Circulating Material Practices

Abstract

Tools are important components of a community; or, from an actor network perspective, they are important actors that lend their own affordances and constraints to individual human agents and collectivities. In the past, tools — and, technology more generally — have been treated as something independent of society by analysts of technology. Thus, technology was said to influence individuals and entire social entities. On the other hand, individual engineers and scientists usually take credit for having invented a technology. In recent years, such a view of technology has shown to be insufficient in explaining most of socio-technical developments. Sociologists of technology (e.g., collection in Bijker et al., 1987) and historians of technology (e.g., Constant, 1989) now emphasize that it makes little sense to treat the social and engineering aspects of technology as separate entities. Adding social and technological aspects as independent components or taking either a social or technological approach and using the other for dealing with any residual problems also leads to unsatisfactory accounts of socio-technical development. It appears that social and technological aspects are mutually constitutive. In other words, phenomena involving society and technology are best treated in a holistic way, as irreducible socio-technical phenomena (Latour, 1992). ¹

The ‘Pasteurization of France’ (Latour, 1988b) includes a piece called Irreductions, which poignantly makes reference to the author’s methodological and theoretical approach as embodied in actor networks.