Science, Technology 10.

1177/0162243905280022 Neyland / Analysis of, the & Human Strategic Values Aspects of Actor-Network Theory

Dismissed Content and Discontent

An Analysis of the Strategic Aspects of Actor-Network Theory
Daniel Neyland
University of Oxford

Science, Technology, & Human Values Volume 31 Number 1 January 2006 29-51 2006 Sage Publications 10.1177/0162243905280022 http://sth.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Actor-network theory (ANT) has contributed greatly to the development of science and technology studies. However, recent critiques appear to have left ANT in a gloomy theoretical black box. What is the likelihood of ANT exiting its current theoretical discontent? Is ANT worthy of salvation and on what grounds? Law argues that recent critiques stem from ANTs development into a particular theoretical strategy. However, this article will argue that by focusing on strategy as messy and impure, ANT can be afforded the opportunity to shift from a fixed approach to an ambiguous and contingent strategy, well placed to carry on. The article achieves such an argument by first highlighting how ANT has contributed to a recent study of strategy in action; second, by outlining the strategic aspects of ANT; and third, by using the study of strategy in action as a means of engaging with ANTs current theoretical discontent. Keywords: strategy; actor-network theory; content; discontent

ctor-network theory (ANT) can lay claim to some significant contributions to science and technology studies (STS). Through Latours work on pasteurization (1988) and the missing masses (1992) and through Callons work on scallops (1986) and Laws work on Portuguese navigation (1986) (among much other work), ANT has rejected any sundering of human and non-human, social and technical elements (Hassard, Law, and Lee 1999, 388). Through the application of this sociotechnical symmetry, ANT has been used to investigate the achievement of enduring, heterogeneous assemblages. Above all, the actor network . . . is realized through the common enrolling of human and non-human participants into a network through processes of negotiation and translation, (Hassard, Law, and Lee 1999, 388). Although summaries of vocabulary for ANT have been attempted (see, e.g., Akrich and Latour 1992), Lee and Hassard suggest that the key to

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ANTs success lies in its habit of failing to forge its own internal and external boundaries (1999, 392). Despite this apparent success, there have been a multitude of recent critiques of ANT. Law (1999) argues that ANT is now excessively strategic (p. 6) and that it has been turned into a specific strategy with an obligatory point of passage (p. 2) with a more or less fixed location (p. 2). For Law, further critiques of ANT, such as problems of otherness (Lee and Brown 1994; Hinchliffe 1996; Hetherington and Law 2000), representation (Latour 1999), and centering (featured in Law 1999), follow from this problematic strategic status. That is, discussion of ANT and work using ANT has forged the kind of fixed location, well-known theoretical moves, and status as an obligatory point of passage that ANT previously sought to avoid. This materialization of ANT into an enduring theoretical strategy has left ANT without the necessary flexibility and ambiguity to tackle the issues raised by these critiques. Taking on these strategic arguments, what are the prospects of ANTs addressing recent critiques and exiting its current theoretical discontent? What moves could ANT make to shift from a single, known, and disputable approach to a more ambiguous and contingent strategy that is well placed to carry on? Would these moves be worthwhile in demonstrating ANTs worthiness of salvation? How could ANTs worth be assessed? This article will address these questions by actively interrogating the notion of strategy. The article begins by reporting on research carried out by the author investigating the utility of ANT as a tool for interrogating university strategy processes. The article proceeds to highlight the dismissed strategic content of ANT. The article concludes by engaging with the strategic aspects of ANT to address some of ANTs theoretical discontent. This engagement will investigate whether ANT is a thing to be saved and worth saving. Thus, the article begins by analyzing how theory can augment strategic activities, proceeds to suggest that ANT is a strategic activity, and concludes by arguing that engagement with strategic action can be used to assess the worthiness of saving ANT.

Part One: Using ANT to Analyze Strategy

Strategic Background
This article is one product of Evaluating Information Technology Related Change (EVINCE), a Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) Fund for the Development of Good Management Practice project.1 The project was established by a well-known proponent of STS.2 The aim of the project was to use an STS-informed ethnographic approach to analyze

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issues implicated under the term management practice by university information technology (IT) developers at two English universities. The author of this article was hired to carry out such an ethnography. HEFCE was sold this approach on the potential that STS approaches (such as ANT and the social construction of technology, or SCOT, approach; see Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1989) might have for providing an alternative view on some longheld issues in university IT management practice. The first such issue raised by participants to the research was information strategy (see below). Producing an STS-informed ethnographic analysis of information strategy provided an opportunity for analyzing the immutable mobility3 of STS research in its move from social science to university management. EVINCE formed one small part of the recent history of information strategy in English universities. Information strategy has formed a central tenet of government reports (Follett 1993; Dearing 1997), which have suggested that all United Kingdom (UK) universities must have an information strategy and that the absence of a strategy could have an unspecified effect on universityfunding body relations. Subsequent to these demands, information strategy has been the subject of HEFCE-funded projects (Joint Information Systems Committee 1998),4 and many universities have established information strategy committees during the past eight years. However, information strategy has not achieved a stable identity, and the information strategy committees of the two universities involved in the EVINCE project (termed university 1 and university 2 for the purposes of this article) were not in agreement on what an information strategy was, should be, or could be. There is little in the way of a singular body of literature on information strategy either. There are between two and three thousand books on how to do strategy (for information strategy and university strategy examples, see Goodman and Lawless 1994; Thompson 1995; Corrall 1994; Davy 1998), and there are accompanying histories of strategy recommendations (Mintzberg 1998; Whittington 1993). However, although the information strategy committees at university 1 and university 2 had some awareness of these mostly prescriptive strategic texts, neither committee was committed to the idea that a particular prescription would work for them.

Strategy Inaction
The EVINCE ethnographer spent a year observing and participating in university-strategy-related activity. It turned out that university 1 had a fiveyear-old strategy document and had held information strategy committee meetings for five years. While members of the committee were aware that the strategy document had been usefully waved at government funding agencies

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(such as HEFCE) as evidence of the presence of a strategy, they were also clear the strategy had never (to use their terms) been enacted in the university. Just prior to the EVINCE project, the information strategy committee established a working party with a remit for a new/updated strategy that the committee members hoped would successfully enact a new future for university information. However, during the course of a year of meetings attended by the EVINCE ethnographer, members of the working party struggled with definitions (e.g., what is information?), content (e.g., what should a strategy include?), and an aim for the strategy (e.g., what kind of future should the strategy propose?). There were also minuted difficulties in the working arrangements between the committee and the working party. Each group appeared to blame the other for the absence of strategic action. University 2, by contrast, had held information strategy committee meetings for five years but had never produced a strategy. Members of the committee spent their time debating whether there should be a strategy and what a strategy would do (if there were to be one). Members of university 2s information strategy committee produced an ongoing range of views as to what a strategy should contain and a range of worries about the future of university relations with government funding bodies if they could not produce a strategy when called on. After a year of observation, the EVINCE ethnographer was then called on to provide a report for the information strategy committees, recommending ways out of this strategic impasse.

Providing STS-Informed Sensibilities

An initial EVINCE suggestion, drawing on the extensive nondeterminist literature within STS (see, among others, Mackenzie and Wajcman 1985; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1989; Woolgar 1991; Bijker and Law 1992; Mansell 1994; Grint and Woolgar 1997), was that the information strategy committees might be attempting a form of strategic determinism. That is, the committees appeared to expect the production of a strategic document to have a series of effects that would be predictable and as they intended. The mobilization of an antideterminist stance from STS to university management was successfully achieved as members of both university information strategy committees recognized that the production of a fixed, rigid strategic document was unlikely to produce the future they aimed toward. However, committee members asked, if they did not follow the strategy document production path, what kind of alternative activity should they enter into? The EVINCE project attempted to provide a range of STS-informed sensibilities for reorienting university strategy activity. With multiple interacting entities (both social and material), apparent contests, and complex and

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mundane linkages, this antideterminist stance was augmented by ANT.5 ANT was deployed to argue that strategy could be considered as the linking of multiple, heterogeneous entities. This would require that members of the information strategy committees worked through a diverse array of linked regions, networks, and flows (drawing on Mol and Laws 1994 ANT). It was suggested in the EVINCE report to the information strategy committees (drawing on Law 1986) that strategy could be considered as a matter of overcoming distances and that what the committee members usually thought of as external factors beyond their control (they often referred to environment, culture, or context issues) could be drawn into the process of strategizing as entities among the connected network. Rather than approaching strategy as a single document, it was suggested to the committee members that strategy could be looked on as an ongoing, contingent, achieved process. This involved considering the process of strategy as similar to the story of Portuguese navigation told by Law (1986). The EVINCE report suggested that points to consider were movement of information from center to periphery (from the information strategy committee to the rest of the university), the establishment of robust, durable, repeatable, but flexible, routes (for information and for the entities connected in the process of strategizing), and the enrollment of allegiances (across the universitys strategizing process). The routes and informational flows could be constituted through the connection of a diverse array of entities that the information strategy committees could highlight as relevant for the purposes of the routes. The robustness of the routes would be dependent on connections that offered opportunities for overcoming distance. Drawing on the ethnography of committee strategic (in)activity, the report suggested distance could be oriented around questions of time, space, and action. In terms of time, EVINCE suggested that the information strategy committees were attempting to produce documents now to have an effect for the next five years. During this time, a range of activities could question the relevance of a strategy document. Overcoming this temporality by establishing an ongoing process within which informational routes and flows could be reassessed might lend a robustness to information strategy. EVINCE suggested that an ongoing strategy process could incorporate opportunities to dispute the content of strategy discussions and draw further entities into those discussions. By doing this, a strategy process might keep strategy debate refreshed and might overcome the notion that a strategy could go out of date. It would mean the strategic activity avoided forging an enduring and inflexible material instantiation. In terms of space, the information strategy committees often produced decisions that needed to be enacted at some distance from the committee.

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Nick Lee (1999) has termed this the problem of the general and the particular (p. 457)the production of general principles to cover a wide array of activity that then need to be enacted in particular circumstance. Through the establishment of an interconnected process, these decisions, enactments, and multiple interpretations might be brought closer together. The achievement of the strategy process would be a decentered connection of multiple disputes and multiple interpretations that could be communicated between (and further disputed by) the connected strategic entities to propel the strategy process onward. This onward propulsion would not necessarily have to aim toward a fixed set of goals but could orient toward an ongoing, disputable, connected, but flexible, set of principles. This would not mean that only the particular was possible but that shifts between the general and the particular might be made more available to those involved in considering strategic activity. Finally, in terms of action, the information strategy committees were often identified by academic members of the universities as being part of the center of the university, with the departments, faculties, and so on at the periphery of strategic activity. By connecting a heterogeneous collection of entities into a strategy process, this long-standing center-periphery boundary might be overcome, shifted, or replaced. The decentering, coupled with a shift toward embracing ambiguity (in the sense of the unfixed, uncertain, or indeterminate) or partiality (in the sense of incomplete and not all inclusive; see Strathern 1991) as a positive good management practice, would enable the strategy process to cope with multiple disputes to the content of the process. Unlike a fixed and single document, the first question to the strategy would not necessarily mitigate the strategy or initiate a strategic impasse. Instead, the connected strategy process would have to find ways to incorporate questions asked by academic members of the universities (e.g., What do you mean by information? What is my department supposed to do with it? Why do we need a strategy?). Attempts to retain relevance for a strategic document in relation to these questions, it was suggested by the EVINCE report, had previously generated a strategic impasse. The EVINCE report to the information strategy committees argued that it was unlikely that all routes and flows for connecting the strategy process would be equally successful at overcoming university informational distances. Instead, it was suggested that successful routes and informational flows could be folded into nodelike exemplars of what might constitute success.6 Success was taken to imply that those entities connecting to form the routes found that the routes and informational flows worked for them. These successes could then be translated to routes that were deemed less successful by the entities making up the connections for those routes, as demonstrations

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of what could or might succeed. Mobilizing these ANT sensibilities required a great deal on the part of the recipients of the report. It required them to reconsider the current management literature that some were aware of; it required them to rethink divisions they constituted every day between social and technical, human and nonhuman; and it required them to accept (to some degree) that the alternative being presented had some form of validity.7

Emphasizing Validity
Emphasizing the validity of the report involved two processes. The first process involved highlighting to the information strategy committees that the findings were based on the ethnography to which the audiences for the findings of the strategy report had been a part. The conclusion that a collaborative, ongoing process was required had been the product of a collaborative, ongoing process. The second process for emphasizing validity, however, involved further engagement with the management literature. The distinctiveness of STS and ANT needed to be emphasized to demonstrate to the universities that this was not what they had been trying all along. This emphasis of validity through claims to distinction was complex in that strategy as an inclusive and ongoing process features in much of the information management literature (see, e.g., Morton 1988; A. Lee 1999; Smits, van der Poel, and Ribbers 1997; Fjelstad and Haanaes 2001; Pettigrew 1987; Reponen 1993; Orna 1999; Ackoff 1981) of which some members of the committees were aware.8 However, in this management literature, first, information is regularly treated as an extant thing that can be passed from one person or group to another while still retaining the same identity (see particularly Birkinshaw 2001). The EVINCE report suggested instead that information would not just flow but rather that the flow could be conceptualized as a series of sociotechnical connections, each connection forming an opportunity to confirm the continuity of information usage or to reconstruct the usage and, thereby, the information itself. In this sense, information would achieve a form of stability only through being treated in the same way by each connector to the flow; the stability would not be an inevitable quality of the information. Second, culture/context/environment is frequently highlighted as the issue on which strategists need to come to terms (see particularly Smits, van der Poel, and Ribbers 1997; Orna 1999). The EVINCE report suggested that just as information could be most usefully treated as multiply reconstructable, nonstable, and nonfixed, so could what are often termed cultural/contextual/ environmental issues. Furthermore, by connecting multiple opportunities to dispute information and strategy, the strategy process could produce a forum

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for drawing together partially connected but disparate viewpoints of information and culture/context/environment. The EVINCE report suggested that this connectivity and retention of partiality9 could allow for the development of some coherence in and through the strategy process while also allowing opportunities for ambiguity to remain. Opportunities for ambiguity and partiality would be retained in the possibility of other entities being connected to the process, in the potential for questions to redirect the process, and in the potential that the absence of fixed end goals offered for more innovative developments. The membership of the process, the questions asked by the process, and the likely end product of the process could all (at least partially) remain open and hence offer opportunities for something not currently identified to enter (and question or redirect) the strategic process.10 The EVINCE report suggested that ANT sensibilities could be mobilized from STS to university management. This mobilization could be used to suggest that strategy should be thought of as an ongoing process that treats information, strategy, and connectivity to overcome distances as ongoing achievements. A diverse and contingent strategy process could then hope to overcome the current temporal fixity of strategies in university 1 and university 2, barriers of center and periphery within the universities, and multiple disconnected interpretations of strategy across the university. Incorporating opportunities for ambiguity and partiality, in membership of the process, in content of the process, and in direction of the process, could enable flexibility, contingency, and uncertainty to be considered as possible good management practice.

Part Two: ANTs Strategic Content

How can this study of strategy help ANT exit its current theoretical discontent? As suggested in the introduction to this article, ANTs strategic content has been implicated within its theoretical discontent. Part 2 of this article will now investigate that strategic content, before combining with Part 1, to suggest some ways forward for ANT. Particularly in the work of Law (see, e.g., 1991, 1997, 1999, 2000; Law and Mol 1995), ANT portrays strategic content.11 These references to strategy, however, raise a series of questions. What is meant by the term strategy in ANT? What does the term strategy do in ANT? What are the implications of using a theory that in some senses is a strategy (see Law 1997 and 1999 and below) to analyze strategy? The first two questions can be approached via a brief history of the use of the term strategy in the ANT work of Law. Law (1991) implicates strategy

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within a theoretical approach for interrogating the notion of power as the continued performance of social relations that stabilizes through certain strategies for ordering these relations and their power effects (p. 165). Strategy here is not about a single narrative, produced in a single source to have an intended effect; indeed, Law suggests that no single discourse or ordering strategy is complete; that, in practice, several are juxtaposed together and instantiated in any particular part of the network of relations (p. 166). No strategy is pure for Law; instead, strategies draw on a range of practices, organizing principles, and discourses. Law offers the example of Moses overpasses (on the Long Island parkways of New York), which, it has been argued (see Winner 1985), were deliberately designed to be too low for buses to pass, which was further intended to stop sections of the community that had access to buses only from passing also. For Law, this suggests that the strategy of racial discrimination drew on and sought to embed itself in these material forms (Law 1991, 176). Thus, the overpass was an embodiment of material and social relations that were not a single strategy but a set of ordering discourses linking peoples access to cars and buses, buses access to parkways, parkways connections to other places, and so on.12 To answer the first questionwhat is meant by strategy in ANTin Laws 1991 work, strategy centers on attempts to embed or achieve a stable set of organizing principles, discourses, and practices, often in material form. To answer the second questionwhat does strategy do in ANTit acts as one part of a set of theoretical relations drawn together to interrogate power. However, it would be misleading to suggest that strategy is considered in the same way across ANT or that strategy does the same thing in each instance of ANT analysis. In Law and Mol (1995), strategy both performs distinction and derives from it. But instead of helping us to understand social stability, strategy is about social change, about material inflation and the social shifts with which it is linked (p. 275). So strategy is once again implicated in materiality, but the link with stability is altered slightly. It is not just that strategies are embedded sets of relations that attempt to achieve stability; it is also that strategy resides in differences in material durability, manipulability, and scale. Indeed strategy is inconceivable without re-presentation; without relations in which one material signifies another (p. 281). Less emphasis is placed on the drawing together of disparate principles, discourses, and organizing practices here, and more is made of juxtapositions between various entities that go toward producing and/or re-presenting material distinctions. Law and Mol still suggest, however, that the best strategy is usually impure. Its a mix of different strategies (1995, 286). So strategy here is not used as a means to interrogate power but as a way of re-presenting material distinctions. This materialization of strategy does not forge a fixed singularity.

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In Law (1997), strategy shifts. Rather than being a device drawn on in ANT analyses, ANT is referred to as a strategy. Or at least, ANT is referred to in terms that fit with the best kind of strategy outlined above. ANT is not a single strategy; it does not hold a fixed position and cannot be told as a single narrative. ANT can be re-presented as the drawing together of distinct little stories, perhaps without an overall pattern. As a strategy, it is messy and impure, then. It is a strategy for drawing together a range of different discourses, practices, and organizing principles. Law (see also Law and Mol 1995) talks of the patchwork as a means of drawing together and juxtaposing, of re-presenting distinctions that can on occasions be linked. In Law, then, strategy shifts from a theoretical tool to a description of theory. Rather than ask what does strategy do for ANT, it could be argued (in Law 1997) that strategy is what ANT does. If this were the destination for our brief history of strategy in the ANT of Law, it would not be too difficult to answer the third question above as to the implications of using a theory that in some senses is a strategy (see Law 1997) to analyze strategy. The argument could be made that ANT embodies a juxtaposition of various analytical resources, embedded in the material produced under the headline ANT and made available as a redeployable, rejuxtaposable series of nonstable distinctions around and through which analysis can be achieved. That the analysis was then of strategy in action would not be particularly important as the analysis would involve a re-presentation of the theory as strategy, theory of strategy, and activity of strategy. However, our brief history does not end here. Instead, Law (1999, as featured in the introduction) needs to be considered. Law (1999) argues that ANT has been turned into a specific strategy with an obligatory point of passage (p. 2). Law suggests that ANT has materialized as a more or less fixed location which is performed, in part by the fact of its naming (p. 2). For Law, the achievement of ANT in becoming a recognized strategy, a recognized name, a recognized way of carrying out analysis must be considered alongside a series of relations that implicate ANT strategy in a more negative light. The fixed rigidity of the strategy that ANT has become represents a theoretical limitation. It was never the intention that ANT would be an easily transportable set of theoretical moves that could be made in a variety of locations. ANTs naming, transportability, and black boxing as a specific strategy have made it less flexible, less contingent on the subject of analysis, and closer to the notion of power outlined in Law (1991). He argues that perhaps ANT is now excessively strategic (1999, 6) and that moves made to know clearly what we are talking about . . . have done harm as well as good (1999, 8).

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So strategy here is about describing the theoretical content of ANT, but it is also about describing ANT as a theory with power implications. If we draw on a set of discourses that have to do with strategy, then the gravitational pull of those discourses is primarily about the struggle to centreand the struggle to centre and order from a centre. And as we know, this brings problems (1999, 5). In Law (1999), ANT achieves a problematic status as a strategy. This status is problematic primarily because the strategy of ANT appears to form a center from which to impose an order. Law suggests that as ANT draws things together, it performs a kind of centering while suggesting that everyone and everything is heterogeneous. But then, Law asks, what about distinctions of privilege within notions of heterogeneity? Furthermore, Law asks what about heterogeneity as difference, otherness, or as the inassimilable? Law suggests that these questions should be the concern of ANT and that ANT should be able to cope with various notions of difference and otherness, but that ANTs specific strategic status (and centering activities) often mitigates against this. The brief history of strategy references in the ANT of Law appears to have come full circle. What began in Law (1991) as an attempt to implicate strategy within a theoretical approach for interrogating the notion of power became a means of juxtaposing material distinctions (in Law and Mol 1995). These juxtapositions were then taken up as an element of describing ANT as a (messy and impure drawing together of) strategy (Law 1997) that result (in Law 1999) in ANTs achieving (a problematically fixed and rigid) strategic status. This strategic status, and particularly ANTs strategic centering, shift ANT close to Law (1991) and questions of power. Except that whereas Law (1991) emphasized that strategy was impure and messy, and whereas Law (1997) suggested that ANT had achieved the same kind of diversity, Law (1999) argues that ANT has now become stuck in one specific strategy. In this sense, ANT in Laws (1991) terms does not achieve a particularly powerful drawing together of relations, organizing principles, and practices into a strategy, but instead achieves a singular, fixed, and disputable position. For Law (1999), however, this is not an entirely negative position for ANT to occupythis is a problem of balance; there are advantages to having ANT known, but there are disadvantages to having ANT known as one rigid thing. Law (1999) asks, How to talk about something, how to name it, without reducing it to the fixity of singularity? (1999, 10). For Law (1999), further criticisms of ANT (see Lee and Brown 1994; Hinchliffe 1996; Hetherington and Law 2000; Latour 1999; these will be featured in part 3 below) follow from this fixity. So ANT, for Law, might still have much to offer if it can shift or dismiss these strategic implications. Effectively, Law argues it is (what he hopes will become the dismissed) strategic content of ANT that leads to

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ANTs theoretical discontent. However, this negative conceptualizing of ANT as a fixed strategy depends on an extremely fixed notion of strategy. As part 1 of this article suggests, university 1 and university 2 (and in part 2, Law [1991]) are aware that such fixed strategies do not work. Not working here implies that as strategies, they are not well placed to carry on and that they represent a fixed pattern of action that will necessarily be mitigated by any activities that raise questions over that pattern (otherness in ANT, belligerent academics who insist on their own interpretations in university strategy). The inflexibility of the materialized thing (be it ANT or a university document) means that the strategy is not well placed to deal with changes, ambiguity, the unfixed, uncertain, or nonstable. What, then, are the possibilities of ANT overcoming its theoretical discontent? One possibility of overcoming the discontent might be to reengage with the dismissed content. That is, by actively interrogating the notion of strategy and investigating the nonfixed, uncertain, contingent, and ongoing as concepts in strategy, ANT might be afforded an opportunity to achieve Laws (1999) balance of having a name but not a singularity. However, this raises further questions of whether ANT is worthy of salvation and on what grounds this might be assessed. I will argue in part 3 that the problem is not so much that ANT has become a strategy; the problem is that it has achieved a materialized and enduring fixed status, an immutable mobility, and that it requires a different kind (or kinds) of strategy to get out of its current black box. I will argue that part 1 of this article demonstrates that this salvation is worthwhile.

Part Three: Can Engagement with ANTs Dismissed Content Offer Potential for Overcoming ANTs Discontent? Would the Effort Be Worthwhile?
Part 3 of this article will now engage with ANTs discontent before subsequently assessing whether this engagement is worthwhile. Although the view from within ANTs current theoretical black box might appear gloomy, particularly given the myriad of recent critiques of ANT (see above and below), it is still possible to deconstruct the black box. This deconstruction can begin by interrogating three closely linked aspects to this problem of engaging with ANTs dismissed content to overcome its theoretical discontent. These three aspects of engagement are recent critiques of ANT, the strategic status of ANT, and using the study of strategy to investigate opportunities for ANT to shift theoretical focus. First, then, as part 2 of this article

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suggested, Law (1999) argues that ANT has achieved a problematic status as a fixed strategy. Recent critiques of ANT then proceed from this problematic status. This article will now focus on three aspects of these critiques: representation, inclusion, and theoretical centering. The notion of representation has been noted, particularly by Latour (1999), who argues that a great deal of our own vocabulary has contaminated our ability to let the actors build their own space (p. 20). That is, ANTs materialization into an enduring strategy, using the vocabulary of ANT theorists, raises the problem of how to open up opportunities for representation or greater actor participation. This problem of representing participants with a less contaminated vocabulary links closely to the second feature of critiques, namely, inclusion. Alongside the absence of a representative vocabulary for participants to the research, further critiques of ANT suggest that permanently escaping noncategories (Hinchliffe 1996, 676) must be borne in mind, that it is not possible to draw everything together to offer a single account (Hetherington and Law 2000, 129), and that ANT should remember the other (Lee and Brown 1994) outside the network. There is a dual critique, then, of ANTs strategy involving, first, failure to adequately represent and, second, the production of claims to universal inclusion. The apparently enduring claims to universal inclusion do not leave a space for the possibility (or even inevitability) of the nonincluded, undecided, noncategory or otherness. Part of the problem here is that these nonincluded features do not fit easily into any theory; they do not lend themselves well to the fixity of any research write up.13 However, as Law (1999) points out, the problem of theoretical centering in ANT exacerbates these problems of inclusion and representation. What has become the more or less rigid strategy of ANT effectively becomes the theoretical center, the obligatory point of passage through which all entities must pass. And that obligatory point of passage suggests that it is inclusive and representative. Although ANT was established on a rhetoric of inclusiveness (studying human and nonhuman entities) and antideterminism (that an actor-network entity does not necessarily have an inevitable effect), if it turns out that there are criteria for how an entity becomes an actor-network entity and a strategy by which that actor-network entity status is achieved, then this raises problematic questions about the strategic determinism of actor-network status. Second, however, as part 2 of this article also began to suggest, the notion that ANT has become a problematic fixed strategy is dependent on a very fixed notion of strategy. Indeed, it suggests ANT has become recognized as the kind of strategy Law (1991) and university 1 and university 2 (part 1 of this article) dismissed as unlikely to work. As emphasized in part 2, work-

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ing here refers to strategies that are well placed to carry on. Strategies that are well placed to carry on, I argued in part 1, are strategies that can incorporate a range of disputes, a range of sometimes disparate entities, and a range of questions that can propel the strategy process onward. In this sense, fixed strategies are highly problematic as they contain none of the ambiguous flexibility or partiality required to cope with questions directed at the strategy process. ANT, according to Law (1999), has developed into a fixed, obligatory point of passage that has led to problems in dealing with questions of otherness, permanently escaping noncategories, contaminated vocabulary, and so on. Third, though, it is somewhat ironic that ANT could then be used to produce an analysis of strategy in part 1 of this article as necessarily (and positively) messy, partial, ambiguous, and contingent. Does this suggest that ANT is not tied to one way of doing things, that it is not entirely fixed or rigid?14 Law (1999) argues that ANT cannot be anything and everything. That is, a balance between naming and being known on one hand and retaining flexibility on the other is required. How, then, could ANT achieve a decentered, inclusive, and representative identity without being restricted to being the decentered, inclusive, and representative approach known as ANT? That is, how could ANT change without materializing as another fixed strategy?15 What follows will have to be thought of as one suggestion to sit alongside others (it is also, I hope, a suggestion that incorporates sufficient opportunity for ambiguity and partiality to avoid being tied to singularity). As with the strategy process outlined in part 1, ANT could focus more specifically on shifts between the general declarations of ANT and the local, contingent, and messy application of ANT. Through this focus, ANT could act as a means of constructing a theoretical flow. The flow here would act a little like Mol and Laws (1994) ANT,16 with multiple human and nonhuman entities drawn together into fluid relations. However, while a variety of recent theorists have used notions of multiplicity and fluidity,17 rather than using the flow as a metaphorical tool to interrogate particular subject matter (e.g., Mol and Law [1994] focus on anaemia diagnosis), this article suggests that ANT could become the subject of interrogation. This is not a call for a further reflexive turn (Woolgar 1988; Ashmore 1989) but instead for a shift in focus to enable theoretical accounts produced by ANT to form a flow. This flow would offer opportunities for multiple connections to be drawn together, connections that could dispute the content of the flow, question it, redirect it, and reassess it. The human and nonhuman entities drawn together would act as multiple connectors without which the actor-network flow would not be achieved. The entities would also have direct input into the ongoing direction, questioning,

Neyland / Analysis of the Strategic Aspects of Actor-Network Theory 43

and achievement of the flow. This may generate a decentered actor-network flow without a single point of passage. The shift of flow from a topic of empirical inquiry to a form of empirical strategy could enable decentering through focusing on the materialization of entities into actor-network entities. Rather than depending on the terms of the ANT theorist, this materialization could focus more greatly on the moves made by the entities. ANT could be treated as an ongoing flow that incorporates a range of (possibly shifting) entities. Such a flow may also allow for a shifting or redistribution of power within ANT. It would not depend on such a strong emphasis on inclusion performed by the researcher, as the flow could contain multiple disputable points of passage, distributed among an array of connected entities. One means of illustrating this decentering is provided by a return to the strategy study of part 1 of this article. Here, the mobilization of ANT sensibilities from STS to university management was not approached as an imposition, but as an ongoing, constitutive activity. Attempts were made to decenter ANT through the strategy process, which involved a constant questioning (and reformulation) of ANT sensibilities alongside a questioning of information strategy issues (e.g., What is information? What is strategy?, etc.) to the extant that the two became intertwined.18 To avoid simply introducing a new, single, and enduring actor-network strategy, these flows needed to be able to incorporate opportunities for ambiguity. This was not simply about incorporating the idea that some aspects of the flow were uncertain; it required that the flow, the connections that formed the flow, and the content to the flow were all multiply disputable. That is not to say that the locations for disputes, the nature of disputes, or the outcomes of disputes could be easily incorporated into theory. This was the purpose of incorporating opportunities for ambiguity; the opportunities were themselves ambiguous and could relate to members of the interconnected flow, content of the flow, or anything else, as an incomplete theory should allow. Promoting incompleteness and ambiguity as positive aspects of a theoretical strategy might enable a theoretical strategy to perform shifts, allowing for ANT to escape a single fixed position. However, what of the third area of critique, representation? To return to Latours comment, A great deal of our own vocabulary has contaminated our ability to let the actors build their own space (1999, 20). How, then, could ANT allow actants opportunities to build their own spaces? Would this resolve the critiques of representation? Thrift (2000) argues that one of ANTs key strengths is that it does not represent, but invents; how could this sit side by side with Latours call? Perhaps if ANT is seen to invent rather than represent, would it be fair to ask, can ANT (re)invent representation?

44 Science, Technology, & Human Values

That is, could ANT reformulate representation, not as a means centered entirely on allowing research participants to give their own accounts but rather as a means through which research participants accounts could be given (potentially) equal status between the contesting heterogeneous elements of a network re-presented by the researcher? This may not be such an impossible task; network connections could be seen as the sites for positioning explicit and accountable claims and questions, and the flows outlined above could be taken on to represent movements within networks, allowing issues of relevance to the research participants (both human and nonhuman) to be highlighted. Actants accounts could be reinvented as an aspect of the actor-network flow of representative, dynamic, interactive, connective elements. Part 1 of the article can be used again to illustrate this point. The members of university 1 and university 2s information strategy committees produced a range of ongoing disputes of what information strategy should be, what their next steps should be, what to do with ANT-informed sensibilities they were being offered, and so on. These disputes formed an ongoing network of entities that ebbed and flowed (occasionally dramatically, with tables being thumped, and mostly mundanely through hours of committee discussions). While this (unsteady and bumpy) flow of claim and counterclaim could be studied as an empirical topic in its own right, for the purposes of this article, it could also be approached as the assembling of (one sense of) ANT. What got constituted as ANT, how this assemblage was drawn together, disassembled, redrawn, and reoriented as a messy and impure strategy said much (to the author) of the liveliness of representational issues in relation to ANT. It did not appear to form a single, materialized, enduring, and problematic strategy for representation. It could be argued that this focus on claim and counterclaim shifts the focus of ANT from one problematic center (that of the researcher) to another (that of the human participants of research). However, this is not inevitable. The assembling and disassembling of ANT in these claims and counterclaims drew on a range of what might be conventionally termed human (members of the information strategy committees) and nonhuman entities (pens, pencils, tables, paper, offices, lighting, PowerPoint presentations, etc.). Through this assembling and disassembling, ANT achieved a fluid (though multiple and decentered, messy and impure) strategic status (to the extent that the author had to chase after members of university 2 when writing this article to find out what they were now making of ANT).

Neyland / Analysis of the Strategic Aspects of Actor-Network Theory 45

Conclusion: Is ANT Worthy of Salvation?

This article has contained a study of strategy. First, this article began by offering detail on a project that used insights from ANT to emphasize that strategy could be rethought of as a contingent, ongoing achievement involving the connection of multiple disparate entities into a process. The purpose of the process was to further question, dispute, and propel the process onward. Second, this article then suggested that ANT itself had achieved a problematic strategic content. According to Law (1999), particularly, ANT has achieved a status as a fixed and rigid strategy. Third, the article argued that this problematic strategic black box in which ANT found itself required various moves to escape. These moves amounted to a series of performable shifts. The shifts involved transforming flows from a theoretical subject to a theoretical strategy; transforming notions of centering, inclusion, and representation; and incorporating opportunities for ambiguity and partiality to reside in theory via ongoing questions of content, membership, and direction. Is all this strategic shifting worthwhile? On what grounds should ANT be assessed as worthy of salvation? Is it a thing to be saved? To answer the latter question, ANT becomes a thing or materializes into an enduring strategy in Laws 1999 work. However, as part 2 of this article demonstrated, even in the work of Law, ANT shifts in diverse formations. This is not, then, a straightforward venture to save the thing called ANT. Instead, this article is an attempt to reinvigorate ANT so that it might return to the messy and impure strategic formations advocated by Law (1997).19 A variety of claims can be made in favor of ANTs salvation. The author of this article would focus such claims on the advantages of attempting to get to grips with mundane masses (the everyday and humdrum that are frequently overlooked), assemblages (descriptions of things holding together), materiality (that which does or does not endure), heterogeneity (achieved diversity within an assemblage), and flows/fluidity (movement without necessary stability). Alternatively, claims could be made that university 2 eventually incorporated the EVINCE ANT-inspired sensibilities into a new Web strategy process; HEFCE (the funding body) congratulated EVINCE on their work. During twenty-two university IT conferences, where the EVINCE ethnographer presented an ANT study of strategy, feedback was favorable. However, who is to assess these claims, using what means, and to what end? Although a variety of forms of evidence can be mobilized to support claims to the value of saving ANT, as Neyland and Woolgar (2002) and Woolgar and Cooper (1999) argue, the defining piece of evidence always appears just out of reach. In relation to the arguments of this article, the value of reforming the messi-

46 Science, Technology, & Human Values

ness and impurity of ANT might be evidenced by continued attempts to avoid forging rigid boundaries around ANT. In that sense, if this article forms one entity in a heterogeneous flow of further ANT accounts, then this may form and perform the disputable content to which other ANT accounts can attach, dispute, and further propel. There has been a diverse flow of interconnected ANT accounts passing through this article, some of which have been reformulated, reassessed, and passed on. If the end point of this flow of ANT accounts remains ambiguous, and if it is further propelled by subsequent disputes of ANT, its content, membership, and direction, this may act as further evidence of the worthiness of ANTs salvation.

Notes
1. EVINCE nominally stood for Evaluating Information Technology Related Change. The full title of the project was rarely invoked. HEFCE is the Higher Education Funding Council for England, a government body with responsibility for (among other things) distributing government resources to universities to cover costs such as administration and management. Members of HEFCE reiterated during the course of EVINCE that they do not fund research but rather fund initiatives. In this sense, EVINCE was not (supposed to be) a research project but was an initiative to test and employ the utility of science and technology studies as a form of good management practice. These issues of utility were sufficiently complex to provide a further work (Neyland and Woolgar 2003). 2. This proponent was Steve Woolgar (see, e.g., Woolgar 1991; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Grint and Woolgar 1997). 3. Immutable mobility is a term taken from the work of Latour. Latour (1990) argues that a great deal of work goes into the construction of what he terms immutable mobiles: you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another (p. 26). According to Latour, if there are competing accounts, the strongest will be the one able to muster on the spot the largest number of well aligned and faithful allies (p. 23). 4. The Joint Information Systems Committee is a government fundedbody in the United Kingdom that promotes itself as follows: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) supports further and higher education by providing strategic guidance, advice and opportunities to use Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support teaching, learning, research and administration (Joint Information Systems Committee 2004). 5. Monteiro (2000), McBride (2001), and Martin (1998), among others, have drawn on selected elements of actor-network theory (ANT) and emphasized its managerial utility. However, I decided not to selectively draw out aspects of ANT but instead to carry out an ANT analysis in university administration and management to raise questions about current management literature, suggest an alternative means through which strategy can be conceptualized, and to uncover a range of responses as to ANTs utility. 6. The term node is used in ANT (e.g., Law 1986) to convey the notion that each entity in a network is a network in itself but appears as an apparently more simplified, singular entity (a node) in connection with other nodes in further networks.

Neyland / Analysis of the Strategic Aspects of Actor-Network Theory 47 7. University 2 has accepted the validity of these claims and incorporated aspects of these ideas in the development of a new approach to Web information management (see Neyland and Surridge 2003). 8. Some members of the information strategy committees had been selected for the committee through claims to strategic expertise. For example, a member of university 1s information strategy committee went on to become chair of strategy in a business school toward the end of the EVINCE project. 9. The report was promoted as a partial, rather than a complete, solution to initiate discussion about strategy (e.g., What else should be included in discussion?). 10. While emphasizing the validity of this report involved making claims that the report represented something different from current university strategic activities, the report did not make claims to complete originality. Thus, the report suggested ways of approaching strategy that were distinct from current university activity but similar in some respects to other theorists of organizational activity (such as Chia 1998, 2001, 2002; Weick 2001; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von Savigny 2001; Czarniawska-Joerges 1992; Czarniawska and Sevon 1996; Czarniawska and Hopfl 2002). Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer who highlighted this issue. The EVINCE report deployed analytical exemplars from ANT (such as Laws 1986 work on Portuguese navigation and de Laet and Mols 2000 work on bush pumps) as heuristic devices to aid strategy committee members in engaging with strategy from an alternative perspective. 11. Similar references to strategy could be traced through other ANT studies (e.g., Schwartz Cowan 1989; Star and Griesemer 1989; Lee and Hassard 1999), and similar moves toward theoretical discontent could be retold through historical reconstructions of other authors work. (For example, Latours work on pasteurization [1988], drawing things together [1990], and questions of the missing masses [1992] could be redescribed as alternate theoretical strategies that are subsequently featured in later critique [1999]. A similar exercise could focus on the work of Callon.) This diversity emphasizes the difficulty of drawing ANT together into a single story (see Lee and Hassard 1999). There is insufficient space to cover this diversity in a single article, and Laws works will form the focus of this section as it provides one means for analyzing a shifting strategic focus in ANT. The diversity of ANT will be dawn into part 3 of the article. 12. Law (1991) does not make the same point as Woolgar and Cooper (1999) that the overpasses are subject to a range of disputes, and it is far from certain that buses were ever prevented from navigating the parkways. Woolgar and Cooper suggest that the overpasses are surrounded by an ambivalence that at some point might be resolved. This missing uncertainty in ANT returns in part 3 of the article. 13. Examples of this floating negation of the fixed research write-up include the liminal (Thrift 2000) and the blank figure (Lee and Hetherington 2000). 14. An argument could be made either way that part 1 proves that ANT is not fixed and rigid or that part 1 proves itself not to be an ANT analysis but merely an analysis that draws on some features of ANT. 15. Materializing here is intended to convey the sense that ANT may get talked of in certain ways, may get re-presented as having a particular set of moves, not just that studies that use ANT might follow a pattern. 16. This is also similar to the work of Rose (1996) on accountability. Rose produced an ANTinformed study surrounding multiple entities connected by informational flows. The difference here is that the focus is on incorporating ambiguity, problematizing connections and flows, and issues of representation, which are not features of Roses work. 17. For example, Mols work consistently focuses on notions of fluidity and multiplicity (1998, 2001a, 2001b). While a reviewer suggested a more thorough engagement with postANT work, this has been resisted on the grounds that talk of post-ANT work implies that

48 Science, Technology, & Human Values ANT itself is easily known and knowable and that we can comfortably move beyond it. Instead, I would like to suggest engaging with fluidity and multiplicity in relation to ANT (not as a single thing but as a multiplicity) to explore the possibilities for reinvigorating ANT. 18. At one point, a manager at university 2, when considering a variety of problems that had arisen in relation to the ongoing strategy process, said to me, Ive got bush pumps coming at me from all angles. Presumably, this was a reference to de Laet and Mols (2000) work on bush pumps that had formed an early discussion point. 19. One reviewer suggested that treating ANT as if it were a thing worth talking about in its own right risked a reification and that what Law (1991, 1997, 1999) and Latour (1988, 1992, 1999) are primarily interested in, which is answering questions. If talk about ANT has reified it to the point where it is no longer good for answering questions, why bother carrying on? However, as the conclusion to this article argued, assessing whether theory is worth continuing is a complex matter, and this article is designed as an engagement with the possibilities/advantages of reinvigorating ANT. As to whether this acts as a further reification of ANT, part 2 of the article attempts to demonstrate that even focusing on Laws (1991, 1997, 1999) work on strategy highlights a diversity around the term ANT (rather than a singularly reified thing easily recognizable as ANT).

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Daniel Neyland is a senior research fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. His work focuses on a diverse range of sociotechnical research projects including closed-circuit TV cameras, university information technology, recycling initiatives, airport security, and road traffic management.