The spaces of actor-network theory

Locating Communities in Natural Resource Management

“…These are the spaces where authority and power is held, shared and moved. By linking ANT and Stakeholder Analysis, consideration can be given to a full range of actors, the ways NRM policy is translated to action and the how different actors integrate by association (Murdoch, 1998;Pouloudi et al, 2004;Rockloff & Lockie, 2006).…”

Theorizing global business spaces

“…Actor-network theory (ANT) refers to a school of thought linked to the sociology of scientific knowledge which in particular has been concerned to understand how the social action and the production of knowledge are inseparable from the materiality of the world (Law 1994;Law and Hassard 1999;Latour 1993Latour , 2005. A range of contributors in this field have sought to theorize how social practices cannot be isolated from the material context in which they are undertaken (Callon 1998;Murdoch 1998;Dant 2005). Bruno Latour (2005, p. 4), one of ANTs leading thinkers, thus argues that 'there is no social dimension of any sort, no 'social context' or 'social force', no distinct domain of reality to which the label social or society should be attributed'.…”

“…Using an ANT-based epistemological perspective, however, I suggest that formal material spaces of business need to be conceptualized as material and physical contexts whose form is bound into, influenced and in part constituted by associations with distant objects, organizations or social actors (c.f. Murdoch 1998Murdoch , 2006. Two examples illustrate this argument.…”

“…Amin (2002) points to the difficulties in pinning down agency in the contemporary globalized world where in fact social relations (and hence actors and agents) 'perforate' many scales. Furthermore, the integration of actor-network perspectives (Law and Hassard 1994;Murdoch 1998;Latour 2005) has developed the argument that economic agency may be better conceptualised as a network effect, emergent from the wide range of associations that enable 'actors' to act and shape economic outcomes (c.f. Jones 2008).…”

Mobilities, moorings and boundary marking in developing semantic technologies in educational practices

“…While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologies, and the use of spatial metaphors in the framing of educational practices, the impact of spatial theory on the discussion of such education is less well developed (Nespor 1994;Edwards et al 2004;Edwards and Usher 2008;Ferrare and Apple 2010). With that comes a tendency towards cyber-utopianism and cyberdystopianism, wherein space itself is left unexamined as simply a different context, container or backcloth for curriculum and pedagogy.…”