According to John Law Punctualisation is an effect or a process – not something that happens and is then fixed. As Law says no version of the social order, no organisation and no agent is ever complete, autonomous or final.  Law states that Translation in ANT terms is a verb that means transformation and the possibility of equivalence – the possibility that one thing may stand for another e.g. a Network.

Translation is contingent, local and variable.

4 general principles of translation also apply:

1. Durability – some things are more durable than others. Thoughts and ideas are less durable than speech but walls are more durable than both. Walls though are only as durable as they are allowed to be over time. Walls can be taken down and turned into other things. Durability then needs to be approached with caution.
2. Materials and processes of communication. These include: writing, electronic communication, methods of representation, banking systems, early modern trade routes. These (translations) are what Latour calls immutable mobiles: letter of credit, military orders etc.
3. Translations that relate to the relationship between literacy and bureaucracy, print, the development of double entry book keeping, and newer technologies and the capacity to foresee outcomes.
4. The scope of ordering, Strategies relating to; enterprise, administration, vocation, and vision which operate collectively to generate multi-strategic agents and inter organisational transactions. Organisations may be seen as a set of such strategies which operate to generate complex configurations of network durability; spatial mobility, systems of representation and caluability – configurations which have the effect of generating the centre/periphery asymmetries and hierarchies characteristic of most formal organisations.

Questions stem from these concepts such as:

1. What kinds of heterogeneous bits and pieces created or mobilised and juxtaposed to generate organisational effects?
2. How are they juxtaposed?
3. How are resistances overcome?

4. How it is (if at all) that the material durability and transportability necessary to the organizational patterning of social

   relations is achieved?

5. What are the strategies being performed

6. throughout the networks of the social as a part of this?

7. How far do they spread?
8. How widely are they performed?
9. How do they interact?
10. How it

    is (if at all) that organizational calculation is attempted?

11. How (if at all) are

    the results of that calculation translated into action?

12. How is it (if at all)that the heterogeneous bits and pieces that make up organization generate an asymmetrical relationship between periphery and centre?

13. How is it, in other words, that a centre may come to speak for and profit

    from, the efforts of what has been turned into a periphery?

14. And maybe most interestingly – How is it that a manager manages?

 

I have just read “Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” by Michael Callon. This paper is a very good exposition of how ANT works in practice. I have found many later papers are not as clear or as well written as this early paper. Many recent papers such as Jim S Dolwick’s ‘The Social’ and Beyond: Introducing Actor-Network Theory are written in obscure and overly complex language. It seems that one way of creating a difference in journal writing is to use an obfuscating style. Another older (original) paper by John Law, Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering Strategy and Heterogeneity is also a clear description of ANT in use…

For example the concept of Punctualisation are in effect just simplifications of complex networks in the social sphere. Punctualisation can be summed up in a concept such as a railway station or sugar beet as an ingredient in a soft drink. They contain within them many other heterogeneous assemblages or networks. For example sugar from a sugar beet listed as an ingredient on a soft drink is an Actant in a network of other actants (actors) such as farmers, the soil, pesticides, pickers, the distribution network , the marketing company, processing plants, advertising companies, banks etc. etc. As Law states heterogeneous networks are precarious because they can fall apart at any time and turn into failing networks. Punctualisation though is a way of dealing with Networks of the Social without getting involved with a lot of complexity.