Definitions – Actor Network Theory concepts

Vocabulary of Inscriptions & Translations: 

Irreversibility and Flexibility: Source (Monteiro and Hanseth 1996)  

 “The inherent difficulty in changing an actor-network – —- removing an inscription – can be well captured by Callon’s concept of the (possible) irreversibility of an aligned network. This concept describes how translations between actor-networks are made durable, how they can resist assaults from competing translations. Callon (pg 159) states that the degree of irreversibility depends on (1) the extent to which it is subsequently impossible to go back to a point here that translation was only one among many and (2) the extent to which it shapes and determines subsequent translations.

 Inscriptions are given a concrete content because they represent interests inscribed into a material. The flexibility of inscriptions vary: some structure the pattern of use strongly, others quite weakly. The power of inscriptions whether they must be followed or can be avoided, depends on the irreversibility of the actor-network they are inscribed into. It is never possible to know beforehand, but through studying the sequence of inscriptions we learn more about exactly how and which inscriptions were needed to achieve the aim. (Pg 331). Example: Let us consider what it takes to establish a specific work routine – In order to do so you could acquire the skills, if the skills cannot be acquired you could inscribe into a textual description of the routine in the form of  a manual. If this also does not work, you could inscribe the work routines by supporting them by an Information system.

 Mobile and Combinable (Superimposable): Source {Mouritsen and Johansen (2008),

Panourgias (2007)} – “The generation of immutable mobiles is closely linked to the development of chains of reference that are formed by the linking of actants and serve to make the physical world mobile and compatible with human systems of communication, and thus understandable to human. The moments of these immutable mobiles traces the heterogeneous networks they are part of and can be of great value in their studying and observation. Events, places, people, things are made mobile while being kept stable so they can move back and forth without distortion, corruption and decay, and be combinable so that they can be ‘cumulated, aggregated, shuffled, compared and used for calculations’. (Latour 1987, 223). A movement from things to signs and back again is thus made possible. Mobile and combinable allow distant actors to be brought to a centre that then is able to act at a distance on remote places. Being combinable or superimposable allows various immutables to be combined and thus develop new insight about the remote place.

 Solid (Immutable): Source: Nonaka (2005,215),Latour (1987,227), Chua (1995, 116)        

 Solid and immutable inscriptions allow the remote place to be held without significant distortion. The process of inscription is cumulative; a single work routine may be inscribed into several system components. This superimposition and accumulation adds to the strength of the inscription.

 “Inscriptions are ‘immutable, combinable mobiles’ because they are translated into a fixed form that is combinable and comparable with other inscriptions, and because they are then able to be carried from their original contexts to other applications.

 Paperwork such as formulae, graphs and charts are argued to possess many rhetorical advantages: they are mobile, immutable, recombinable and are perceived to be built on many facts. Most important of all, inscriptions make black boxes visible.

 Durability: This indicates the strength of the inscriptions as it moves from one actor to another. It is imparted through the successful intertwining of both social and technical elements.(Panourgias 2007, 216)

 “Durability is thus imparted to the resulting object through obtaining the support of strong allies in the form of new links that tie instruments, figures, and texts both to each other and to the original claim being defended. In the process, movements from the conceptual to the material, from words into things, from the centre to the periphery, from the general to the particular, from the global to the local and then back again, ensue. Facts become statements, statements become facts, both can be incorporated into texts, objects, machines, automations, which can then themselves produce inputs and data that feed back into texts, statements, facts, and controversies”. (Panourgias 2007, 53)

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ANT Vocablulary – Table

 

 

August 1, 2009

VOCABULARY: Inscriptions & Blackboxes

 

Term	Meaning	Reference
Black box	A black box is created when a group of actors comes together and each one influences the other through actions, translations etc. It is their common interests and goals that become a part of the black box. A blackbox knits together a whole system of alliances, associations (both human and non-human). (Pg. 57).  Black boxes are devices, practices, or organizations that are opaque to outsiders, often because their contents are regarded as ‘technical’. The goal of opening black boxes is to discover how they are kept opaque; how they structure their ‘contexts’; and how those contexts are inscribed within them.  As Latour write in “Science in Action”, “facts and machines in the making are always undetermined” (Latour 1987, p. 13), but once they become determined they also become what are referred to as black boxes, or as Latour sometimes also refers to as object-institutions (Latour 1999). This process of ‘black boxing’ is one of the key areas of empirical interest in science and technology studies.  Black boxes are “sealed actor networks” (Stadler,1997) whose alignment has been obtained, whose aligned interests have been inscribed in a stable association that is no longer questionable-except at a heavy cost.	Lowe (2000)    Panourgias (2007)    Mackenzie (2005)     Latour (1987, p. 13)   Latour (1999)    Stadler, (1997)
Irreversibility and Flexbility	“The inherent difficulty in changing an actor-network – —- removing an inscription – can be well captured by Callon’s concept of the (possible) irreversibility of an aligned network. This concept describes how translations between actor-networks are made durable, how they can resist assaults from competing translations. Callon (pg 159) states that the degree of irreversibility depends on (1) the extent to which it is subsequently impossible to go back to a point here that translation was only one among many and (2) the extent to which it shapes and determines subsequent translations.  Inscriptions are given a concrete content because they represent interests inscribed into a material. The flexibility of inscriptions vary: some structure the pattern of use strongly, others quite weakly. The power of inscriptions whether they must be followed or can be avoided, depends on the irreversibility of the actor-network they are inscribed into. It is never possible to know beforehand, but through studying the sequence of inscriptions we learn more about exactly how and which inscriptions were needed to achieve the aim. (Pg 331)   Example: Let us consider what it takes to establish a specific work routine – In order to do so you could acquire the skills, if the skills cannot be acquired you could inscribe into a textual description of the routine in the form of  a manual. If this also does not work, you could inscribe the work routines by supporting them by an Information system.	Monteiro and Hanseth in Orlikowski’s – Information Technology and changes in Organizational work.
Mobile and Combinable  (Superimposable)	“The generation of immutable mobiles is closely linked to the development of chains of reference that are formed by the linking of actants and serve to make the physical world mobile and compatible with human systems of communication, and thus understandable to human. The moments of these immutable mobiles traces the heterogeneous networks they are part of and can be of great value in their studying and observation. Events, places, people, things are made mobile while being kept stable so they can move back and forth without distortion, corruption and decay, and be combinable so that they can be ‘cumulated, aggregated, shuffled, compared and used for calculations’. (Latour 1987, p. 223). A movement from things to signs and back again is thus made possible.  Mobile and combinable allow distant afraid to be brought to a centre that then is able to act at a distance on remote places.   Being combinable or superimposable allows various immutables to be combined and thus develop new insight about the remote place.	Mouritsen and Johansen (2008)  Panourgias (2007)
Solid (Immutable)	Solid and immutable inscriptions allow the remote place to be held without significant distortion.  The process of inscription is cumulative; a single work routine may be inscribed into several system components. This superimposition and accumulation adds to the strength of the inscription.   “Incriptions are ‘immutable, combinable mobiles’ because they are translated into a fixed form that is combinable and comparable with other inscriptions, and because they are then able to be carried from their original contexts to other applications.   Paperwork such as formule, graphs and charts are argued to possess many rhetorical advantages: they are mobile, immutable, recombinable and are perceived to be built on many facts. Most important of all, inscriptions make black boxes visible.	Nonaka, 2005 215     Latour (1987:227)               Chua (1995, 116)
Durability	This indicates the strength of the inscriptions as it moves from one actor to another. It is imparted through the successful intertwining of both social and technical elements.(Pg. 216)  “Durability is thus imparted to the resulting object through obtaining the support of strong allies in the form of new links that tie instruments, figures, and texts both to each other and to the original claim being defended. In the process, movements from the conceptual to the material, from words into things, from the centre to the periphery, from the general to the particular, from the global to the local and then back again, ensue. Facts become statements, statements become facts, both can be incorporated into texts, objects, machines, automations, which can then themselves produce inputs and data that feed back into texts, statements, facts, and controversies”. (Pg. 53)	Panourgias (2007)

ANT and Translations

What is translation?

 Inscriptions and translations go hand in hand. As discussed above, inscriptions are a result of a series of transformations. (Mouritsen et al. 2008). Thus it can be deduced that high quality transformations/translations will lead to high quality inscriptions.

 Translation “is a verb which implies transformation and the possibility of equivalence, the possibility that one thing (for example an actor) may stand for another (for instance a network).” (Law 1992, 5-6). Akrich states that “technical objects participate in building heterogeneous networks that bring together actants of all types and sizes, whether human or nonhuman”. (Akrich 2000, 206). Law et al. (1999) state that actor-network theory is “intentionally oxymoronic, a tension which lies between the ‘centered’ actor and the ‘decentered’ network on the other” (Law et al. 1999,5). There is tension because actors have their own interests and translation plays a vital role in acquiring stability among this chaos. Translation acts helps re-interpret, re-present other’s ideas as one’s own ideas. In order to align interests, stability and social order are continually negotiatied “as a social process of aligning interests”. (Hanseth et al. 1998). 

 In the translation process, the designer who creates the artifacts intends for them to be used in a certain manner, this is then inscribed into the tool. For example, once a piece of technology is created, the technology becomes an actor and imposes its inscription on its users. When studying the use of technical artefacts one necessarily shifts back and forth “between the designer’s projected user and the real user” in order to describe this dynamic negotiation process of design (Akrich 1992, p. 209).

 A theory of Systems Thinking is a theory of how conceptual systems behave. From a bricoleur’s lens all aspects of DSRP function simultaneously creating a self similarity process; where the same thing repeats over and over again.

 Based on our experience too we are choosing DSRP and especially perspective to view bricolage. Many other researchers have talked about systems thinking but according to us all concepts work in unification.

When do translations take place? 

Translations take place as the project is taken and adapted by actors, as interests and solutions are developed and evolved.

 Robson (1992, 691-692) describes an inscription as “a material translation of any setting that is to be acted upon. Inscriptions have to travel between the context of action and the actor remote from that context”.

 Translation “is a verb which implies transformation and the possibility of equivalence, the possibility that one thing (for example an actor) may stand for another (for instance a network).” (Law 1992, 5-6). Akrich states that “technical objects participate in building heterogeneous networks that bring together actants of all types and sizes, whether human or nonhuman”. (Akrich 2000, 206).

 Law et al. (1999) state that actor-network theory is “intentionally oxymoronic, a tension which lies between the ‘centered’ actor and the ‘decentered’ network on the other” (Law et al. 1999,5). There is tension because actors have their own interests and translation plays a vital role in acquiring stability among this chaos. Translation acts helps re-interpret, re-present other’s ideas as one’s own ideas. In order to align interests, stability and social order are continually negotiated “as a social process of aligning interests”. (Hanseth et al. 1998).

 In the translation process, the designer who creates the artifacts intends for them to be used in a certain manner, this is then inscribed into the tool. For example, once a piece of technology is created, the technology becomes an actor and imposes its inscription on its users. When studying the use of technical artefacts one necessarily shifts back and forth “between the designer’s projected user and the real user” in order to describe this dynamic negotiation process of design (Akrich 1992, p. 209).

 “Translation is the interpretation given by the fact or technology builders of their own interests and those of the actants they seek to enroll in order to transform their claim to a matter of fact (Latour 1987, 108).” A successful translation will lead to a network of indispensable network. Every version of each actor’s interest translates every other, and all together acquire a “sort of hegemony” (Latour 1987, 121). Their interests and goals become a part of a black box. As mentioned earlier, these black boxes need to be maintained over time due to threat of new actors/elements.

ANT and Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS:

According to Chua (1995), Inscriptions further enable the exercise of comparative, normalizing judgement. This in turn permits action from a distance, enabling people far away from the scene of activity to ostensibly have a window on those activities and intervene in the name of better management.

 “An inscription is the result of the translation of one’s interest into material form (Callon 1991, 143). In general, any component of the heterogeneous network of skills, practices, artifacts, institutional arrangements, texts and contracts establishing a social order may be the material for inscriptions..” (Monteiro and Hanseth 1996, 330). There are four interesting aspects of the notion of inscriptions:

1)      what is inscribed : which anticipations of use are envisioned

2)      who inscribes them

3)      how are they inscribed: what is the material for the inscriptions

4)      how powerful are the inscriptions: how much effort does it take to oppose an inscription.

 Scientific knowledge is embedded in procedures of inscription (Latour 1987, Latour 1991), that is the rendering of what is contested and not-yet-fixed immutable or possible to circulate in the form of mathematical formulae or visual representations; such inscriptions are the outcome of the effective alignment of organization and technology.

 The process of Inscription:

The process of inscription seems to be cumulative and there could be several layers of inscription in one system. This process of superimposition bolsters the strength of the inscription. In ANT , “entities acquire attributes and take their form as a result of their interaction with interaction with other entities.” (Nonaka 2005, 215). These actor networks are formed by negotiation and enrollment of participants. “The notion of inscription refers to the way technical artefacts embody patterns of use: ‘Technical objects thus simultaneously embody and measure a set of relations between heterogeneous elements’ (Akrich 1992, p. 205).”

 Latour uses a very general conception of technology which encompasses anything emerging from what he terms the process of “translation”. In this context Latour uses the terms to refer to the production or “fabrication”, of “quasi-objects”. Although these are mostly physical objects, Latour also includes inscriptions, machines and technology.

Evolution of Inscriptions:

 Mouritsen et al. (2008) define an inscription as follows: “the inscription is found at the end of a process of sorting out traces and connecting them in an expression.” (Mouritsen et al. 2008, 3). “Inscriptions are strong (immutable), mobile and combinable (superimposable) which allows distant affairs to be brought to a centre that then is able to act at a distance on remote places.” For example: traces such as accounting receipts can be summarized into accounting numbers; the strength of the inscription is a key element and its strength depends on the transformations of multiple traces to one inscription. Borrowing from actor network theory, it is also true that inscriptions grow as the network of actors grows. For example, an accounting system can be referred to as an actant within a network of human actors, 

 Robson (1992, 691-692) describes an inscription as “a material translation of any setting that is to be acted upon. Inscriptions have to travel between the context of action and the actor remote from that context”.

 Lowe (2000)’s work emphasizes the importance of human relationship with objects in the explication of accounting practice. (Lowe 2000) emphasizes on human relations because “it can be argued that the expansion of object-centered environments which situate and stabilize selves, define individual identity just as much as communities or families do” (Lowe 2000, 5). 

 Diverse forms of Inscriptions:

“The use of diverse forms of inscription is significant… because in certain settings/contexts written communications –– chapters and diagrams as well as documents –– are attributed greater weight and permanency compared to oral modes of communication.” (Ezzamel et al. 2004, 808). In our own experience, we used patterns of thinking ^TM tool and dis-embedded it in advance organizers, big idea maps to impart DSRP concepts to our students. “The work of Latour and Callon draws attention to the persuasive power of non-human resources such as visual inscriptions, academic texts and ‘centres of calculation’ (Latour 1988a). Paperwork such as formulae, graphs and charts are argued to posess many rhetorical advantages: they are mobile, immutable, recombinable and are perceived to be built on many facts. Most important of all, inscriptions make black boxes visible.” (Chua 1995, 6)

 Need for Inscriptions in the attention economy:

 “Inscriptions further enable the exercise of comparative, normalizing judgement. This in turn permits action from a distance, enabling people far awar from the scene of activity to ostensibly have a window on those activities and intervene in the name of better management.” (Chua 1995, 6).

 In words of Brown (2000), “with the web, we suddenly have a medium that honors multiple forms of intelligence – abstract, textual, visual, musical, social,and kinesthetic. As educators, we now have a chance to construct a medium that enables all young people to become engaged in their ideal way of learning.”

 Brown (2000) also states that today’s generation is a more action oriented group of people. Today, “learning becomes situated in action; it becomes as much social as cognitive, it is concrete rather than abstract, and it becomes intertwined with judgment and exploration” (Brown 2000, 4).

 Mason (2002) elaborates further on ideas and thoughts that clamor for our attention everyday. He says that what is in the periphery at one moment may be at the center of our attention in the next moment. He refers to John Seely Brown’s description of how people deal with the available data in one context. Seely Brown says that when a cyclist begins a race, she/he wears a helmet, kicks the back stand and roards into the road. As her speed increases, she focusses on the road, any changes in the condition of the road prompts her to make changes in her steering. At the same time, she is surrounded by other sensory experiences, weather, smell etc. that seem to hover on the periphery of her mind. This process of sensing but not attending is what Brown refers to as “attuning”. For example, while the rider’s attention i riveted on the road she is also attuned to the movemet of a small rubber ball rolling out between tw cards. She shifts her center of attention to the ball and recalls that sometimes a small child, upon losing the ball, may follow it into the street. The motocyclist slams on the brakes or adjusts bike path to avoide the possibility of hitting a child  without having actually seen the child.

 Mason (2002) also states that placing things in the periphery overcomes information overload. An organization is able to attune to many more things that it could it everything was in the center. In the same way, if inscriptions were transparent, less rigid and prone to easy manipulations; actors in a network would be fumbled by the pethora of permutations and combinations of the same inscriptions. By ‘black boxing’ these inscriptions, we are able to focus our attention away from the tool and instead focus on the task.

When are inscriptions successful?

 The success of inscriptions is embedding in the performance of its actors in the execution of the script. The job of the researcher is to de-scrpit the various inscriptions and programmes of action embodied in particular sociotechnical arrangements. Akrich takes an approach that sees machines and devices as “composite, heterogeneous, part of a long chain of people, products, tools, machines..”, and finds unclear boundaries between these. (Akrich,1992).

 Panourgias (2007) also states that if there is a break in the links or if a new heterogeneous object is being introduced into the network, there will be new delegations, changes to the existing chains of reference, transaction flows and inscriptions. It is central to research to view these changes though time, material and space and also what sort of reconfiguration is associated with this change. He gives an excellent example of the involvement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) in the financial market place. There are innumerable inscriptions and complex chains of references that allow for voluminous trading to take place in a highly complicated system that exists today. It involves a large set of heterogeneous actors that seem to hold this chain together. “It is by following the processes of coding the transformation of relations between actants involved in the re-configuration of the existing securities marketplaces in to the ICT platform being developed in order to make possible transactions across jurisdictions, that the tracing of the transformation of these chains of reference and mobilization so that they hold across jurisdictions can be undertaken” (Panourgias 2007, 74).

Obligatory Passage Points and Delegates

Delegates are actors who “stand in and speak for” particular viewpoints which have been inscribed in them, e.g. software frozen organizational discourse. (Dear and Flusty, 2002,    398) – “Delegation, then, may be understood in a semiotics of materiality as a way of talking about the immutable mobile. Delegation is sending something out which will hold its shape – so that the centre does not have to do the dirty work itself. Which is, to be sure, not simply a moral but also a practical matter. If the King of Portugal or Vasco da Gama has been obliged to subdue the Indians alone and with their bare hands they would not have been up to the task. Delegation, then, is also something that works through a series of tiers. It is an arrangement in which you push the levers and something happens, something that magnifies in the next stage, and then again.

 “….successful delegation, the successful creation of immutable mobiles, the capacity to know and act at a distance, has other asymmetry-relevant effects. For instance, it may be thought of as the creation of what Michel Callon calls an obligatory point of passage. For the obligatory point of passage is the central node in a network of delegation, so to speak its panopticon.” (Dear and Flusty 2002,398). They use an example of pepper growers in India who are unable to sell their crop to the Arabs because then network of the Portugese have cut all the old links. If the Indian sellers want to continue to make money then they would need to be enrolled into the Portugese network. This means that now the Indian sellers become “faithful delegates of the (newly distant) Portugese centre” (Dear and Flusty  2002,398) and they keep working and performing on behalf of their center, their obligatory point of passage. OPP can thus be defined as a “privileged location that can see and act at a distance”. (Dear and Flusty 2002, 399).

Obligatory passage point can also be defined as a “single locus that could shape and mobilize the local network” and “have control over all transactions between the local and the global networks.” (Bijker and Law 1994, 31).

 Black Boxes and OPP:

 Most of the times, users are presented with enough information needed to complete a task. If the users are overburdened with information, there is a possibility that they may lose focus from the actual task. Providing a fixed method for a reader to follow may actually stimulate completion of task as compared to exposing the reader to all the intricacies. “The reader can thus concentrate on input and output-observations, measurements, and other such data – and not concern himself with the troublesome mathematics in between. In a word, such tools may be seen as a sixteenth-century version of a black box, a device intended to shield the user from complex ideas and processes he did not need to comprehend by making it possible for him to function in a limited input-output role. (Ash 2004,150).”

 By indulging in blacboxing, the authors are able to reach out to multiple audiences. Through this process, authors “also transformed themselves into an obligatory point of passage for anyone who wished to understand fully, let alone improve upon, the newly mathematized art of navigation” (Ash 2004 ,150).

 “OPP refers to a point that channels all interests into one direction. The OPP creates a ‘black box’, and translation processes run automatically without being renegotiated case by case.” (Bernsten and Seim, missing year)

Actor Network Theory and ‘Tracing’

 

 August 18,2009

 Actor Network Theory and ‘Tracing’

 Mouritsen (2008,2) “An inscription emerges at the end of a procedure which organizes traces. For example, an accounting number is the end of a procedure for organizing receipts. The process collects disparate and distributed traces, and it summarises and transports them to a centre from which they make action at a distance possible. This production process and the resources necessary to make the inscription solid has been analysed in the literature, but the reverse process of making the inscription an input to intervention at remote places thus analyzing its role in acting at a distance is neglected in the literature.”

  “Actor-network theory, or the ‘sociology of translations’ (Callon 1986b;Law 1992), is concerned with studying the mechanics of power as this occurs through the construction and maintenance of networks made up of both human and non-human actors. It is concerned with tracing the transformation of these heterogenous networks (Law 1991) that are made up of the people, organizations, agents, machines and many other objects. It explores the ways that the networks of relations are composed, how they emerge and come into being, how they are constructed and maintained, how they compete with other networks, and how they are made more durable over time. It examines how actors enlist other actors into their world and how they bestow qualities, desires, visions, and motivations on these actors (Latour 1996). Law and Callon (1988, 285) put it this way – ‘Our object, then, is to trace the interconnections built up by technologies as they propose projects and then seek the resources required to bring these projects to fruition.” (Tatnall and Gilding 1999, 959).

 Lower (2006, 30) “ANT extends the general case study approach with the concept of tracing the dynamics of heterogeneous networks consisting of human and non-human actors.”

 “Tracing the movements of actants, their transformations, and the things they fetch, recruit, seduce, convince and bring to the setting during controversies, has to be at the centre of empirical investigations of scientific and technological facts and artifacts (Latour 1987, 15)” (Panourgias 2007, 54)

 “Tracing the emergence of these networks of relations and describing, understanding, and explaining the ordering of relations between human and non-human entities has to be at the centre of any enquiry into how devices, agents, institutions, or organizations are generated (Law 1992), and this can be extended to heterogeneous objects such as financial marketplaces.” (Panourgias 2007, 69).

 Summary of what we talked about:

 WHAT IS ANT GOOD FOR?

 Several researchers (Akrich 2000, Mouritsen and Larsen 2005, Nonaka 2005, Latour 2005, Law 1992) present actor-network theory as a constellation of actors and their environment. They describe actor-network theory (ANT) as a theory where actors continuously evolve and take shape (translation) depending on their relations with one another and with the environment.  An actor-network is a “provisional assembly of productive, heterogenous and quite limited forms of ordering located in no larger overall order”. (Law, 2007, p. 6)

 In contrast to systems thinking, ANT is more dynamic because the actors, networks, nodes etc. are not fixed and are constantly evolving. This constant change and evolution provides an opportunity for us as researchers to study the process of ‘tracing’, which involves following the path taken by actors and networks as they interact with each other. The heart of ANT is about relationships. When using the patterns of thinking tool, there is no structure or order in which DSRP are identified. There is no one right starting point however the starting point of ANT is invariably relationships. We view actors in a network and networks as a congregation of actors. Both these components are highly interlinked and cannot be separated from each other.

 Law (1986) discusses how the Portuguese generated a network that allowed them to control half the world. His response was that an interplay of many actors, ships, sails, navigators etc. all formed a web of relationships. “That web, precarious though it was, gave each component a particular shape or form that was to hold together …’ (Law 2007,7). This shows that the strength of actors in a network leads to a successful endeavor.

 For example: If Connector Rx was a well established resource, it would not provide much room for a researcher to dissect the moving parts and study them because the parts are well established, “immutable mobiles” as this stage. However in the case of a new project, even this paper for instance, we can see the paper evolve as it continues to interact with other elements in the network. This mobility an fluidity provides an opportunity where we can trace the movement of objects over a period of time until they solidify and become a ‘black box’. Once a ‘black box’ is created, although it has achieved a significant level of stability, it continues to interact with other elements in other networks and continues to evolve.

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