A Glossary follows, in which the un-ANT notion of “sociomateriality”, like with Belliger and Krieger’s “social and technical things” still seems to be assuming that social is human-only, and non-material to boot.
All in all, Michael’s book is a good illustration of its main point: that translations of ANT are many, but almost always engaging and fruitful, of which Belliger and Krieger provide yet another example. Thus whereas Michael’s book will be helpful to readers who want to know how to locate ANT among other theories, Belliger and Krieger show how to adapt ANT to a specific purpose and to combine it with other theories of the phenomenon under study.
Readers who reach for these books in order to find an easy introduction to Actor-Network Theory may be disappointed – even if Chapter 3 in Michael’s book is entitled “‘Classical’ Actor-Network Theory”. But neither did Latour’s 2005 book offer it, in spite of its subtitle: “An introduction to Actor-Network Theory”. Additionally, as is well known, ANT is positive about hybrids. These two books are hybrids: the authors were inspired by ANT, interpreted it in their own way, and adapted it to fit their interests and purposes. Thus the reader will not learn from them how to apply ANT to study organizations, but how others did it, which is always instructive.