Actor-network Theory and Organizing

Actor-network Theory and Organizing BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA and TOR HERNES (eds). Malmo: Liber AB and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2005. 360 pp. £32 (pbk) ISBN 8763001446

This edited collection consists of 15 separately authored chapters. Each focuses on the emergence of macro-actors as a means of exploring how organization happens in different contexts. The editors' primary focus is on categorization-'less fuss about "the method" but greater caution when apportioning the world into inherited categories' (p. 13)-and they have selected an eclectic group of papers, many of which explore in detail how trajectories of local and particular entities and events deliver concepts that are received as given at higher levels of organization. The contributing authors appear to be more or less familiar with Actor-Network Theory (ANT): some of the submissions are reprises of earlier topics (Chapters 2, 3 and 6); others are high-level comparisons of ANT with other approaches to organizational analysis (Chapters 14 and 15). The exploration of macro-actors is wide in scope and includes a database, a flexible manufacturing system, a diesel power plant, open source software, routines (with a chapter on a specific instance-the hiring process), a takeover, an e-government platform, an educational portal, intellectual capital, and a human baby.

The contributors work with a common lexicon that is introduced succinctly and clearly in the editors' opening chapter (pp. 7-9) and elaborated on in later chapters. ANT inverts the assumptions of mainstream organizational analysis that assume actors precede networks; in ANT, 'power is the effect of actions and not the cause' (p. 9): actants (heterogeneous) adhere in associations (action nets) and acquire identity, or become actors (pp. 18-20), 'by repeatedly performing the same actions with similar results' (p. 19). Actors with greater purchasing power adhere in networks by means of translation-a process of alignment that stabilizes...