I was speaking to a colleague at work the other day about Actor-Network Theory and applying it to a work-based issue. I mentioned that ANT seems to invoke quite strong emotional responses in people sometimes for example I mentioned using ANT to another colleague who responded along the lines of “you don’t want to use ANT because it’s all about power”. This person seemed quite taken aback at the thought I would actually use ANT. This other colleague of mine said “of course ANT is about power!” I said I thought everything especially at work and in terms of project teams, innovation and technology is about power. This person recommended that I read a book called Kinds of Power by James Hillman (Doubleday, 1995).

I’ve now got a copy of this book and have just started to read it. I’ll update on this in a later post, but the main thrust of the book is that business is the one factor that impacts on everyone’s life, more than religion, government, politics, etc. Hillman asks the question “What constitutes the power of business?” Related to this is Karl Weick’s Sensemaking and his views on how power shifts in groups depending on circumstances. Anyway, as I said more on this later…

After thinking through issues relating to the last two assignment essays, reading a lot of journal papers, reading a lot of related books and thinking through work based issues that could be used as possible areas for the research component I have identified a couple of possibilities.

Three issues have the level of complexity, organisational cross-dimensionality, levels of power structure, mess and opportunity for using a range of methods such as interviews, text analysis, video and images. There are issues in all three relating to the initial concept, the business case (quality of), budgets, contractor selection (tendering processes), project team selection and management, team dynamics and in ANT terms, Problematization, obligatory passage point (s a contact point to connect all the actors those involved in the network, Punctualization (blackboxing), Translation (making connections and relating things that were previously different – relating things in a socio-technical network – how ideas are turned into concrete thing like labs, or systems etc.), the Obligatory Passage Point, Network organization, power dynamics and the breakdown of network structures, user impact, acceptance and adoption and dissolution or degeneration into failure. All three of the potential projects contains heterogeneous elements that can be blackboxed or Punctualized.

What has become clear over time though are the potential ethical, operational and governance issues. For example, there are issues about confidentiality to consider. The three potential projects are all current, live projects that have a high degree of visibility in the university. There are likely to be political and management sensitivities surrounding all three. I believe this to be the greatest difficulty in carrying out a work-based project i.e. would the institution like to potentially have problems exposed to a wider audience and have thesis published on them? I foresee some difficulties here.