Journal ArticleDOI
Notes on the theory of the actor-network: ordering, strategy and heterogeneity.
John Law
- Vol. 5, Iss: 4, pp 379-393
TLDR
The actor-network theory as discussed by the authors is a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social.Abstract:
This paper describes the theory of the actor-network, a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects. The theory is distinctive because it insists that networks are materially heterogeneous and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social. Agents, texts, devices, architectures are all generated in, form part of, and are essential to, the networks of the social. And in the first instance, all should be analyzed in the same terms. Accordingly, in this view, the task of sociology is to characterize the ways in which materials join together to generate themselves and reproduce institutional and organizational patterns in the networks of the social.read more
Citations
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Journal Article
Institutions and Institutional Work
TL;DR: The Handbook of Organization Studies as mentioned in this paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of organization studies, providing a synthesis of knowledge and literature from the field of organizational studies, and provides an overview of the most significant issues to affect organization studies such as leadership, diversity and globalization.
Journal ArticleDOI
10 Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization
TL;DR: The role of technology in organizational life is discussed in this paper, where the authors examine the research that has been done on technology, and categorize this literature into two research streams according to their view of technology: discrete entities or mutually dependent ensembles.
Journal ArticleDOI
Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. - Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences , trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95.
TL;DR: The Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance.
Journal ArticleDOI
GIS for district-level administration in India: problems and opportunities
Geoff Walsham,Sundeep Sahay +1 more
TL;DR: It is concluded that the creation and maintenance of a relatively stable set of key actors with aligned interests related to the GIS technology had not been achieved in any of the districts studied by the end of the research period.
Book ChapterDOI
Actor-network theory and IS research: current status and future prospects
TL;DR: In this article, the actor-network theory has been assessed in relation to IS research, with the broad conclusion being that it has much to offer in both theoretical and methodological terms.
References
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Book
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
TL;DR: In this article, a social critic of the judgement of taste is presented, and a "vulgar" critic of 'pure' criticiques is proposed to counter this critique.
Journal ArticleDOI
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Book
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
TL;DR: Foucault shows the development of the Western system of prisons, police organizations, administrative and legal hierarchies for social control and the growth of disciplinary society as a whole as discussed by the authors.