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Mediators and the Material Stabilization of Society
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... However, in order to be recognized as such, an organization also has to manage, somehow, to materialize itself through its various representatives or embodiments (see, again, premise three). The spokespersons have to be its spokespersons, the organizational charts have to be its organizational charts, the cultures have to be its cultures, etc. (Bencherki, 2012;Nicotera, 2013;Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Latour (2013) uses the term "script" to talk about this specific way by which organizing take place -that is, specific programs of action that ultimately define organizing and organization. ...
... This is why any relation always expresses itself through a form of possession, ownership, or attribution. For instance, we have enemies, friends, colleagues, parents, readers, and we also have genes, organs, attitudes, passions, identities, statuses and reputations (Bencherki, 2012;Bencherki & Cooren, 2011;Tarde, 1895Tarde, /2012. This point is crucial in this argument as we see that what appears to be proper (as in "property") to someone or something is, to some extent, also always already improper (Derrida, 1993), precisely because the property always expresses/materializes itself through a relation, a link or a connection with something or someone else. ...
The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism-and how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the "work of communication" in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practices-as opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutions-as the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism.
... For instance, what we tend to call the structure of an organization can, in fact, often be associated with the texts (organizational charts, policies, work descriptions, etc.) that are supposed to define what this organization consists of and what its members should do (Cooren, 2004;Cooren & Seidl, 2020;Luhmann, 2018;Taylor et al., 1996). In other words, an organization is communicated into being to the extent that the structuration of its activities always depends on communicative acts, whether we are speaking of wildland firefighters negotiating safety procedures (Jahn, 2016(Jahn, , 2019, taskforce members collaborating to address problems of affordable housing (Koschmann, 2016), or technologies constraining or enabling various courses of action (Bencherki, 2012(Bencherki, , 2016. ...
Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.
... This perspective has been illustrated through numerous publications by scholars associated with the Montréal School of organizational communication (Brummans, 2006;Mumby, 2007;Schoeneborn et al., 2014). These scholars differ in important ways, yet they also find in pragmatism and relationality a way to reconcile these differences (Brummans, 2006(Brummans, , 2011Bencherki, 2012;Benoit-Barné, 2007;Robichaud, 2006;Taylor & Van Every, 2011, 2014Vásquez, 2013). Moreover, the conception of agency I have been defending is not only mine. ...
... Cette notion de texte renvoie à la théorie de l'acteur-réseau (Latour, 1994) selon laquelle la matérialité permet la stabilisation du social. Ainsi, par exemple, une affiche indiquant les règlements de mon club de sport n'est pas uniquement la représentation de ces règlements (qui existeraient par ailleurs autrement) : c'est bien grâce à cette affiche mais aussi, peut-on supposer, grâce à une page du site web ou au feuillet remis lors de l'inscription, que ce règlement peut perdurer d'une manière plus ou moins stable, sans devoir être continuellement renégocié dans la conversation (Bencherki, 2011). ...
Ce texte présente l’ethnométhodologie, approche développée par le socio-logue américain Harold Garfinkel au courant des années 60, telle qu’elle a été reprise par un courant de la communication organisationnelle appelé École de Montréal. Celle-ci a été initiée par James R. Taylor à l’Université de Montréal et compte parmi ses figures de proue un groupe de cher-cheurs du département de communication de cette université (F. Cooren, D. Robichaud, B. Brummans, C. Benoit-Barné...) ou liés à celui-ci (N. Bencherki, E. Van Every, C. Vasquez...). L’originalité de la reprise de l’ethnométhodologie par l’École de Montréal réside dans l’incorporation de nombreuses idées empruntées à la théorie de l’acteur-réseau, laquelle permet de reconnaître la contribution du monde matériel dans l’action et son rôle dans la stabilisation du social.
... Peut-être sommes-nous si empêtrés dans la distinction entre le « monde matériel » et le « monde social », que nous sommes incapables d'accepter la réalité des pratiques de phonation des participants, et nous n'y voyons que des « stratégies rhétoriques » et autres artifices. Autrement dit, nous regardons les médiations qui sont ajoutées comme éloignant la réalité, alors qu'en fait ces médiations créent justement de l'immédiateté (Bencherki, 2012). ...
Writing objects/Letting the objects write themselves
Calls are multiplying for qualitative researchers to ‘position’ their knowledge. They are invited to exercise more reflexivity (Harding, 1991 ; Rose, 1997). Positionality is presented as an ethical imperative, guarding the researcher against the temptation to impose their own categories or forms of knowledge to the people being studied. Indeed, research should leave all the necessary space for subjects’ voices to express themselves (Nagar-Ron et Motzafi-Haller, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988). But what of research concerning things rather than people ? What voices can be carried when research participants are objects, rather than subjects ? What is the researcher’s ethical responsibility towards objects ? Building on the work of Bruno Latour (1994) on interobjectivity, I propose that the ‘objective’ researcher is not the one who dismisses the imperative of positionality and the invitation to let participants express their voice. On the contrary, the objective researcher precisely gives a voice to objects and is on the lookout for their own expressive modalities. This paper reveals that strategies already exist to make objects speak, that qualitative researchers could adopt.
... An object will not take an action by itself, or have any wish or desire to do something or something else. The action is never taken alone, disconnected from others or other object but they participate to any action in the world (Bencherki, 2012). The participation of object in the world of human is heavily linked to this specific notion of action within ANT: ...
We are told that society changes. It evolves toward a more fluid, active and horizontal form of socialisation (Bauman, 2000; Castells, 2009; Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2000; Wittel, 2001). As much as a change in the social, it is also a change in the conception sociology gives to the sociality and society as large. There is a shift in social theory with recent raises of post-demographic perspective, and postmodernism (Latour, 2005, 2011, 2013; Ruppert, Law, & Savage, 2013).Along these, post changes, another revolution takes place, in the use of new technology and mainly the Web. These new uses are associated with an explosion of the quantity of digital traces, often labelled as Big Data.This Big Data paradigm brings radical changes in research that are perfectly suitable for computational researchers and other data scientists, and they are taking full advantage of it (Hey, Tansley, & Tolle, 2009). This new landscape, in society and in research, puts pressure on sociology, and other social sciences fields, to find adequate answers to these societal, theoretical and methodological challenges. The best proxy of these challenges and the tensions between scientific fields and the new form of social interactions are the Social Network Sites (SNSs). They represent the extreme case of horizontal and fluid interactions while producing an incredible amount of accessible digital traces.These digital traces are the essential bricks for all the research using SNSs. But despite this importance, few researches actually investigate and explain how these digital traces are produced and what is the impact of their context of access, collection and aggregation. This thesis focuses on these digital traces and the gap left in the literature. This empty space is however conceived as a central point of tension between sociological positions on how to define new social interactions, and methodological principles imposed by the logic of Big Data.The work is articulated around one specific social network, Twitter. The reason for this choice lays in its openness, the easy use of its APIs, and, in consequence, by the fact it is the most extensively studied SNS for now.I begin the work on the definition of the new form of sociality using the network concept as the key concept around which several notions, such as social, cultural and technological can be articulated. I conclude that none of these evolutions are independent and need to be seen as co-integrated. In consequence, the change in the social interaction needs to be seen as much as a factual change, than a change in our way to interpret it. From this conception of the network and the importance in our understanding of social interactions, I retrace the evolution of the notion of Big Data, specifically with the example of Tesco and their ClubCard. This is the first step to locate the technological changes into a more comprehensive methodological framework. This framework, the transactional perspective, is decomposed to understand the consequence of such position applied on SNSs and specifically on Twitter. This is the first explanation of why the research almost entirely focuses on the Tweets and what are the consequences on our understanding of the interaction on the social web service. Then I use this first iteration of the definition of a digital trace to build a new definition of what a Social Network Site is and centre this definition around the concept of activity and context.I operationalise these concepts on Twitter to develop a new method to capture social interaction and digital traces that are often put aside due to the difficulty of their access. This method takes into account the limits imposed by the Twitter APIs and describes the consequences they have on the generation of a dataset.The method is based on a constant screening of sampled profiles over time. This method allows people/us/you to reconstruct the missing information in the profile (the trace of the changes in the friends’ and followers’ lists). This information creates the measure of context (the user’s network) and activity (tweeting and adding or removing links) defined earlier.The obtained dataset provides an opportunity to see the importance of the aggregation process and the flexibility offered by the digital traces. Then following this, I developed three analyses with different levels of aggregation for different purposes. The first analysis was to test the hypothesis of the influence on users’ context activity on their own activity over time. The second analysis, did not use the time as a measure of aggregation but tested the same hypothesis on an individual level. And finally, the information about the activity itself is analysed in order to see to which extent the digital traces obtainable contain the sufficient information about the change in activity itself.
... However, the SSH does not just simplify, it also complexifies Callon's (2002) long meditation on management tools because the tool brings additional complications due to the new relations and activities that the diagram demands, for example, the work of maintenance/upgrade and follow-up. The diagram also transports complication to Med Dialysis managers, engineers, and technicians because the SSH diagram records, carries, and channels interactions through time and space (Bencherki 2012;Latour 1996). In other words, this visual representation enables a form of collectivity within Med Dialysis, but it also renders relationships within the collectivity problematic because it crystallizes dilemmas around technical specifications and design in a way that makes them appear intransigent. ...
Innovation studies has been enriched by recent engagement with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which appears to share many concerns with the management of externalities and the enrollment of allies. But this approach nevertheless renders the question of where innovation comes from mysterious. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres, we develop a “parasitic” account of innovation, where third spaces, inscribed in material artefacts and visual representation, intrude into the innovation process. Illustrating our argument with empirical material derived from a study of Med Dialysis—a medical technology company based in the UK—we propose that parasitic interventions distribute order and disorder in a reversible fashion within innovative organizations. Anticipating and responding to the parasite is treated as a central process for managers and engineers who engage with a representation of the world that is “constitutively vague.” We conclude with a proposal for developing an application of Serres’ work in management and organization studies—a “dark organization theory.”
What part do physical environments play in materializing relationships? How is intimacy created in specific places, through specific objects? What do these places and objects imply about our understandings of intimacy? To answer these questions, I draw on fieldwork I conducted in Québec, Canada, and mobilize the tools of ethnography and qualitative social research to create a methodological bricolage with the aim of making familiar cultural processes seem strange (Clifford 1986). My project of making intimacy “strange” draws from queer studies and materiality and affect theories, which aim to deconstruct heteronormativity and to de-center the focus on humans, based on the work of Bruno Latour (2005), Tim Ingold (2012), Judith Butler (2002) and Sara Ahmed (2004). I use the material as a point of entry to understand how intimacies are performed and subtly mediated by elements that go unnoticed in common sense definitions of intimacy. From this perspective, intimacy is created by a combination of things: humans, objects, spaces, affect and texts that are each more or less attached to collective and personal aspirations. My contribution lies in showing how some objects and places are involved in the performativity of intimacies, and how the material can create ephemeral intimacies and concretize relationships. The cases I work through indicate a capacity for the (re)creation of intimacy, the reproduction of normative ideas, as well as a kind of distributed agency through the multiplicity of things that are necessary to achieve intimacy.
When fourteen-year-old Nadia Comaneci won gold at the 1976 Olympic Games, her youthful appearance inspired concerns about the hard training of young gymnasts. These concerns frequently centered around the coach as a figure of authority with the power to potentially exploit young girls. This paper both confirms and questions this assumption through using an Actor Network Theory (ANT) perspective. It is argued that what has been missing from previous accounts of sports training and competition is the role that nonhumans play. It is shown how existing Foucauldian work examining gymnastics can be extended through demonstrating the Latourian notion that power is enacted through nonhumans. It is further suggested that the inclusion of nonhumans such as video cameras into the gymnastics network can potentially generate different power arrangements from the traditional authoritarian coach/athlete relationship. Latour's concepts of mediators and intermediaries are used to show how nonhumans can have agency and affect gymnastics performance, demonstrating that power is shared among both human and nonhuman actants.
This article considers some political potentialities of the post-constructivist proposal for substituting truth with traceability. Traceability is a measure of truthfulness in which the rationality of a truth-claim is found in accounting for the work done to maintain links back to an internal referent through a chain of mediations. The substitution of traceability for truth is seen as necessary to move the entire political domain towards a greater responsiveness to the events of the natural-social world. In particular, it seeks to disarm the strategy of exploiting scientific uncertainty in order to defer political action concerning issues such as global warming. A broad acceptance of traceability as a standard for measuring truth-claims responds to the problem of the political impact of a given claim to truth often being inversely correlated to the degree of truth behind the claim because of the oft-prevailing faith in the purity of representation. This substitution has implications for policymaking based on scientific research, styles of journalism and classification of documents. Its success, however, depends on an arduous decoupling of the supposed link between truth and the purity of representation without the deleterious undercutting of all truth-claims.
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
"Do You Believe in Reality?" News from the Trenches of the Science Wars Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest Science's Blood Flow: An Example from Joliot's Scientific Intelligence From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment The Historicity of Things: Where Were Microbes before Pasteur? A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus's Labyrinth The Invention of the Science Wars: The Settlement of Socrates and Callicles A Politics Freed from Science: The Body Cosmopolitic The Slight Surprise of Action: Facts, Fetishes, Factishes Conclusion: What Contrivance Will Free Pandora's Hope? Glossary Bibliography Index
We begin with a remark from Chapter 2 of What is Philosophy?, which discusses the plane of immanence. This book, of course, is by Deleuze and Guattari, but the text, in this case, clearly indicates a Deleuzian provenance: Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. 1 Further on, Deleuze writes: Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape. Will we ever be mature 1. What is Philosophy?, 48.
The ethnographic study performed by Bruno Latour engaged him in the world of the scientific laboratory to develop an understanding of scientific culture through observations of their daily interactions and processes. Latour assumed a scientific perspective in his study; observing his participants with the "same cold, unblinking eye" that they use in their daily research activities. He familiarized himself with the laboratory by intense focus on "literary inscription", noting that the writing process drives every activity in the laboratory. He unpacked the structure of scientific literature to uncover its importance to scientists (factual knowledge), how scientists communicate, and the processes involved with generating scientific knowledge (use of assays, instrumentation, documentation). The introduction by Jonas Salk stated that Latour's study could increase public understanding of scientists, thereby decreasing the expectations laid on them, and the general fear toward them. [Teri, STS 901-Fall; only read Ch. 2]
During the past decade, the "script" concept, indicating how technologies prescribe human actions, has acquired a central place in STS. Until now, the concept has mainly functioned in descriptive settings. This article will deploy it in a normative setting. When technologies coshape human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question of how to act. This implies that engineers are doing "ethics by other means": they materialize morality. The article will explore the implications of this insight for engineering ethics. It first augments the script concept by developing the notion of technological mediation. After this, it investigates how the concept of mediation could be made fruitful for design ethics. It discusses how the ambition to design behaviorinfluencing technologies raises moral questions itself and elaborates two methods for anticipating technological mediation in the design process: performing mediation analyses and using an augmented version of constructive technology assessment.
This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social), the paper describes a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four 'moments' of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by defining the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the 'obligatory passage point' of the researchers' programme of investigation; (b) interessement: a series of processes by which the researchers sought to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in that programme; (c) enrolment: a set of strategies in which the researchers sought to define and interrelate the various roles they had allocated to others; (d) mobilisation: a set of methods used by the researchers to ensure that supposed spokesmen for various relevant collectivities were properly able to represent those collectivities and not betrayed by the latter. In conclusion it is noted that translation is a process, never a completed accomplishment, and it may (as in the empirical case considered) fail.