What makes human–animal relations ‘organizational’? The de-scription of anthrozootechnical agencements

Abstract

Questions concerning animals’ role in society have received little attention from Organization Studies. This article develops and tests some theoretical and methodological propositions aimed at contributing to the elaboration of an analytical framework for interpreting our organized relations with animals and furthering our understanding of what makes human–animal relations ‘organizational’. First, examining the role of animals in the ‘non-human turn’ that has been emerging, especially with the Actor–Network Theory and the Symmetrical Anthropology project, it adresses the limits of the ‘non-human’ category to analyze situations of coordination of collective action involving animals. It then develops the concept of anthrozootechnical agencement to envisage the role of animals in the course of action through the lens of their relational properties and applies the notion of script to propose an operational formulation of the specifically organizational trials to which these particular agencements are subjected. Based on three case studies (the role of the leash in the organization of human–dog relations, the management of wolves’ return to France, and the production of milk on a dairy farm), this article shows that two main types of operation make human–animal relations ‘organizational’: first, the organization of anthrozootechnical relations is constituted by and constitutive of the combination of three types of specifically organizational test to which these particular agencements are subjected (the performance test, the coherence test, and the dimensioning test); second, the work of organizing anthrozootechnical relations then consists in elaborating, executing, and transforming heterogeneous scripts that are never strictly indexed on the nature (human, animal, technique) of the entities they concern.

Hefted: reconfiguring work, value and mobility in the UK Lake district

“…Documents, including the transient passage of text and image in online spaces, as intermediaries are both actants and inscriptions. They represent inscribed agential relations (Dore and Michalon 2016) and in doing so attempt to ascribe particular organizational contexts, including roles and programs of action. Our range of documents such as DEFRA reports, Federation of Cumbrian Commoners newsletters, marketing material for sheep products, farms and abattoirs incorporate clear scripts regarding the relations between actors and their mobility.…”

“…As we shall illuminate in our examples, this applies to the farming of Herdwick lamb (as a food product) and to wool and craft products that capture the essence of place and use it to drive perceptions of quality and contest the market logic of commensurability. Dore and Michalon (2016) draw on Latour (1993) to highlight how animal relations are encoded in scripts, and manifest in objects such as the leash. The idea of the script as a programme of action that may be embedded in an object is outlined by Akrich and Latour (1992) as a way of articulating relations between technologies and humans and their intent to provoke particular programmes of action.…”

“…The Herdwick, as a product of selective breeding and territorial practices, is both inscribed with and ascribes judgements of mobility. Dore and Michalon (2016) argue that animal-human relations are better understood by reference to their co-functioning multiplicities because their organized relations lie in the production and maintenance of coherence in specific spatio-temporal frames. The Herdwick has direct influence as a subject in the network relations of Lake District businesses and their particular form of organising, hefting, crafts coherence between human, animal and technical actants.…”

Archaeo-Ornithology: Towards an Archaeology of Human-Bird Interfaces

“…Ongoing attempts to overcome the human-animal polarity by invoking mixed or hybrid 'humanimal relations' (e.g. Lestel, Brunois, and Gaunet 2006;Guillo 2009; Taylor and Signal 2011), 'anthrozootechnical agencements' (Doré and Michalon 2017) or notions of 'non-human personhood' (e.g. Descola 2005;DeGrazia 2006;Hill 2013;Locke 2017;Morton 2017) illustrate the respective discursive dynamics.…”

“…Hussain 2018a). With its privileged focus on material culture and skeletal remains, archaeology, moreover, finds itself in a highly favourable position to chart the intersections of and interdependencies between tangible things andoften less tangiblehuman-animal articulations, which in turn may contribute to the formation of what has been termed 'anthrozootechnical relations' (Doré and Michalon 2017). The synchronic interrogation of multiple lines of evidence is thus of central importance for working towards an integrated perspective on the changing significance of animal others within different past sociocultural contexts, under different ecological circumstances and in varying domains of human life.…”