Actor Network Theory: An inroad to the study of ’the virtual building’

Ursula Plesner

Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy

Copenhagen Business School

Today’s talk

• Short introduction: the development of a framework for studying ’the virtual building’

• The principles of the sociology of associations

• Methodological implications

• Group work

• Sum up: ANT and the virtual

From levels, spheres or domains to long chains of associations

’The real/material’

The virtual/immaterial

A particular site or social sphere

Action/interaction

Example: An ANT study of the virtual building

• ‘The virtual building’ as a promise, a contested topic and a non-settled technology

• An empty notion covering different technological innovations and given different meanings by different actors

• An innovation in the making, which has not yet been naturalized or black-boxed

• The virtual building much more than a medium representing other phenomena.

Software

Avatar

Hardware Aesthetics

Technical information

Designer

Building

Fundingagencies

Users(citizens, politicians

contractors, etc)

Percieved users

Architectural training

Navigationtools

Bird’s eyeperspective

Locked doorsSurprises

Users’ skills

Principles of the sociology of associations

1) A sociology sceptical of ’the social’

2) An empiricist orientation

3) An agnostic, symmetrical approach

1) A sociology sceptical of ’the social’

• There is no society, no social dynamics, no social spheres

• …only associations made up by concrete ties

2) An empiricist orientation

• Refusal of abstract theory and the imposition of categories and explanation on the empirical material

• ”The task of the researcher is not to impose order, limit the range of acceptable entities or add reflexivity to [actors’] practice. But follow the actors, their wild innovations, methods, and accounts” (Latour 2005 p.11)

3) An agnostic, symmetrical approach• Impartiality between actors: no à priori

priviledging of either humans or non-humans• "We know how to describe human relations, we

know how to describe mechanisms, we often try to alternate between context and content to talk about the influence of technology on society or vice-versa, but we are not yet expert at weaving together the two resources into an integrated whole. This is unfortunate because whenever we discover a stable social relation, it is the introduction of some non-humans that accounts for this relative durability” (Latour 1991: 111)

Methodological implications

1) Slowciology

2) Lack of generalizability: empirical stories (versus vampirical sociology)

3) Mobile ethnography as approach?

1) Slowciology

• ”…we have to chose to be literal, naive, and myopic” (Latour 2005, ca. 101)

• 'slowciology'• abandon the shorthand of social explanation, • split hairs about what is or is not a group,• register the queerest idiosyncracies of the

humblest actors, • make long lists of objects participating in action, • focus on shifty matters of concern, • follow the actors in all directions

2) Lack of generalizability (a)

• If your informants mix up organization, hardware, psychology etc. in one sentence, dont break it down into elements, but follow the link among those elements (Latour 2005, interlude)

• A discipline without a systematic production of exemplars is an ineffective one

• More discoveries have arisen form intense observation than from statistics applied to large groups

• Thick and hard-to-summarize narratives are signs of a rich pronlematic,

• Summarizing and generalization is not an ideal• The ideal is to allow the story to unfold and expose

complexity (Flyvbjerg 2006: 219-38)

2) Lack of generalizability (b)

• Latour’s suggestions: • Good sociology has to be well written, so that the

social appears through it• Textual accounts must be accurate and truthful -

the absence of an absolute Text does not mean that all texts are relative.

• We must renew what an objective account is. It does not use all-purpose meta-language, and no 'objective style language’. Such forms disguise the OBJECTS... An objective account brings objects to the foreground.

• We need to bring into the foreground the study itself, the very making of reports.

3) Mobile ethnography

• The principle of ’following the actors’

• From multi-sited to mobile: looking at connections rather than locations

• "The object of ethnographic enquiry can usefully be reshaped by concentrating on flow and connectivity rather than location and boundary as the organizing principle” (Christine Hine 2000: 64)

Group task (Part 1, 20 minutes)

• Using one of your empirical fields as a case, draw an extensive network of associations, including all entities that might make a difference for other entities.• Think of symbols, technologies, humans,

self-proclaimed groups, policies, documents, architecture, emotions, ideals, significant events, historical accounts, slogans, avatars, user skills, etc. Be as inclusive as possible.

Group task (Part 2, 20 minutes)

• Discuss how the entities of the network are associated. • Which entities might contribute to the

stabilization of the network? Which might contribute to its destabilization? How do elements make a difference in relation to the others?

Sum up

• Which kinds of insights did the drawing and brief analysis of the network produce?

• What characterizes the kind of knowledge produced by ANT on Virtual Worlds?

ANT and the virtual

• A material semiotics: tries to capture relations between material and discursive elements

• The symbolic and the material not opposed, but interwoven

• Not reconciliation of dualities (subject/object, material/symbolic, virtual/real)

• The virtual not to be studied as a realm separate from other realms