---
title: "Actor–network theory"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor–network_theory"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:10.578747+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Nonhuman actors can be considered as a condition in human social activities. Through the human's formation of nonhuman actors such as durable materials, they provide a stable foundation for interactions in society. Reciprocally, nonhumans' actions and capacities serve as a condition for the possibility of the formation of society.
In Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, his conceptual "parliament of things" consists of social, natural, and discourse together as hybrids. Although the interlocks between human actors and nonhumans effects the modernized society, this parliamentary setting based on nonhuman actors would eliminate such fake modernization, and changes the dichotomy between modern society and premodern society.
Nonhuman actors can be considered as mediators. On the one hand, nonhumans could constantly modify relations between actors. On the other hand, nonhumans share the same features with other actors not solely as means for human actors. In this circumstance, nonhuman actors impact human interactions. It either creates an atmosphere for humans to agree with each other, or lead to conflict as the mediators.
It is noticeable that the status of mediation is more affiliated with intermediaries or means as a stable presence in the corpus of ANT, while mediators function more powers to influence actors and networks. Technical mediation exerts itself on four dimensions: interference, composition, the folding of time and space, and crossing the boundary between signs and things.
Nonhuman actors can be considered as members of moral and political associations. For example, noise is a nonhuman actor if the topic is applied to actor-network theory. Noise is the criteria for humans to regulate themselves to morality, and subject to the limitations inherent in some legal rules for its political effects. After nonhumans are visible actors through their associations with morality and politics, these collectives become inherently regulative principles in social networks.
Nonhuman actors can be considered as gatherings. Alike nonhumans' impacts on morality and politics, they could gather actors from other times and spaces. Interacted with variable ontologies, times, spaces, and durability, nonhumans exert subtle influences within a network.

== Criticism ==
Some critics have argued that research based on ANT perspectives remains entirely descriptive and fails to provide explanations for social processes. ANT—like comparable social scientific methods—requires judgement calls from the researcher as to which actors are important within a network and which are not. Critics argue that the importance of particular actors cannot be determined in the absence of "out-of-network" criteria, such as is a logically proven fact about deceptively coherent systems given Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Similarly, others argue that actor-networks risk degenerating into endless chains of association (six degrees of separation—we are all networked to one another). Other research perspectives such as social constructionism, social shaping of technology, social network theory, normalization process theory, and diffusion of innovations theory are held to be important alternatives to ANT approaches.

=== From STS itself and organizational studies ===
Key early criticism came from other members of the STS community, in particular the "Epistemological Chicken" debate between Collins and Yearley with responses from Latour and Callon as well as Woolgar. In an article in Science as Practice and Culture, sociologist Harry Collins and his co-writer Steven Yearley argue that the ANT approach is a step backwards towards the positivist and realist positions held by early theory of science. Collins and Yearley accused ANTs approach of collapsing into an endless relativist regress.
Whittle and organization studies professor André Spicer note that "ANT has also sought to move beyond deterministic models that trace organizational phenomena back to powerful individuals, social structures, hegemonic discourses or technological effects. Rather, ANT prefers to seek out complex patterns of causality rooted in connections between actors." They argue that ANT's ontological realism makes it "less well equipped for pursuing a critical account of organizations—that is, one which recognises the unfolding nature of reality, considers the limits of knowledge and seeks to challenge structures of domination." This implies that ANT does not account for pre-existing structures, such as power, but rather sees these structures as emerging from the actions of actors within the network and their ability to align in pursuit of their interests. Accordingly, ANT can be seen as an attempt to re-introduce Whig history into science and technology studies; like the myth of the heroic inventor, ANT can be seen as an attempt to explain successful innovators by saying only that they were successful. Likewise, for organization studies, Whittle and Spicer assert that ANT is, "ill-suited to the task of developing political alternatives to the imaginaries of market managerialism."

=== Human agency ===
Actor–network theory insists on the capacity of nonhumans to be actors or participants in networks and systems. Critics including figures such as Langdon Winner maintain that such properties as intentionality fundamentally distinguish humans from animals or from "things" (see Activity Theory). ANT scholars  [who?] respond with the following arguments:

They do not attribute intentionality and similar properties to nonhumans.
Their conception of agency does not presuppose intentionality.
They locate agency neither in human "subjects" nor in nonhuman "objects", but in heterogeneous associations of humans and nonhumans.
ANT has been criticized as amoral. Wiebe Bijker has responded to this criticism by stating that the amorality of ANT is not a necessity. Moral and political positions are possible, but one must first describe the network before taking up such positions. This position has been further explored by Stuart Shapiro who contrasts ANT with the history of ecology, and argues that research decisions are moral rather than methodological, but this moral dimension has been sidelined.

=== Misnaming ===
In a workshop called "On Recalling ANT", Latour himself stated that there are four things wrong with actor-network theory: "actor", "network", "theory" and the hyphen. In a later book, however, Latour reversed himself, accepting the wide use of the term, "including the hyphen." He further remarked how he had been helpfully reminded that the ANT acronym "was perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler"—qualitative hallmarks of actor-network epistemology.