Aramis was a personal rapid transport system tested in Paris for a long time from 1970, but finally abandoned in 1987. Officially, nobody knows why this system failed. Alternatively, better, there are many reasons. Someone or something killed the innovation, and if it were an Agatha Christie novel there would be many potentially guilty parties in the detectiveâs notebook. A list of 21 explanations can be offered, some of them equally possible, and some that contradict one another. It could have been the ministers, the local elected officials in Paris. Maybe, Aramis was not technically feasible, or economically sustainable. Perhaps more experimentations, refinements, and trials were needed to fix its hardware. Probably there is more than one guilty party in this failure. Reconsidering this story, however, suggests that there is a solution to the quandary. Aramis was not loved! The technical project remained the same, while the social environment changed. There was no connection between the social and technical aspects. Engineers and technologists had separated technology from society.
(Latour, 1996)
The preceding story is a summary of Bruno Latourâs book called Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996). The book is the story of a failed technology or, more precisely, of a failed engagement between society and technology. It is a story where non-humans (here âAramisâ) fail to acquire the capacity to act. Like the Creature in Mary Shelleyâs novel Frankenstein, Aramis was abandoned to its destiny. No one loved Aramis, it is said, and its bits and pieces were finally disassembled.
Patient readers of this book might now feel somewhat disoriented: âWhat am I reading? Is this an academic book or a sci-fi novel? Why are we talking about non-human agency? Are we talking about robust theory?â Some may have already closed the book. For the remaining (hopefully not few) readers, however, the story offers, as will become more evident, some of the themes (non-human agency, entanglement of technology and society) of an impressive contemporary intellectual endeavor: actor-network theory (ANT), a helpful arena for rethinking the theory of agency and re-describing the dynamics of educational leadership and management.
What is ANT? There are many definitions: a theory, a methodology, a sensibility. ANT is less a single definite object of investigation, however, and more a multiplicity without a fixed and standard identity. Nowadays, ANT is a contemporary perspective crossing rapidly into many disciplinary fields. It initially emerged in science and technology studies, contributing to their constitution and shape, and has since traveled a great deal. In its travels, it has solicited the emergence of unexpected landscapes on many topics, sub-disciplines and disciplines, and at the same time, it has enriched its vocabulary. A quick search for ANT on the Internet demonstrates that it has crossed into disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy and economics but also other fields, such as organisation studies, media investigation, policy studies, medicine, art, disability studies and animal studies.
ANT has resisted being centered in a model by underlining and wittingly privileging its flexibility. Often, success brings a tendency to protect, draw boundaries and establish conventional frames. Here, instead, the success (but also the criticism) has created a mechanism of reflexivity that has re-launched the endless becoming of the perspective. ANTâs fluidity illustrates its complexity and its capacity to flow and to resist the many attempts at black-boxing it to a set of ordered principles. ANT is not âsingular, but plural in character,â and it is more interested in displacements and what happens when it interferes in a multiplicity of sites (Law, 2006).
How can this assemblage be described, with due attention to its complexity? How can we avoid the trap of reducing it to a static and rigid framework? How can we present this elusive intellectual and collective endeavor? This chapter will provide an introduction to the history of actor-network theory. It will explain the name of the approach and describe the primary studies that can be considered the starting point of the perspective (Callon, 1986a). The difficulty of defining actor-network theory as a theory and the struggle to present a theoretical sensibility that escapes the attempts of classification will also be discussed.
In the following pages, I will focus, firstly, on how ANT emerges in the practice turn in science and technology studies. Secondly, I will draw attention to its emergence and unfolding. Finally, I will describe how the book is a space of encounter between ANT and educational leadership and management.
Fractures in science and technology studies
A good starting point with which to understand the emergence of ANT is to talk about the practice turn in science and technology studies (STS) (Pickering, 1992). Born at the beginning of the 1970s, the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) intended to empirically study how scientific knowledge was socially constructed by distancing it from the philosophical and sociological reflections that analysed the dynamics of science without a close description of the science in practice. At that time, the geography of SSK was clear, since it was mostly concentrated in Edinburgh and Bath. In Edinburgh, scholars such as Barry Barnes, David Bloor and Steven Shapin framed a macro-social approach to studying science. Harry Collins in Bath focused on controversies and prompted innovative and original micro-social research, where scientific knowledge was described as an unexpected outcome of the negotiations among all scientific actors. The Edinburgh and Bath schools followed the classical sociological discourse, along with the usual categories (macro-micro, quantity-quality) of the sociological field.
During the 1980s, however, the landscape changed rapidly. Several books on laboratory life had become particularly important: Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in 1979, Manufacture of Knowledge by Karin Knorr Cetina (1981), and ethnomethodological studies of science. Some philosophers of science started to analyse scientific knowledge by following the same principles as the sociological approach to knowledge. Several researchers following symbolic interactionism became interested in studying science empirically. To these scholars, we should add the works of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon and their colleagues (Madeleine Akrich, in particular) working in Paris at the Centre for the Sociologies of Innovation.
While different in many aspects, these research projects shared a common interest in investigating science and technology in practice (Pickering, 1992), although it was unclear whether these investigations were aligned with the sociology of scientific knowledge. SSK considers the culture of science to be a single conceptual network, where concepts are linked together to a different degree of abstraction and connected to the natural worlds through the many empirical specifications of the scientific fields. Here, scientific practice expands this conceptual network by analogy, creatively and indefinitely. The ongoing reshaping of the conceptual network does not end the unitary character of the culture of science. Something accounted for the emergence of a consensus in knowledge-making: sociological interests were this âsomething.â
The argumentation is as follows: knowledge-making is not only for the sake of knowledge. There is an interest to follow, a need, or a problem arising in a given historical contingency and in a specific social group that knowledge is able to satisfy or resolve. The extension of the conceptual network will be oriented, therefore, to sociological interests. Notably, the sociological interests of dominant groups provide the criteria by which to assess the usefulness of the new creative enlargements of the scientific culture. In a controversy, therefore, the closure in knowledge-making is accomplished by considering the pressures and the negotiation among sociological interests. Knowledge is not, therefore, a âmirrorâ of nature; it is sociologically related to a given culture.
This standard understanding of SSK was contested by the group working in Paris and other investigations during the 1980s. It was considered a simplified and reductive version of the culture of science. From the perspective of science as practice, knowledge-making is more articulated. The complexity of practice, in other words, overcomes the reductive descriptions provided by philosophy and sociology. Philosophy tends to emphasise the philosophical foundation of science; sociology underlines the role of the interests, by subordinating science to the sociological arena.
The orientation toward practice involves new multidisciplinary perspectives from which to gain a more productive and realistic understanding of scientific knowledge-making. It implies âwaging warâ on discipline boundaries and, more profoundly, problematising their roots in modern thinking. Accordingly, ANT arises in the fracture determined by the contrast with the a priori philosophical reflection of science and the empirical explanation of SSK.
The story of ANTâs origins is also specifically French. The group in Paris had to confront the sociology of scientific knowledge at the international level (the controversy with Collins and Yearley [1992] is well known) and in the sociological French academic arena.
Callon and Latour worked most of their long careers at the Centre of the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) in Paris: a specific ânicheâ in the French academic landscape. The CSI is located within the Ecole des Mines (School of Engineering), which is part of the celebrated network of the Grand Ecole, a set of institutions in French higher education focused on engineering, commerce and veterinary practice and characterised by high standards in student selection and by the highest qualifications of its students. The focus on innovation and its positioning in a school of engineering led the Centre to assume an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach, where social sciences were asked to collaborate and hybridise their vocabularies according to the repertoires of the natural sciences.
The landscape of French sociology, however, was strongly discipline-oriented and was characterised until the middle of the 1990s by schools of thought, that is, organised around a strong theoretical orientation, a leading scholarly figure and several research programs. The âquadrumvirateâ composed of Bourdieu, Touraine, Crozier and Boudon dominated the scene (Cousin & Demaziere, 2014). Bourdieu, in particular, intended to reinforce sociology in the French academy by distinguishing it as discipline differentiated from philosophy and more in general from the humanities. His critique of the works of Latour and Callon was severe and led to some trenchant statements.
In his lectures at the College of France, 2000â2001, on the new empirical studies of sciences, he described the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in a âgood light.â He considered SSK quite limited in explaining external social forces, however, and was critical of the new research in the laboratories, devoting the most âacidicâ comments to the first publications by Latour and Callon (Bourdieu, 2003). They were accused of playing a game of being radical and trying to artificially differentiate their position in the field of study. Bourdieu described Latour and Callonâs idea to give more space to texts and more general objects in laboratories as bizarre. Notably, the redistribution of the capacity to act, that is, the symmetric importance attributed to texts, laboratory objects and technologies in scientific knowledge-making, was ridiculed. The use of the semiotic, according to Latour and Callon, would have reduced human agency to the level of the effects emerging from a text and full scientific knowledge to literary activity. The suggestion that humans and non-humans should be considered on the same footing was described as misleading, and their advice to take the agency of the âmissing massesâ of materiality seriously was seen as so unhelpful that Bourdieu declared it a bogus argument, leading to dead-end and meaningless discussions.
The harsh attack on Latour and Callon was justified by Bourdieuâs overall program of giving sociology a prominent position in the French academy. In a space that philosophers appeared to dominate, the emerging vocabulary of ANT and the work of Latour and Callon did not fit into Bourdieuâs project to develop a sociological explanation of science.
Latour and Callonâs work was criticised not only by Bourdieu but also by Friedberg, another French sociologist who was closer to Crozier. According to Friedberg, the challenge to the primacy of human agency was highly provocative. He shared with the Bourdieu the idea that a revision of the theory of action was not necessary, as the âtime for mutants is not comingâ (my translation from Friedberg, 1993). While recognising the role of objects, technologies and innovations, he thought there was no need to include them in the category of âactor,â which should be used exclusively for the human domain.
In sum, the papers by Callon and Latour were considered âindigestibleâ and unassimilable in the existing sociological framework in France and the U.K. It was not clear whether Callon and Latour brought philosophical or only provocative arguments, probably harming sociological investigations and the advancement of research in the emerging field of studying sciences.
Emergence and unfolding of actor-network theory
A look at the famous article on the domestication of fishers and scallops in the Bay of Saint-Brieuc in France (Callon, 1986a) helps us to better understand where the fractures in science and technology studies were created. We will return to this article in Chapter 3. It is crucial, however, to underline that the group in Paris proposed a sociology of translation, by problematising the so-called strong programme in SSK.
In the French version of the article on the domestication of scallops and fishers, Callon starts by recognising a âprofound asymmetryâ in the studies inspired by that program. The asymmetry involves the analyses of scientific and technical controversies. While these analyses present the plurality of descriptions of nature made by the researchers and engineers, without assumi...
