Reassembling the Social
An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
Bruno Latour
Price: £34.00 (Hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-925604-4
Publication date: 28 July 2005
312 pages, 1 b/w line illustration, 8 half tones, 234x156 mm
Series: Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies
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| Reviews |
| - 'Latour's book can also serve, not so much as a model to copy, but certainly as a source of inspiration for how to write a social science text: vividly, engagingly, eloquently.' - Organization Studies
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| Description | | - Bruno Latour is a world famous and widely published French sociologist who has written with great eloquence and perception about the relationship between people, science, and technology
- Latour is closely associated with the school of thought known as Actor Network Theory
- In this book he sets out for the first time, in one place, his own ideas about Actor Network Theory and its relevance to management and organization theory
- Subjects the use of the adjective 'social' by the social sciences to critical analysis
| 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.
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Readership: Scholars and students across the Social Sciences, but particularly those concerned with Social, Political, and Organization Theory.
| Contents |
Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations
Part I: How to Deploy Controversies About the Social World
1.
Learning to Feed from Controversies
2.
First Source of Uncertainty: No Group, Only Group Formation
3.
Second Source of Uncertainty: Action is Overtaken
4.
Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects Too Have Agency
5.
Fourth Source of Uncertainty: Matters of Fact vs. Matters of Concern
6.
Fifth Source of Uncertainty: Writing Down Risky Accounts
7.
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT - An Interlude in Form of a Dialog
Part II: How to Render Associations Traceable Again
8.
Why is it So Difficult to Trace the Social?
9.
How to Keep the Social Flat
10.
First Move: Localizing the Global
11.
Second Move: Redistributing the Local
12.
Third Move: Connecting Sites
13.
Conclusion: From Society to Collective - Can the Social be Reassembled?
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Bruno Latour, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris
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