Person, animal, inanimate object... it's all the same to me! They all "do things"!
 

 

Actor-Network Theory emerged during the mid-1980s, primarily with the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and ​John Law; Susan Leigh Star had also worked with this theory at one point in her career. Actor-Network Theory attempts to describe a society of humans and non-humans as equal 'actors' tied together into networks that are built and maintained in order to achieve a particular goal. In this theory, actors can be any entity that 'does something,' and so a cable operator and the cable that he installs and maintains are both considered actors and are therefore equal. Other important elements of Actor-Network Theory are the network itself and the notion of a 'black box.'



The network simply consists of the group of unspecified relationships between actors; a black box is a collection of either actors or whole networks that are considered 'stable' and do not need to be considered when looking at the larger network to which they contribute. Actor-Network theory suggests that science is not fundamentally different from other social activities and consists of a process of in which the social, technical, and conceptual elements are pieced together and transformed in order to produce something.