Essai: Why Organization Studies Should Resist Translation by Actor Network Theory1 Dr Andrea Whittle Cardiff Business School Cardiff University CF10 3EU +44(0)29 2087 4000 [email protected]

Dr André Spicer Warwick Business School University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL United Kingdom [email protected] +44(0)24 7652 4513

August 2005 Submitted to: Organization Studies (Essai section).

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This essai was originally presented at the EGOS 2005 colloquium in Berlin. We would like to thank participants in the ‘Technology, Organization and Governance’ stream for their helpful comments. We would like to thank Martin Parker, Stefano Harney, Markus Perkmann, and Carl Rhodes for their ideas which sparked the development of this essai.

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Essai: Why Organization Studies Should Resist Translation by Actor Network Theory.

Abstract In this essai we scrutinise the claim that Actor Network Theory (ANT) provides a critical account of power in organizations. We argue that a critical approach has an over-riding commitment to emancipation. This is expressed in a denaturalizing ontology, a reflexive epistemology, and an anti-performative politics. In stark contrast with these demands, we find that ANT relies on a naturalizing ontology, an unreflexive epistemology, and a performative politics. This does not completely dismiss ANT as a useful approach to studying organizations. However, it does dismiss it as a theory which will help developing a critical theory of power in organizations.

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Introduction

There is a long history of calls for a critical account of power in organization. The common characteristic shared by ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ approaches is a dissenting approach to organizational reality (Scott, 1974; Benson, 1977; Stablein and Nord, 1985). According to Fournier and Grey (1999), this usually involves an attempt to denaturalise social relations by recognising their socially constructed nature, a commitment to being reflexive about claims to knowledge, and an anti-performative stance towards existing power relations. Recent attempts to develop a critical theory of organizational power have focused on how power is manifest in the every-day micro-processes through which power is achieved, such as subjectivity, discourse, technology and habit (Clegg, 1989). One approach which has attempted to develop a critical account of such micro-politics is Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Calás and Smirchich, 1999).

In this essai, we would like to question whether ANT can in fact deliver a critical theory of organizational power. Building on earlier critiques of ANT (eg. Bloomfield and Verdubakis, 1999; MacLean and Hassard, 2004), we argue that although ANT may masquerade as a critical theory, in practice it is based on conservative ontological, epistemology and political assumptions. Of course, proponents of ANT may not necessarily claim or aspire to the criteria, following Fournier and Grey (1999), which we use to characterize a critical theory of power. Yet the increasing popularity in organization studies, coupled with the ‘radicality’ and ‘criticality’ often attributed to the theory, calls for a closer review of its underlying tenets, political presuppositions and philosophical ‘baggage’. We conclude that while it may be appealing and useful in many respects, ANT cannot provide a critical theory of organizational politics. In order to make this argument, we begin by briefly examining the central tenets of the theory. We then draw out three broad assumptions which underpin ANT studies of power – ontological realism, epistemological positivism, and political conservatism. We argue this stands in stark contrast to the key features we might expect from a critical theory of power – ontological denaturalisation, epistemological reflexivity, and political anti-performativity (cf Fournier and Grey, 1999). As a result, ANT brings with it a blind-spot to the unfolding nature of reality, the recognition of the limits of knowledge, and the recognition of the collective nature 3

of power. It is these features, we suggest, that make ANT a conservative and thereby limited account of power relations.

Actor Network Theory

ANT, otherwise known as the sociology of translation, rejects the idea that ‘social relations’ are independent of the material and natural world (Strum and Latour, 1999). In fact, to ANT there is no such thing as a purely social actor or purely social relation. Actors are heterogeneous - partly social, partly technical, partly textual, partly to do with naturally occurring events, objects and processes (Law, 1991). In terms of a theory of power, then, material and natural elements are understood to infiltrate, stiffen, reorganise or dissolve power relations (Law, 1991a).

ANT overcomes the seemingly irreconcilable dichotomy of human/non-human by viewing the power of particular configurations as a property not of any one element but of a chain (Latour, 1991). Power lies not within the actants but through their relations/associations/alliances (Law, 1991). The exercise of power therefore involves heterogeneous engineering: the engineering of physical as well as social phenomenon (Law, 1986).

In recognising the role of the non-human, ANT pursues a radical form of symmetry. ANT seeks to analyse the power of humans and non-humans in the same way and avoids ascribing different properties to either category (Callon, 1986). While commentators like Collins and Yearly (1992) suggest that this is merely a semantic game, where the language is radical but the ontological assumptions remain conventional and realist, proponents of ANT disagree. They pursue a commitment to viewing the power of humans and non-humans as equally uncertain, ambiguous and disputable (Callon, 1986). No necessary agential priority is accorded to the social, institutional, conceptual and material (Callon and Latour, 1992).

Scholars that have drawn on ANT have tended to view power as precarious in the sense that all configurations of human and non-human actors are in principle reversible. Their aim is thus to understand the nature of power, that is, how and why some configurations are more durable and robust than others (Callon, 1991). 4

According to ANT, the actor-network is only stable so long as all human and nonhuman actors remain faithful to the network. Power is evident in cases where configurations become ‘black boxed’; when the controversy closes and the social meaning of actors become settled. The cost of alternatives becomes too high, allegiance to the network becomes indispensable and its definitions (translations) become seen as incontrovertible (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). According to Latour (1991), it is the introduction of non-human elements that often accounts for the durability of particular power relations.

As ‘issues of power are of central concern for ANT’ (MacLean and Hassard, 2004: 494), it is not surprising that researchers in organization studies have increasingly drawn on the field to furnish them with a theory of micro-political power (Clegg, 1989; Calás and Smirchich, 1999). This has produced a growing body of studies which put ANT to work in order to understand how power is implicated in phenomena as diverse as professionalism (Dent, 2003), technology (Joerges and Czarniswaska, 1998; Munir and Jones, 2004), information technology implementation (Bloomfield and Verbudakis, 1994; Bloomfield, 1995; Doorewaar and Van Bijsterveld, 2001), anomalies (Bloomfield and Verbudakis, 2001), consultancy (Bloomfield and Best, 1992; Legge, 2002), organizational safety (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000), knowledge management (Hull, 1999), innovation (Harrisson and Laberge, 2002), economic markets (Callon and Muniesa, 2005), corporate greening (Newton, 2002), academic communities (Hardy, Phillips and Clegg, 2001) and the very nature of organizing and organization (Czarniawska and Hernes, 2005). Indeed many claim that ANT provides a particularly promising ‘radical’ account of power in organizations (eg. Clegg, 1989; Calas and Smirchich, 1999). However in what follows we argue that ANT fails to provide a critical theory of power. Following the agenda put forward by Fournier and Grey (1999), we develop our argument by drawing out the ontological, epistemological and political assumptions which underpin ANT. We argue that ANT’s ontological realism, epistemological positivism, and political conservatism mean that it is unable to provide a genuinely critical theory of power in organizations.

Ontology

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The first aspect of Fournier and Grey’s (1999) ‘critical’ agenda for management and organization studies involves a commitment to denaturalization. This means rejecting the idea that existing power relations are rational, value-neutral, natural or inevitable and questioning taken-for-granted inequalities (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). Some assume that Actor Network Theory is a valuable extension of the social science tradition of denaturalization and ontological relativism (Clegg, 1989; Calás and Smirchich, 1999). For its promoters, ANT encourages ontological denaturalisation because it seeks to question how nature is produced (Newton, 2002). More specifically, ANT claims an anti-essentialist position by resisting the attribution of essential characteristics to objects and revealing how power relations involve the attribution of properties and capacities to object or actors. In addition, ANT is also said to avoid the construction of divisions between the inert object on the one hand and the alert subject on the other. ANT’s supposed anti-dualism allows the study of how power is produced by a network of both human and non-human actors. Finally, the anti-determinism stance of ANT is thought to encourage the recognition that power relations may be transformed through shifting connections, with no grand source of determination.

Here we seek to question these claims (namely its ability to transcend essentialism, dualism and determinism) by exposing the ontological naturalism that we think lies behind much ANT-inspired work (see also: Mutch, 1999). In particular we suggest that ANT is founded on ontological naturalism because it assumes that objects have innate capabilities, it draws dualistic distinction between objects and subjects, and assumes the social reality is determined by actor-networks.

Essentialism Actor Network Theory (ANT) is widely valued for its anti-essentialist or relativist ontology (Lee and Hassard, 1999). ANT seeks to resist explanations that rely upon appeals to the essential characteristics of actors, whether human or non-human. In pursuing its commitment to radical symmetry, however, ANT falls into a kind of essentialism regarding the properties of non-human actors. The claim to an ontologically denaturalising position (Lee and Hassard, 1999) appears at odds with the attribution of definite agential capacities to objects. For example, Grint and Woolgar (1997) expose the technological essentialism at play in Callon’s (1986a) 6

actor-network account of the French electric vehicle project. In attributing the breakdown of the network, at least in part, to the failure of a catalyst within the fuel cells, Callon relies upon a definition of the actual, inherent or essential property of the catalyst. In so doing, the actor-network theorist relies on the idea that nature or technology have some essential or real properties which explain the power relations of the network (Mutch, 2002).

By implicitly assuming the presence of innate characteristics within objects, studies of ANT are unable to remain sceptical about such claims to knowledge of the ‘actual properties’ of an artefact. Power is reduced to the effects of a reality impermeable to social analysis. This hinders our ability to examine the stabilisation of an object as a constructed achievement. By forfeiting this deeper analysis, ANT is unable to resist universal statements about the characteristics of technology that are abstracted from the context of their development and use. In contrast, careful empirical observation has the potential to reveal the multiplicity of meanings and uses around (seemingly) ‘the same’ artefact (Bijker et al, 1987).

Dualism In seeking to describe the construction of networks of truth and power, ANT makes a valuable contribution to studies of power by identifying the importance of connections between human and non-human actors. Yet by suggesting that it is possible and desirable to distinguish between the human and non-human, albeit only for the purposes of analysis and to demonstrate their interconnection, ANT recreates the dualism it so despises (Callon & Law, 1997; Bloomfield and Vurdubakis, 1999: 627). By starting from this analytical postulate, ANT glosses over how the separation between human and non-human is neither natural nor inevitable and is itself the outcome of a ‘labour of division’ (Bloomfield, and Vurdubakis, 1994; Hetherington and Munro, 1997). For instance, we can only identify a technology because we split it off from human actors (Harraway, 1996). To label an activity or object ‘technical’ is to define particular boundaries and associated moral orders (Rachel and Woolgar, 1995). Within organizations, categorisation such as this can enact particular allocations of responsibility, resources and rewards (ibid). The divisions between humans and non-human actors relied upon by ANT, then, are nothing more than taxonomical conventions or institutionalised patterns of categorisation and ordering 7

(Foucault, 1974). While ANT on the one hand stresses that actors do not have fixed boundaries and attributes (Callon & Law, 1997), it continues to rely on precisely these assumptions when partitioning of the world into, for instance, aircraft, humans, texts and social groups (ibid).

By beginning with the analytical axiom of a division between humans and nonhumans, the analyst misses how the very distinction between humans and non-humans is constituted by the social act of making divisions. In fact, if this labour of division is a social act, then it surely belongs to the category human (if we are to accept the distinction). Describing the technical properties of technology is thus a fundamentally social act (Bloomfield and Vurdubakis, 1994). Technologies, for example, do not speak for themselves nor do they exist outside of processes of human interpretation (Grint and Woolgar, 1997). Analytically speaking, then, there is no such non-human realm to be described by ANT, or at least not one that is amenable to being mirrored by the ANT analyst. This means that the very boundary between the human and nonhuman is an outcome of the boundary-setting practices of the participants including the ANT analyst, not the stable starting-point of the analysis (Rachel and Woolgar, 1995). This leaves ANT in the somewhat awkward position of recreating and reinforcing the very dualisms it claims to deconstruct.

Determinism In seeking to examine what determines the power of robust actor networks such as a large scientific research programme, ANT has offered an important move away from simple deterministic models of power which understand either the actor or structures as determining relations of power. In its place we find a model of complex determination of social power where an entire network of actors (be they people, funding, or machines) are implicated in power relations, whether as conditions or consequences of their formation. This means ANT largely focuses on how a network of powerful actors is successfully constructed and maintained.2 The assumption underlying these studies is that once an actor-network has been carefully crafted, then it gains power over and through those who are enrolled in the network. The power 2

Some notable exceptions which look at the breakdown or failure of actor networks include Callon’s (1986) study of scallop fishing, Latour’s (1996) study of the electric light vehicle project and Law’s (2000) work on transitives.

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over ‘the enrolled’ or ‘the translated’ is both determinate and complete. For example, the construction of ‘immutable mobiles’ is thought to enable the domination and control of distant spaces (Law, 1986; Latour, 1987). Similarly, once a strong actor network is constructed around a new technology (eg. Bloomfield and Danieli, 1995) or management fashion (Doorewaard and van Bijsterveld, 2001), then the possible behaviours of an actor become increasingly narrow. The actors who participate in the network therefore become mere functionaries, “intermediaries without discretion” (Munro, 1999: 433). The language and actions of the ‘translated’ are determined by the network. Power becomes nothing more than the pulse of power that flows through diodes on an electrical circuit-board.

By assuming that actor-networks are completely determinate, ANT misses the opportunity to uncover the fragility of power relations and see how the network could have been otherwise. It ignores the fact that power relations and networks are, as du Gay (1996) phrased it, ‘congenitally failing operations’. That is power relations are relatively fragile and continually fail because they never completely envelope the subject (Jones and Spicer, 2005). The fact that there is well documented resistance in nearly any attempt at organizational change (eg. Prasad and Prasad, 2000) reminds us that there is always some aspect of the subjects’ world that is not translated or dominated by an actor network. Indeed, power only exists and is meaningful to the extent that resistance is possible. As Knights and McCabe (2000: 426-7) suggest, ‘power is rarely so exhaustive and totalising as to preclude space for resistance and almost never so coherent as to render resistance unnecessary or ineffective’.

To put this in ANT terms, then, we live in a world of ‘translators’ but not in a world that is ‘translated’. ‘Centres of discretion’ emerge alongside ‘centres of calculation’ (Munro, 1999). Yet by focussing on the determinate power of actor networks, ANT is left without the constructs to chart how subjects ignore, deny and resist their translation within an actor-network. Even when ANT seeks to account for the fact that translation does not always proceed as intended, it is unable to account for the fact that there may be possibilities which lie outside the network success/failure binary, for example actions that are neither caused by nor reactions to the translation attempts of the network. By being bound into an account of actor-network success or failure, it

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becomes difficult to recognise that networks can always be, and subjects can always do, otherwise.

Summary Bringing these ontological underpinnings together, we have examined the assumption that ANT provides a promising approach for denaturalising power relations. In contrast we have argued that ANT actually provides an essentialist account of the capacity of objects and subjects, a dualist division between objects and subjects, and a determinist account of the actor network. Paradoxically, this means ANT appears to naturalize relations of power by insisting that objects and subject have an innate capacities and characteristics which exist independently of actors, that explanations of power can be divided between the social and natural world and that the power of networks are total and determinate. This means ANT is unable to develop an account of how the capacities of object are given to it through use. It also renders ANT unable to account for how the split between humans and non-humans is created in social practice. Finally, it renders ANT unable to explain how members of an actor network are able to resist and possibly transform the determination of the network. Ultimately, this leaves ANT ill-equipped to pursue a radical ontology that involves the denaturalization of power relations.

Epistemology The second aspect of Fournier and Grey’s (1999) ‘critical’ theory of power concerns epistemology. The authors advocate the sort of methodological reflexivity commonly associated with constructionist approaches, which enable scholars to relativize truth claims (including their own) by reflecting upon and scrutinizing the generation of knowledge. ANT is often positioned as an approach which embraces epistemological relativism (Law, 1991) and is resolutely reflexive. This is because many of the foundational studies of actor network theory sought to empirically examine how truth was produced (rather than discovered) in scientific enterprises (eg. Latour, 1986). For example, these early studies demonstrated that the truth about nature is the result of an ever expanding actor networks being constructed around a particular theory. The implication was that positivist scientific method was not a value free way of gaining access to truth. Rather, it was part of a broader struggle to ensure one’s theory dominated over others. This led to the assumption that ANT is a 10

reflexive approach to understanding relations of power. This would mean that ANT would seek to give voice to local knowledge and actor’s understandings of the world, avoid developing linear systematizations of the social world that presume a fixed ordering of analysis, and be reflexive about the role of the researcher in making truth claims (Alvesson and Skölberg, 2000). In contrast, we argue that ANT actually relies on an un-reflexive epistemology to generate its accounts of how some power relations come to be understood as true, correct and acceptable. We shall argue that ANT is resolutely positivist because it disregards actors understandings, develops linear models that forces interpretations into fixed stages, and is largely un-reflexive about its own suppositions.

Etic understandings Many studies of actor-networks in organizations argue that ANT provides a valuable tool for avoiding claims to universal knowledge imposed by scientists. They also argue it allows the analyst to tease out understandings that actors have of their own lived reality. Promoters of ANT declare a commitment to removing barriers to allowing actors “to define the world in their own terms” (Latour, 1999: 20) and a commitment to a “struggle against producing its own vision of the world” (Lee and Hassard, 1999: 398). Following these claims we would expect that ANT studies would produce explanations of social life that are rooted in the thick local knowledge of situated actors. In contrast, most analyses produced by ANT rarely concur with the descriptions and explanations produced by field members themselves. Few fishermen would be likely to attribute agency to scallops (cf. Callon, 1986), just as few scientists would be keen to agree that their knowledge claims are relative and their scientific objects are socially constructed (cf. Latour, 1986). The reader is often struck by the gulf between the complex neologisms invented by practitioners of ANT and the actual terminology used by actors in the field. What this points to is the fact that ANT effectively disregards the cultural distinctions that are meaningful to the members of a given society and presents a resolutely ethnocentric view of a given situation (Bloomfield and Verdubakis, 1999: 8). This means ANT imposes an etic understanding of social life based on its own complex theoretical vocabulary. Whether intentionally or not, this stance implies that ANT offers a ‘superior’ or more ‘accurate’ picture of social action. By implication this assumes that participants have at best ‘naïve’ or at worst ‘wrong’ explanations for their world. 11

Because ANT seeks to graft its own complex vocabulary onto the world of actors it seeks to study, it typically fails to both respect and engage with emic understandings of those actors (Lee and Brown, 1994). An anthropological commitment to gaining an experiential understanding of emic life on its own terms would certainly rest uneasily with this colonizing tendency. While analysis is perhaps somewhat inevitably undertaken somewhere between the emic and etic and while observers certainly cannot claim a neutral or objective stance, a commitment to retaining and representing emic understandings would at least temper the ‘grand narrative’ of ANT (Lee and Brown, 1994). Moreover, a rigorous commitment to reflexivity would treat all accounts as in principle equal, including the one produced by the analyst. From this perspective, ANT does not produce the definitive account of social action but rather one among many. If ANT accounts succeed in gaining salience, power and verisimilitude over and above emic accounts, this must itself be treated as an accomplishment that requires explanation.

Linearity One of most interesting findings associated with ANT is that the development of a simple linear model is not a slow process of revealing a pre-given reality, but is a complex and uncertain achievement. We are advised that any simple model does not just work by nature, but must be made to work. The result is that linear models are to be suspected. This worthy critical suspicion does not seem to square with work in ANT itself which is not afraid of charting out stage models. For instance, Callon’s (1986) foundational study of a scallop fishery charts a linear model of four ‘moments’ through which an actor network was produced. What is even more interesting is that these moments have been applied, often in slightly modified stage models, by other scholars in their studies (eg. Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000; Doorewaar and van Bijsterveld, 2001; Legge, 2002; Munir and Jones, 2004). Although Callon’s four moments may be a useful explanation of translation in that particular case, it belies a desire to create a linear model of translation which moves in an orderly fashion through a series of defined stages. Attempts by various social scientists to apply this model to other cases suggests a desire to follow the positivist route of verifying the universality of Callon’s account.

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Applying linear models developed in earlier studies falls foul of ANT’s desire to develop a ‘ruthlessly’ empirical approach. Assuming a stage model implies that translation is something which exists ‘out there’ to be captured and represented by the researcher. This blinds us to the value of viewing the stages of translation more accurately as analytical heuristics or sensitising concept employed by the researcher to make sense of complex observations. It also blinds us to the actual empirical complexity of field. Indeed, if we were to study any process of translation and we truly believed that a phenomenon should be studied with empirical detail, then we would trace out how translation processes occur in each individual case. Moreover we might be open to considering how translation processes may be an ongoing, iterative and non-linear process.

Reflexivity ANT is often seen to be an important part of a more reflexive account of organizations (Lee and Hassard, 1999). This is because ANT seeks to explain how scientists (or other network builders) produce truth through the mobilisation and strengthening of networks of actors. Indeed, there have been attempts to use ANT to trace how the production of scientific truth in organisation studies is conditioned by the actor networks in which this truth is produced (eg. Hardy et al, 2001). However, ANT has been less willing to reflect upon how it is itself an active attempt to build and strengthen a network or actors into a durable network. In fact, being reflexive about the claims of others without applying this to your own claims constitutes a form of ‘ontological gerrymandering’ (Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985; Bloomfield and Danieli, 1995). This means that actor network theory is able to examine other fields of research as producing relative truths while representing its own findings as the product of absolute truth. This means that ANT exercises a kind of limited reflexivity in that it is reflexive about the truth produced by other scientific fields while not extending this reflexive move to itself.

By practicing a limited reflexivity, ANT blinds us to how it produces truth claims. Indeed if we analysed the history of ANT itself, we could observe how a scientific and technical truth is produced through the enrolment of various actors such as journals, writers and reviewers, courses, research grants into durable networks. The spread of ANT from science and technology studies into organization studies is in fact 13

testimony to this network-extending effect. ANT could tell us much about its own career as a scientific truth. It has developed its own obligatory passage points. It has reached out of studies of science and technology into the field of organisation studies, among others. It has steeled itself from attacks from rival actor networks. Instead of doing any kind of reflexive work, and explaining how it is itself producing scientific truths about the production of scientific truth, ANT seems to pursue a paradoxical strategy of merely claiming that it speaks the truth by revealing what ‘actually happens’ in the production of scientific truth (Law, 2003). Such an analysis might allow the possibility of multiple (perhaps competing) versions of the process of translation, without the tyranny produced by assuming that the researcher always holds the authoritative ‘Gods eye’ view (Lee and Brown, 1994).

Summary Having more carefully examined its epistemological underpinnings, we are now in a position to assess whether ANT is as epistemologically relative and reflexive as it claims to be. Above we have argued that despite contrary claims, ANT is actually underpinned by an etic approach, attempts to impose linear models and engages in limited reflexivity. These means that ANT seems to actually find its groundings in a pre-reflexive positivist epistemology insofar as it assumes that social life can be objectively observed by a scientist using esoteric concepts that disregard local knowledge and voices, understood through the imposition of a rational and linear model and explained without reflexive examination of the philosophical assumptions their research is based upon. By adopting such an approach, ANT renders itself unable to consider how actors already embedded within particular contexts make sense of and construct their world. ANT is also unable to account for how translation might occur in complex and over-lapping processes. Finally, ANT limits its own interrogation of how it produces truth as a field of knowledge. Ultimately what this means is that ANT is unable to provide a reflexive account of how it as field of knowledge is also implicated in the production of power/knowledge relationships. Moreover this means that ANT becomes unable to affirm the subjugated knowledge of participants within the field.

Politics

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The third and final aspect of Fournier and Grey’s (1999) critical agenda concerns politics. This involves questioning the imperatives constructed by performance-driven means-end calculations, interrogating the power inequalities enacted in the name of management and exposing the value-laden nature of organizations. Alongside claims to having a denaturalizing ontology and a reflexive epistemology, ANT often claims that it pushes forward a radical, anti-performative account of power (eg. Callon, 1986; Clegg, 1989). At the very least this means that it claims to offer an extension of accounts of organizational politics which recognises the inherently political nature of the most mundane, taken-for-granted and apparently technical decisions. Indeed, many ANT studies have made significant progress towards just such a radicalisation of power by showing how even the most apparently objective issues such as scientific truth are the product of ongoing negotiation and politicking. While it is certainly true that ANT provides an account of the political dynamics of everyday processes, it is somewhat uncertain whether we can actually call many of the accounts of power antiperformative and ‘politically radical’. We shall argue that this is because ANT presents a vision of politics which degrades the political actor, assumes a utility maximising actor, and cannot provide a normative political stance. This ironically amounts to a depoliticised account of organizations.

Degrades ‘the actor’ One of ANT’s founding principles was the exploration of the connections between human and non-human actors. As we have already argued, the principle of generalised symmetry asserts that the concept of ‘actor’ should also be extended to non-human actors, such as technological artefacts. However, this extension seems to degrade what is so interesting about being human – our capacity for particular types of meaningful, purposeful, self-aware and non-repetitive action (Fuller, 1993; Mutch, 2002). First, on the ability to act, Hannah Arendt (1958) argues that what is so central to a human is not the fact that they may die one day (cf. Heidegger, 1923), but the factor that we as humans constantly give birth. That is, for Arendt, what is central to human beings is our ability to bring new things and states of affairs into being. This partially reflects and reinforces Marx’s point that any technology is merely the outcome of human action and creativity – what he famously calls ‘dead labour’. Indeed technology is only given the ability to do things to the extent that a human has acted to bring that technology into being. To talk about the agency of machines is therefore to fall victim 15

to the crudest form of commodity fetishism. It is to imagine that a technology dances all on its own without the intervention of human action or labour at any point in time. To attribute a sense of action to all things is to deprive the human subject of what is absolutely central to our own being – agency, the ability to change the world.

By approaching all action as similar, ANT renders itself unable to distinguish between different types of action. Following political philosophers like Arendt, it would be useful to distinguish at least two forms of action. The first is the kind of routinely repetitive action that ANT sees in non-human actors like a machine. This form of action, many would argue, does not really deserve the word agency – it is simply the functional repetition of the system. It is this kind of functional repetition that merely bolsters already established political structures. In contrast to these repetitive actions we can distinguish action proper. We might define action as any attempt to challenge the pattern of repetition associated with activity such as the functioning of a machine. This involves attempts to act in a fundamentally non-routine way that challenge the co-ordinates of a given system. Indeed, we might argue it is only those rare acts that fundamentally challenge and question our daily activity that deserve the name ‘action’. Yet the generalised symmetry of ANT at best obscures and at worst ignores the fact that it is only through the intervention of humans that action and agency (and thus political transformation of social arrangements) might occur.

By failing to distinguish between human and non human action, ANT is unable to engage with the meaningful character of human interaction (Munir and Jones, 2004: 570). Collins and Yearly (1992) articulate a penetrating criticism of ANT’s generalised symmetry around the notion of human action and agency. In contrast to the symmetrical treatment of the human and non-human in ANT, the authors suggest humans deserve an ontologically distinct category for their ability to use language and other symbolic forms to generate and interpret meaning. This particular criticism is especially pertinent for assessing the value of ANT for organization studies given the importance of processes of sense-making, interpretation of meaning and the role of narrative in organizations (Weick, 1995). It also means that ANT misses the opportunity to understand how and why the strategies used to enrol non-human actors are likely to be very different to those used to enrol human actors (Amsterdamska, 1990). For example, microbes are unlikely to be convinced by the arguments used to 16

enrol funding bodies into the scientist’s network, and vice versa (ibid). Focussed attention on the precise characteristics of ‘nodes’ and ‘associations’ in the network is needed to understand how and why particular types of networks succeed while others fail (ibid).

Rational conception of the actor ANT assumes that network-builders rationally pursue their self-interest by building durable networks around themselves to bolster their power. For instance, senior scientists seek to build a network to prove themselves correct, attract more funding, and destroy competing theories (Latour, 1987, 1988). Actors are presumed to rationally advance their interests through a variety of alliances in a Machiavellian manner (Amsterdamska, 1990). Although this kind of rational interest seeking is certainly an accurate description in some cases, there are also large swathes of behaviour that do not comply with such rational interest seeking.

Such Machivellianism certain presents a cold, overly rationalist understanding of the human actor (Laurier and Philo, 1999). In doing so, ANT employs a curious form of ‘ontological gerrymandering’ (Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985) in relation to the notion of interests. While the ‘enroller’ is (usually implicitly) assumed to have fixed or essential interests furthered by the construction of the network, the enrolled are understood to have their interested constructed or translated as they come to see their situation in terms that allies them into the network. For example, Hassard, Law and Lee (1999) claim that the central motivation for ‘enrollers’ is to “ensure that participants adhere to the enroller’s interests rather than their own” (p. 388).

According to this logic, the enroller possesses essential interests, following the humanistic tradition, while the enrolled have their interests translated, in the constructivist tradition. This is clearly contradictory and, in our view, inadequate because it ignores the constructed nature of the ‘interests’ of the enroller. This suggests a need to rethink ‘interests’ as “recurrently constructed and partially pursued, rather than affirmed and realised as a predetermined, essential destiny” (Willmott, 2003: 86). This would enable us to pursue a more ‘critical’ agenda by moving beyond the assumption that actors possess ‘real’ interests (where other actions and identities are dismissed as ‘false consciousness’) and expose the power at work in the 17

construction of interests, desire and subjectivity (Knights and Willmott, 1989). Employing this perspective would also enable us to understand action that appears to be self-defeating, altruistic or even unrelated to any conception of interests.

Lack of normative political stance In a somewhat curious and contradictory manner, ANT seeks to provide critical descriptions of existing power relations while at the same time remaining reluctant to offer a normative political position by either opposing domination or proposing an alternative political schema. By refusing to speculate on what state of affairs might be possible or desirable, it merely describes what state of affairs we actually have. This is not a neutral, apolitical process because, through this process of description, ANT actually reproduces and reinforces the state of affairs that it describes. Indeed, Law (2003) recognises the possibility that ANT simply reproduces rather than challenges the hegemonic networks they describe. This is highly ironic given the dire current need for political alternatives to the imaginaries of market managerialism (Parker, 2002).

By concentrating on the networks of the powerful, ANT further marginalises the voices of those who find themselves at the margins of networks (Star, 1991). The power to translate, it seems, is not universal and equally distributed. Opting for a flat ontology means that ANT ignores the hierarchical distribution of opportunities in a society (Reed, 1997). By reducing ‘right’ to ‘might’, ANT remains indifferent about the specific means through which power is established is disregarded (Amsterdamska, 1990). For instance, coercion, corruption and intimidation are not distinguished on any normative basis. As opposed to offering a thoroughly critical theory of power, ANT is resigned to describing and legitimizing the established power relations in organisations.

Summary Following our more detailed examination of the political theory underpinning ANT, we would like to question the assertion that ANT provides an anti-performative account of power. In particular, we have argued that ANT displays a tendency towards degrading the possibility of political action, assumes that actors seek only to maximise utility and fails to produce a normative political account which pursues the 18

possibility of emancipation, however local and small-scale. Typically we would expect that a critical theory of power would provide an account which recognises our potential political agency, realises that we are not merely driven by utility maximising calculation, and most of all provide some form of normative political philosophy which permits judgement about desirable and abhorrent paths of action, albeit without any ‘grand narrative’ of enlightenment. On the contrary, we have shown that ANT actually ignores relations of oppression, emphasises the difficulty of changing relations of oppression and fails to advance any normative assessment of existing relations. ANT therefore appears to provide a theory which describes the reproduction of only surface-level power relations (Winner, 1993) without the ammunition to construct other possibilities and empower actors to pursue them.

Conclusion We started this essai by revisiting one of the foundational claims of ANT – that it offers a potentially radical or critical theory of power (Callon, 1986). In order to make sense of this grand claim, it is necessary to return to the long running debate about what a ‘radical’ or ‘critical’ approach to organizational power would involve (eg. Benson, 1977; Stablein and Nord, 1985; Fouriner and Grey, 1999). Although there are significant differences in this debate, we can try and isolate some important common themes of theories that generally attract the label ‘critical’. According to Fournier and Grey (1999) these would be a commitment to ontological denaturalisation, epistemological reflexivity and a politically anti-performative stance. Underlying each of these commitments seems to be a more fundamental philosophical dimension. An anti-performative stance is underpinned by a critical politics. Denaturalisation seems to involve a commitment to a sceptical ontology which doubts claims to existence. Reflexivity is underpinned by a commitment to doubting any strong claims to know.

We have argued that ANT fails to meet these criteria for a critical theory of power. Despite claims to the contrary, we have shown that ANT relies on a naturalizing ontology. This violates the central principle of radical thought that it must seek to denaturalize existing social reality. We have also seen that ANT relies on a resolutely un-reflexive epistemology. This violates the radical principle of being sceptical about claims to knowledge, including claims made by the researcher and researched. Finally, we have argued that ANT relies on a conservative politics. This violates the 19

radical principle of desire for anti-performative politics which are underpinned by a desire for emancipatory social change, however local and small (Stablein and Nord, 1985, Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). At least according to Fouriner and Grey’s (1999) definition therefore, ANT fails as a critical approach to the study of power in organizations.

Of course, the criteria set up by Fournier and Grey (1999) and elaborated in this essai do not come without their problems. In particular, the relativist approach to epistemology/ontology and the critical/emancipatory approach towards politics bring about clear tensions and problems. These tensions are an ongoing feature of debates within ‘critical’ approaches and are elucidated most clearly in the debate between Parker (1999) and Thompson et al (2000). How can knowledge and reality be doubted while claims are made about the reality of organizational inequalities and injustices? Can relativism be reconciled with concrete plans for alternative arrangements that offer a ‘better’ way of organizing? Do constructionist and postmodern approaches reduce all voices to mere examples of discourse and lead to moral nihilism? These questions are part of an ongoing debate that is unlikely to be answered by any grand, all-encompassing theory. In fact, this tension may simply be ‘the burden borne by all critical theorizing’ (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994: 192). Yet it could also be what gives critical theories their dynamic and ensures resistance to excessive claims to emancipation (ibid). We therefore use the critical agenda put forward by Fournier and Grey (1999) not as a final and complete taxonomy for the evaluation of ‘criticality’, but as a way of scrutinising the assumption that ANT offers a promising avenue for the pursuit of a critical theory of power in organizations.

To sum up, our argument is not that ANT should be rejected out of hand. ANT is clearly a useful method for understanding how actors are enrolled, how truth claims are constructed, and how varieties of technologies are made to work within organizations. What we have suggested is that ANT fails to provide a ‘critical’ account of power in organizations. This does not therefore preclude the adoption of an ANT approach but it does mean that those using ANT need to be clear about the ontological, epistemology and political commitments which ANT ties them into. This point is particularly important if ANT is to be used as a ‘pick and mix’ approach to be combined freely with others, such as Foucauldian theory (see Newton, 1996; Fox, 20

2000). If our argument is accepted, these theories are clearly not as philosophically and politically compatible as first thought. Ultimately this means that if members of the organization studies communities do actually want to develop a thoroughly critical study of organizational power, then it is necessary to resist translation by Actor Network Theory.

21

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