ABSTRACT
Latour’s main field of workmay be called the sociology of science. His tenet is that the world belongs neither to technology nor to sociology, and that it is the distinction between the two that gets us into trouble. A hardening of either side removes us from the real world in which scientists and technologists go about their work, where the social and the technological are entangled. His concern about sociology is that it should not retreat into the social; it should extend its understanding to the sphere of materiality, technology and artefacts because, he argues, there is no durable social system without material means to keep it together. In a similar way that Whitehead devoted his work to understanding how complex unities come into being, Latour devotes his work to explaining how human and non-human actors are assembled to form durable wholes (Latour, 2005a:68). This has been perhaps the fundamental implicit question behind much of organization theory, as well. Whereas most organization theory has been locked into an entitative view of organizations, the originality of Latour’s contribution lies in the way that he conceptualizes connections and associations between actors, thereby dispelling the extensive use of levels of analysis in organization theory.
