Theoretical foundations: actor-network theory

ANT shares with the theories of practice and structuration their critique of earlier

objectivist approaches, but has arrived at a different understanding of the three elements

discussed above. Like the other theories, ANT also dismisses rule-based explanations of

repetition in social life and, similarly to the concept of habitus in Bourdieu (1977),

underlines the role of disciplined humans in producing and maintaining such repetition (Law,

1986). However, ANT scholars also strongly emphasise the role of material elements in

sustaining patterns of collective action, to the point of insisting on the symmetrical treatment

of human and nonhuman actors in the analysis of social patterns (Callon and Latour, 1981,

Latour, 1991, 2005, Law, 1992). Attributing agency to ‘nonhuman actors’ has indeed been

one of the best known –and most controversial– aspects of ANT.

Such a stance however can only be understood in conjunction with ANT’s

conceptualisation of action. ANT resolves the problem of the rule-action gap through a

mechanism that is quite different from Bourdieu’s (1990) logic of practice or Giddens’s

(1984) practical consciousness: when we say an actor has followed a rule, it is because both

actor and rule have been transformed through what ANT has called a process of translation

(Latour, 1991). Because translation implies a transformation of both actor and rule, ANT in

effect collapses, rather than bridges, the gap between rule and action. After translation,

actors ‘conform’ to the rule because “they cannot do otherwise” (Latour, 1991: 105).

Translation is thus a crucial concept in ANT: it is the basic mechanism by which “the

social and natural worlds progressively take form” (Callon, 1986: 224). Individual actors,

both human and nonhuman have programmes of action. As they engage in the world, they

translate each other and become assembled into collective courses of action which, as they

endure and become increasingly irreversible, form reality. All entities are therefore defined

by their relationships to the other entities which have become assembled in their making.

and even to the definition of a human being: “analytically, what counts as a person is an

effect generated by a network of heterogeneous, interacting, materials” (Law, 1992: 383,

original emphasis). Law further explains:

If you took away my computer, my colleagues, my office, my books, my desk, my telephone I wouldn't be a sociologist writing papers, delivering lectures, and

producing "knowledge." I'd be something quite other–and the same is true for all of us. So the analytical question is this. Is an agent an agent primarily because he or she inhabits a body that carries knowledges, skills, values, and all the rest? Or is an agent an agent because he or she inhabits a set of elements (including, of course, a body) that stretches out into the network of materials, somatic and otherwise, that surrounds each body?

(Law, 1992: 383-4)

This is the meaning that the expression actor-network should convey: all actors –

human and non-human– are the effect of a network of heterogeneous elements. Action does

not originate in the actor that is seen to act. Rather, it is the result of the translation of many

other agencies that may not be co-located with the actor, but relayed from sites that are

distant in space and time. Action is therefore akin to “a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of

many surprising sets of agencies” (Latour, 2005: 44).

Further clarification of ANT’s understanding of action can be obtained by examining

what Suchman (2007) described as ethnomethodology’s5 view of action. This is contrasted with the ‘planning view’ of action, prevalent in modern social science, which defines action

as the enactment of a plan or an abstraction, that is, an imperfect or adapted realisation of

intentions. The major problem with such a view is that it needs to rely on a concept of

commonsense knowledge as the ultimate basis for ‘filling in the gaps’. For instance,

Wittgenstein’s (1953) ‘knowing how to go on’, Bourdieu’s (1990) ‘logic of practice’, and

Giddens’s (1984) ‘practical consciousness’, provide the final source of knowledge that

allows an actor to act in the world. The need for the existence of this base of rather

indeterminate shared knowledge creates a host of new problems for the social scientist,

5

Ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology based on Harold Garfinkel’s (1967, 2002) work, is acknowledged as one of the principal antecedent sources for ANT (Latour, 2005)

Chapter 3 – Towards a practice view of HRM

which, in the case of Bourdieu and Giddens, have been resolved through their particular

understanding of repetition, practicality and recursivity discussed above.

For ethnomethodologists by contrast, situated action is not the enactment of a pre-

existing plan or abstract understanding. Plans are projective representations of action

(Suchman, 2007). They are articulations that represent actions as imagined prospectively.

Such articulations are obviously very different in nature from situated action itself.

Moreover, although plans are often used as a prescriptive resource in situated action, they do

not –cannot– determine action ‘in any strong sense’ because “the efficiency of plans as

representations comes precisely from the fact that they do not represent those practices and

circumstances in all of their concrete detail.” (Suchman, 2007: 72). Any articulation of

practice (a plan in Suchman’s terminology) is a representation –prospective or

retrospective– of a varied set of courses of action, and such representation necessarily omits

a great deal of what needs to happen or has happened in situated action. Indeed:

Just as it would seem absurd to claim that a map in some strong sense controlled the traveller’s movements through the world, it is wrong to imagine plans as controlling actions.

(Suchman, 2007: 186)

An ethnomethodological view of action therefore, sees all action as situated action,

that is, as the product of the particular configuration of materials and human actors in a

specific time and place. This is the insight that underpins ANT’s concept of action as an

assemblage of heterogeneous elements.

Note the contrast between this view of action and that of the theories of practice and

structuration where action is carried out by reflexive human agents as they enact the

structures they are embedded in. In ANT, action does not stem from any pre-existing

structure, even one with which it is recursively related. Action is always a new

accomplishment of the whole set of actors and artefacts that assemble themselves in it.

Repetitions occur not because of a structure, but because durable and replicable artefacts and

Thus, like the other theories, ANT sees structure as an effect of the repetitions present

in everyday action; but contrary to them, it does not seek an explanation to such repetitions

in a recursive relationship with structure. Instead, patterned action is explained by the

repeated presence of durable artefacts and humans in different courses of action. Moreover,

in collective action, particularly within organisations, such repetitive presence of artefacts

and humans often originates in the actions of a specific actor who has found a way of

relaying his or her own agency to the multiple sites where action takes place. It is therefore

possible to identify the source of structuring activities by tracing the connections between

the sites of everyday activity and “other places, other times and other agencies” (Latour,

2005: 166). Latour and Hermant (1998) called the sites of such well-connected actors

oligoptica. An oligopticon is a well-connected site where knowledge of other sites is

gathered, accumulated, transformed into new knowledge, and disseminated back to other

sites in the shape of standards, quasi-standards and collecting statements6 inscribed in artefacts or embodied in disciplined humans (Latour, 2005). Such activities constitute

“cycles of accumulation” (Latour, 1987: 219-33) which are the means for agency at a

distance, and explain how patterns in activity are formed and maintained.

The analytical potential of ANT resides in that, through the combination of a view of

actors as networks of other agencies, of action as a node, and of patterns in activity as

originating in the actions of specific situated actors, it provides a parsimonious, thoroughly

realist explanation of recurrent collective action in organisations. Moreover, such

explanations apply to the examination of stability and change over time, as well as to the

study of variability and consistency across sites. This is the valuable insight that will be

exploited in this thesis, by extending current practice-based views of organisational routines

in order to provide an alternative understanding of variability and consistency in HRM

activities.

6

Latour uses the expression ‘collecting statement’ to refer to any kind of utterance that describes the social, including everything from popular sayings and aphorisms, to social scientists’ writings.

Chapter 3 – Towards a practice view of HRM