Having a Say: Voices for all the Actors in ANT Research?

This article explores issues associated with giving non-human actors a voice of their own in actornetwork theory based research. What issues arise in doing so? Does doing so increase understanding of the issue to hand, bring to life and make more accessible and interesting the stories of these actors? Or does this anthropomorphism detract from the issues at hand? The authors discuss these broader issues and then present findings from an ANT field study which investigated the implementation of institutional repositories and their relations with the spread of open access to scholarly publishing. This paper experiments with allowing some of the non-human actors to speak for themselves. The authors conclude with a discussion which opens the debate: does giving voice to non-human actors bring them to life and make them better understood as intimately entangled with each other and human actors in the socio-material practices of the everyday? And what are the challenges in doing so? DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1559-5.ch004

[1]  Lee C. Van Orsdel,et al.  Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness , 2008 .

[2]  Cat S. McDowell.  Evaluating Institutional Repository Deployment in American Academe Since Early 2005: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 2 , 2007, D Lib Mag..

[3]  Jerzy Jozefczyk,et al.  Knowledge-Based Intelligent System Advancements: Systemic and Cybernetic Approaches , 2010 .

[4]  J. Law.  After Method: Mess in Social Science Research , 2004 .

[5]  Clifford A. Lynch,et al.  Institutional Repository Deployment in the United States as of Early 2005 , 2005, D-Lib Magazine.

[6]  Ian Hosein,et al.  A Research Note on Capturing Technology: Toward Moments of Interest , 2002, Global and Organizational Discourse about Information Technology.

[7]  B. Latour,et al.  Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts , 1979 .

[8]  Arthur Tatnall,et al.  Actor-Network Theory and Information Systems Research , 1999 .

[9]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals , 1999, D Lib Mag..

[10]  J. Willinsky.  The access principle: The case for open access to research , 2005 .

[11]  K. Dale,et al.  Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organizational Control , 2005 .

[12]  Danuta Zakrzewska.  Validation of Clustering Techniques for Student Grouping in Intelligent E-learning Systems , 2012, Int. J. Organ. Collect. Intell..

[13]  B. Latour.  10 ''Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts'' , 1992 .

[14]  Richard J. Boland,et al.  The Limits of Language in Doing Systems Work , 2000, Organizational and Social Perspectives on IT.

[15]  Richard Vidgen,et al.  Boxes, Non-Human Stakeholders and the Translation of IT Through Mediation , 1996 .

[16]  Arthur Tatnall,et al.  Innovation and change in the Information Systems curriculum of an Australian University: a socio-technical perspective. , 2000 .

[17]  Alma Swan,et al.  Institutions, Their Repositories and the Web , 2008 .

[18]  Sandra Payette,et al.  Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (FEDORA) , 1998, ECDL.

[19]  晋典 岡部,et al.  Budapest Open Access Initiativeの思想的背景とその受容 , 2011 .

[20]  Lucy Suchman,et al.  Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions , 2006 .

[21]  Libby Hemphill,et al.  Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions, 2nd ed , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[22]  Bo-Christer Björk,et al.  Global annual volume of peer reviewed scholarly articles and the share available via different Open Access options , 2008, ELPUB.

[23]  R. Dubos,et al.  The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice , 2007 .

[24]  Lena Porsander.  "My name is Lifebuoy" An actor-network emerging from an action-net , 2005 .

[25]  John Law,et al.  Shaping technology building society: studies in socio-technical change , 1993 .

[26]  Athanasia Pouloudi,et al.  Representing Human and Non-human Stakeholders: On Speaking with Authority , 2000, Organizational and Social Perspectives on IT.

[27]  Andrea Quinlan,et al.  Performing Actor-Network Theory in the Post-Secondary Classroom , 2011, InnovaInt. J. Actor Netw. Theory Technol. Innov..

[28]  Wanda J. Orlikowski,et al.  The entanglement of technology and work in organizations , 2008 .

[29]  Danny Kingsley,et al.  e-Publishing's Impacts on Journals and Journal Articles , 2008 .

[30]  Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic,et al.  Have You Taken your Guys on the Journey?: An ANT Account of Information Systems Project Evaluation , 2009, InnovaInt. J. Actor Netw. Theory Technol. Innov..

[31]  Rob Kling,et al.  Electronic journals, the Internet, and scholarly communication , 2005, Annu. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[32]  B. Latour.  Science in Action , 1987 .

[33]  A. Mol.  The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice , 2003 .

[34]  B. Latour.  We Have Never Been Modern , 1991 .

[35]  Tas Adam.  A Petri Net Model for Analysing E-Learning and Learning Difficulties , 2011, InnovaInt. J. Actor Netw. Theory Technol. Innov..

[36]  Andrew Treloar.  ARROW targets: institutional repositories, open-source, and web services , 2005, WWW 2005.