Reviewing the Actor-Network Theory

to be in the broad domain of social networks. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, STS academics of the École Supérieure des Mines de Paris, are their uncontested continental parents. We can report John Law, in Lancaster University, as the leading British key proponent of ANT from the very beginning. Lancaster University provides a lot of papers’ references and sources on ANT in their site (see references). Actor-network theory is not exactly a theory, neither it is a methodology (Latour, 1998); we would say ANT is an approach, a paradigm, eventually a conceptual tool embedded in a constructivist paradigm. ANT is an interesting analytical framework to understand the role of science and technology in structuring actions in complex socio-technical systems. We think ANT can offer valuable insights on complex heterogeneous systems and we also think that it can go far beyond study, analysis, description and explanation of facts, but in this encyclopaedia entry, we will mainly address the common understanding on the subject. Taking both humans and non-humans as actors, ANT dissolves two dualisms: between human and technical artefacts, and between “network” and “actor”. An actor-network is composed of heterogeneous elements, animate and inanimate, linked to one another for a certain period of time. Actor-networks rise up and dissolve themselves as part of their life cycle. They can, at any