Summary:
One of the touchstone works among researchers, Spinuzzi's Network looks at activity theory, actor-network theory, and knowledge work, and asks the question, "Can't we all just get along?" His work merges--somewhat--the theories into net work with a backdrop of a somewhat dysfunctional, functioning telecommunications company. "This book ... is all about how genres circulate through and help build networks of activity in knowledge work and how we can trace those genres to better understand their networks" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 4). His book does not settle the arguments and differences between the theories, but introduces a dialogue of what each theory can, and cannot explain or address.
Citation-worthy:
"I think much of this confusion has to do with slippage in the term network. In actor-network theory, actor-networks are assemblages of humans and nonhumans; any person, artifact, practice, or assemblage of these is considered a node in the network and indeed can be an actor-network in itself. Links are made across and among these nodes in fairly unpredictable ways.… One can see why actor-network theory is considered political and rhetorical: it is in effect a politics and a rhetoric of symmetry, one in which no Cartesian lines are drawn between humans and nonhumans (see Latour, 1999B)" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 7).
"The links in the nodes of an activity network are often portrayed as supply lines: Activity A labors to produce an artifact that serves as a tool for Activity B; Activity C labors to develop practices that then serve as rules for Activity B; and so on. Activities do indeed interpenetrate or overlap (Russell, 1997A; Spinuzzi, 2003B), but they can still be pulled out and examined separately. And –most importantly – activity systems and networks in which they operate develop and change. Activity theory incubated in the field of educational psychology; its central concern is not politics or rhetoric or alliances, but cultural-historical development of individuals and groups" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 7).
"Networks are relatively stable assemblages of humans and nonhumans that collectively form standing sets of transformations: the network represents and re-represents phenomena in various areas. These phenomena include information such as orders but also people such as customers and co-workers. As we'll see below, these necessary rerepresentations introduce plenty of distance" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 12).
"But though networks claim large areas, in practice they are vanishingly small; their claim to power is that a transform the world so that things outside the network don't matter (Bowker, 1987; Latour, 1993B, pp.117-118)" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 15).
"Activity theory provides a cultural-historical, developmental view of networks grounded in the orientation of particular activities toward particular objects. It foregrounds the development of competence and expertise as workers labor to make Telecorp a success. (Of course success means different things in different parts of the network… Actor-network theory provides a political and rhetorical view of networks and foregrounds the continual recruiting of new allies-both human and nonhuman-to strengthen the… network. The two frameworks are very different, even contradictory, and can lead to very different conclusions" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 16).
"Genres – which can be glossed as typified rhetorical responses to recurrent social situations (Miller, 1984) – do much of the enacting that holds a network together. They do this work not by virtue of being simply text types or forms but because they are tools-in-use. That is, in this analysis, I stress genre as a behavioral descriptor rather than as a formal one (cf. Spinuzzi, 2003b; Volishinov, 1973). Genres typically function in assemblages, as I've discussed elsewhere (Spinuzzi, 2004), their compound mediation enables complex activities such as the ones we've seen in this chapter. As we saw in the first two disruptions, workers mobilized various genres to enroll allies for change as well as to support their routine, stable work. As relatively stable ways of producing and interpreting texts, genres impart some measure of stability (cf. Schryer, 1993) to the networks in which they circulate. But at the same time, genres develop, hybridize, interconnect, intermediate, and proliferate to support developments in those networks, providing the flexibility that networks need if they are to extend further and enroll other allies or activities (Spinuzzi, 2003B)" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 17).
"Directionless indeed. While activity theorists use genre to trace and explore historical development, using mediation as a way to conceptualize the impetus for such changes, actor-network theorists have avoided developmental examinations of artifacts in favor of examinations that emphasize relentless and infinitely interconnected intermediations. "In AT [activity theory], the subject-object relation is a historical phenomenon that came into existence as a result of the biological and cultural evolution," Reijo Miettinen points out. "ANT [actor-network theory] postulates a general theory of association of forces, regardless of what they are: (1999, p. 178). Despite the historical examinations of developing technologies common in actor-network studies (Akrich, 1992; Callon, 1986a; Law, 1986b, 2002a; Law & Callon, 1992), the emphasis inexorably turns to rhizomatic actor-networks in which all actants are connected to each other and intermediate each other more or less equally. As the root word indicates, genres imply genealogies, but the rhizome is an antigenealogy (Deleuse & Guattari, 1987, p. 11). No wonder actor-network theory has a problem accounting for the stability of networks" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 22)!
"We can think of at least two ways to build sociotechnical networks: weaving and splicing… Whereas woven networks grow through development, spliced networks grow through opportunistic alliances, through unpredictable jumps and sideways connections. They do have a history, a history of translations, but that history is one of contacts and negotiations and compromise" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 33, 35).
"We can see networked activities as cultural-developmental (as activity theory does) and as political-rhetorical (as actor-network theory does)" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 36).
"Activity networks assume asymmetry, casting nonhumans as mediators or objects of labor rather than as actants. They emphasize development, foregrounding human ingenuity, learning, and individual and social changes. And they exhibit structure in the composition of the activity networks and the activity systems that compose them" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 43).
"Sociotechnical networks can be seen as material assemblages that enact standing sets of transformations. These networks are heterogeneous, multiply linked, transformative, and blackbox.… Heterogenous—Sociotechnical networks are assemblages of humans and nonhumans: material assemblages that are constantly being enacted, that is, that interrelate in relatively stable ways.… Multiply linked—We have to talk about nets as well as knots; agency, competence, expertise, and cognition are distributed across the entire network.… This splicing work, Callon says, always involves negotiating and re-articulating – that is, transforming – text.… Transformative… Transformations happen as movements to different physical and social locales – different media, different activities, different groups with different social languages. And that brings us to the nodes of the network, the local areas in which the message was really articulated. These nodes are local activities in the sense used by activity theorists, but as Engeström et al. (1999) point out, these are often ad hoc activities, often deeply interpenetrated in each other. These activities are standing sets of transformations, but their complex interpenetrations mean that their transformations can be idiosyncratic and unpredictable. Each node has its own logic, its own connections, it's own text, and it's own skills of space and time.… Black-boxed… Black boxes tend to hide not just complexities but also local transformations. Send a signal into a black box and the output will be a transformation – you may not know how it was transformed, but you'll be able to predict the results of the transformation" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 46-50).
"Activity theory, in its "third generation," is attempting to move from the study of individuals and focused activities to the study of interrelated sets of activities, and thus into work organization, and it's also beginning to investigate issues of power and mastery… Simultaneously, actor-network theory is expanding from studies of scientific knowledge into popular science and technology and from there into work organization as well" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 62-63).
"Where an activity theorist would look for a germ-cell or abstract principle from which the many instances of the pump develops,… In an actor-network, the first stroke is a splice" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 66).
"So let's's talk about the development of activity theory itself. Yrjö Engeström (1996a) outlines three "generations" of activity theory in which its tenets were established. In the first generation, Lev Vygotsky and his collaborators built directly on Engles's ideas to develop the concept of mediated human activity in the individual, laying the foundations activity theory. In the second generation, A. N. Leont'ev applied the concept of mediation to larger social groups, yielding the unit of the activity system; this innovation is widely considered to be the beginning of activity theory. And in the third and current generation, Engeström and his collaborators drew on the words of Evald Ilyenkov (1977, 1982) to apply contradictions to activity systems and to conceptualize activity networks. Also in this third generation, activity theory began to come to grips with two aspects of splicing: polycontextuality and boundary crossing" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 69).
"In [an actor-network] view, power is not a possession of a prince, it is a consequence of the system: orders are followed not because the person who issued them is powerful but because they are transformed into actions that serve the interests of those who execute them. "If it were not the case, then the order would not have been 'obeyed' in the first place, and the person who gave the order would be said to be powerless!"(Latour, 1986, p. 268). Such an understanding of power contradicts the popular conception of Machiavelli as a schemer bent on consolidating dictatorial power" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 82-83).
"Actor-networks are mediated but in a very different way from activity networks. In activity networks, mediation comes between humans and their objects or communities. It is represented by the lonely corners of the activity system's triangle. But in actor-network theory, mediation involves coming between two actants – whether human or nonhuman – and creating a relationship between them. Every actant is also a mediator.… If everything mediates everything else, agency must be seen as distributed (Law, 1992, p. 383). This insight allows actor-network theory, like activity theory, to escape the subject-object dichotomy that leads us to ask questions such as: do guns kill people or do people kill people… But whereas activity theory escapes this dichotomy by viewing the subject-mediator relationship as a dialectic that changes pre-existing entities, actor-network theory handles the problem by seeing subjects and mediators as network effects: subjects and objects, actants and mediators emerge from the assemblage rather than pre-existing it. "The agent – the 'actor' of the 'actor-network' – is an agent, a center, a planner, a designer, only to the extent that matters are also decentered, unplanned, in designed" (Law, 2002B, p. 136). Which is another way of saying: the first stroke is a splice" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 86-87).
"Actor-network theory is a complex, sometimes loosely drawn approach to understanding scientific and technical knowledge. Based on relational sociology, it emphasizes the sorts of things that its Machiavellian roots emphasize: alliances, relationships, reversals, and betrayals. But unlike Machiavelli, it applies these principles to nonhumans as much as humans, and in doing so it expands from a political theory to an ontology. In this account, every actant defines and mediates others, and thus every actant is a potential agent; it is a symmetrical account. Actor-network theory provides a sophisticated set of theoretical and methodological tools in service of this account, although those tools are not as coherently assembled as activity theory's" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 92-93).
"Actor-network theory seems quite deficient if you assume it to be a theory of learning; activity theory seems deficient in turn if you assume that it should function as an ontology" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 93).
"These genuine differences have a real implications for understanding how the two approaches can interact. For instance, since activity theory addresses developmental issues and issues of competence and cognition, it is in a much stronger position to explain how workers learn and how they develop resources. At the same time, after-network theory's splicing account is stronger, leading us to examine how relationships among actants define those actants themselves and how changes in relationships lead to change in those actants" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 93-94).
"Activity theory sees history as developmental and linear and examines it through examining the contradictions that form in activities. After-network theory sees history as settlements that accrete and sediment and examines it through translations. Each provides insights for us that are potentially valuable" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 96).
"Text belong to genres.…"genres are constellations of regulated improvisational strategies triggered by the interaction between individual socialization, or habitus, and an organization or field" (2007, p. 31; cf. Russell, 1997a; Spinuzzi, 2003b)" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 146-147).
"Actor-network theory is simply not a theory of learning.… Activity theory, on the other hand, takes development – weaving – as its work. It has an extensively theorized and researched account of education and development based on dialectics. This is where dialectics really shines, of course: in examining how people formulate and develop concepts, how they assimilate and incorporate new knowledge" (Spinuzzi, 2008, pp. 186-187).
"Despite some influx of the dialogic theory, activity theory still understands learning as dialectical" (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 190).
