Eric Monteiro & Sundeep Sahay

Abstract for the Latour workshop, Midsummer night in Tromsø, 2000

1. Introduction

We critically discuss the suitability of ANT to a set of relevant, empirical settings for IS research. This is not motivated by any ideologically driven crusade against ANT as such (a la the epistemological chicken debate, Pickering 1992). Our aim is rather to inquire whether ANT (qua interpretative framework) privileges certain aspects and is blind to others, a blindness that we as IS researchers need to critically reflect upon in studies we are already involved in as well as those we see coming. We are concerned, then, about the seemingly (implicit) assumption that ANT can be used for everything – urban transportation, microbes and hotel keys alike. Our motivation is accordingly to contribute constructively to an appropriation of ANT within the community of practising IS researchers.

We argue that ANT inscribes a certain behaviouristic goal directedness that is problematic for (at least) some cases of information systems use. More specifically, we want to (i) identify and discuss the goal directedness of ANT, (ii) illustrate a few cases from IS research where this is problematic and (iii) discuss whether interpretative research based on ANT need to develop a sense of the conditions under which ANT is appropriate for IS research.

2. Elements of goal-directedness in ANT: sources, manifestations and responses

There is, we argue, an inscribed tendency in ANT to focus on relatively goal directed actions. And this does not come as a big shock to those well versed in ANT. Hence, the "managerial, engineering, Machiavellian, demiurgic character of ANT has been criticised many times" as noted by Latour (1999a, p. 16). In this sense, ANT has been said to produce actants that are "flat"; they are without much blood and tears – or "hairy gorilla-like" as Latour (ibid., p. 16) expresses it.

Still, for the IS research community, it is informative to elaborate on the sources and manifestations of this tendency to over-emphasize the strategic/rational/goal-oriented aspect of ANT. This is valuable in order to minimize the danger of an instumental employment of ANT that already "has done harm as well as good" (Law, 1999, p. 8).

1. The sources

The principal reason why ANT is biased towards strategic behaviour is fairly obvious. Given the STS ambition of empirically examining how facts and technology get invented, this is not alltogether surprising. Projects – turning beliefs into scientific facts, conquering the world from a laboratory or manuevring an artefact from the sketchboard into use – are in a straightforward sense about realizing goals, accomplishments. Hence, there is no coincident that this may result in accounts that are "excessively strategic" (Law, 1999, p. 6).

2. Manifestations – and some of the responses

Two well-known manifestations are:

• priviledging of the centre
• priviledging of one perspective

The privileging of the centre stems in practical, metdological terms from the way ANT starts out by identifying key actors, interests and scenarios before tracing these over time. This centeredness got further exaggerated by the early studies of laboratories which act as natural centres.

Mol and Law (1994), for instance, challenge the centeredness of many ANTish accounts by generalising the notion of social space. Space is not, they argue, intrinsically linked to our traditional, physical sense of space (which may privilege centred accounts), but rather behaves more like a fluid (ibid., p. 643), thereby emphasising the leaking and deleting of physical boundaries. A similar modification of the centeredness of ANT is formulated by Coussins (1996) through the notion of choreography.

Part of the reasons ANT could be perceived to be too Machiavallian, is due to its reliance on pedagogic examples of the hotel-key & door-opener character. Still, the problem of privileging one perspective has been critizised most succintly by SL Star in her series of work where ANT is supplemented with insights from feminist theory, symbolic interactionism and activity theory. The gist of the critique is that despite ANT’s capacity to account for hetereogenity and multivocality, "this is only one kind of multiplicity, and one kind of power, and one kind of network" (Star, 1991, p. 28).

The critique about an excessibely strategic bias in ANT is explicitly addressed in Latour (1999b) by emphasising the "slight surprise of action". Action, Latour reassures us, is never really goal-oriented/strategic as "we are not in command, we are slightly overtaken by the action" (p. 281), "their consequences are unforeseen" (p. 288) and subject to translations characterised by "displacement, drift, invention, mediation" (p. 179).

Hence, there can be no doubt that at the espoused level ANT qua Pandora, the most comprehensive and systematic outline of this theory in many years, does underscore that the strategic/goal-oriented bias is greatly exaggerated as, in principle, there can always be "a drift, a slippage, a displacement" (p. 88).

The question, however, which occupy us remains despite this: is there not – in practise – still a bias; does not the assurance about the "slight surprise" go only skin deep without ever upsetting the basics of ANT?

1. Cases from IS
1. IT-mediated global work

Increasingly, IS researchers are studying work arrangements that are global in nature and which are intensively mediated through the use of ITs. ANT holds a lot of promise in providing researchers with concepts to study these complex hybrids of human and non-human actors and how these networks evolve or not over time. However, the goal-directedness assumption of ANT also provides some fundamental challenges to study various aspects of these global arrangements. One aspect of interest to us is the question of identity of individuals and organisations as they get increasingly embroiled in global networks.

For the last four years or so, we have been studying Indian software organisations forming alliances with American and European firms to develop and maintain software for them. A key strategy employed by the American firms in these relationships is to homogenise and standardise their work practices to the extent possible so as to allow them to efficiently "switch" between software development partners located in different parts of the world. An American manager may be simultaneously working with Indian, Brazilian, Chinese and Irish programmers, and thus are interested in reducing the uncertainty of moving back and forth between these countries. For example, when a "C" level manager in America is talking to an equivalent "C" level manager in India, he wants to know what "C" level means in terms of skills of communication, supervision, and authority. This need for standardisation has led to initiatives to create common templates for identifying, measuring and evaluating "performance dimensions" of managers. By applying these performance dimensions to all their global partners, the American firms are trying to create a template for a "global standard manager."

From the perspective of the Indian firm, at one level they are interested in becoming "close" to their American clients as a part of their "family". Closeness is also conducive in improving the business prospects. However, in becoming close, they feel that they lose their sense of Indian identity, and also become more distant with the other developers of their organisation who may not be working with American clients. As the American firm introduces their management practices in the Indian organisation in their attempts to standardise, these new systems create conflicts with the existing systems of practices in the Indian organisation. There is thus an ongoing struggle of proximity and distance as the Indians accept and reject standardisation attempts respectively. This tension has interesting implications for the sense of identity of the Indian developers and also the organisation. To study these shifting dynamics of identity and their implications on the relationship is something we are interested in studying, and are exploring the use of ANT for this, especially the recently expressed concept of "circulating reference" in Pandora’s Hope.

Studying this notion of identity with ANT is problematic because the notion of action as conceptualised in ANT seems to be more directly situated in time and place – something that can be "seen" as we "follow the actors". Like the scientists in the Amazon forest taking a piece of soil and subjecting it through different steps (like passing it through the Munsell colour code scheme). These steps can be seen, and there is a goal-directedness implicit in these different steps – going from the soil in the forest to a categorised sample in the lab. Also, to understand a notion like identity, we have to conceptualise not only action but broader social structures which shape identity – our traditions, history, culture. Identity is shaped by structures not just limited to interests reflected in actions which are situated in the here and now. Indian identity is shaped by a complex and multi-faceted set of factors, both explicit and implicit. Some of the strategies for "long-distance control" employed by the American are explicit – for example, the reference document that describes the performance dimension initiative. Some are not explicit and shaped by networks not explicitly part of the network under study. Some of the effects come from unintended events such as the Indians reflectively examining a sense of their identity and making changes in how they project themselves. Such effects can take place under different time-space conditions than what we are trying to study.

A notion of identity is thus difficult to study with ANT because of the following reasons:

Cannot be directly linked to "action"

Cannot directly be linked to action that is not situated in time and pace.

How do we understand action not directly linked to the idea of interests – coming from traditions, cultural – other structures? Other networks?

How to take into account unintended effects?


 

2. Domestication of mobile phones

The rapid diffusion of mobile phones make the traditional notion in IS research of the "use" of technology extremely crude. Mobile phones are not merely "used", they are domesticated and tamed as part of our ongoing, everyday life. They are cultivated as part of our self-identity. The boundary between the professional, work-oriented sphere and the private, everyday one is eroding. The "use" of mobile phones hinges significantly on the (ongoing) manner in which they are ascribed symbolic meaning (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morely 1992; Lie and Sørensen 1998; Nye 1990; Monteiro, 1999).

There does not seem to exist much detailed, empirical work on how mobile phones get appropriated into everyday life. Still, is seems reasonable to focus studies on the rich set of ways in which phones are domesticated to everyday life. This would imply starting unpacking not from the designers’ inscriptions but rather from the variety of patterns of use. How are phones used symbolically to gesture membership to certain communities? In what ways do phones express and present externalised images of identy? What does the compact and abbreviated language that teenagers use for messages signify?

3. The life on the net

Some aspects of the "use" (sic!) of the Net may be recognised more as expressions of identity and self-presentation than any form of strategic/goal-oriented behaviour. The Net is but one of many manifestations whereby we present ourselves. The "use" of the Net carves out territories and areanas that, over time, aquire the status of communities (Silverstone, unpublished manuscript).


The use of the Net involves expressions of identity and bring a number of more individual, "psychological" aspects to the surface. For instance, Civin (1999) reports on a variety of ways in which the use of the Net span responses of anxiety, chaos, distress, paraoid-schiziod functions as "cybersystems may foster, even exacerbate, many individuals’ anxiety that the organizational environment will be persecutory" (p. 491).

2. A Grand Theory of Everything?! – worrying about boundaries

Given the elaborate and nuanced concepts in ANT which have been so convincingly demonstrated in the booming collection of cases which have employed an ANTish framwork, it goes without saying that the tendency towards goal-directedness is slight. The coining of our critique as "goal-directedness" should accordingly not be mistaken to be the ridiculous claim that ANT is comparable to simplistic accounts of goal oriented behaviour. Of course not. It is rather the more modest claim that there are some cases, including those illustrated above, that pose this question.

There are surely none that seriously hold that ANT is without boundaries, that ANT somehow is the last dinosaur of a Grand Theory. There is a fairly wide-spread consensus among the well versed that ANT cannot be employed for everything. The problem, however, for us IS researchers less versed is that little or nothing of this is made explicit. The hard-core ANTers keep themselves busy refining, extending, adding nuances as "the most important theoretical and practical questions which we confront: how to deal with and fend off the simplifications" (Law, 1999, p. 10) or curb the "ridiculous poverty of the ANT vocabulary" (Latour, 1999a, p. 20).