Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ontology is even more unusual, beings that possess both the capacity to
produce both time and space?”
This line of thought gave rise to actor-network theory (Murdoch 1995,
1997, 1998; Law and Hassard 1999). It is not simply actors in everyday life
who constitute the primary focus here, but their relative positionality and
powers within integrated systems of power and information that matters
most. Actor-networks exist to construct and maintain power at a distance,
and in the process construct time and space (Thrift and Leyshon 1994). Every
actor-network selectively incorporates some members and excludes others,
often on the basis of implicit codes of behavior re
ecting social position
and spatial location. Networks of actors mobilize rules, resources, and
power, including information, in order to accomplish tasks, creating a net
of intended and unintended consequences that stretch across the spatio-
temporal boundaries of their network. To maintain network functionality,
actors must perform by being engaged with one another recursively, interpret-
ing and translating one another's behavior. Because actor-network theory
strives to overcome the arti
fl
cial boundaries between culture and nature, act-
ors in this sociotechnical seamless “nature-culture” nexus need not be
human, but (controversially) may include inanimate objects (Bingham 1996;
Murdoch 1997).
As with structuration theory, actors and networks are mutually presuppos-
ing aspects of one phenomenon, simultaneously producing and being pro-
duced by time and space. Actor-network theory therefore “spends a great
deal of time examining how actors are incorporated into chains and net-
works. In so doing, it also indicates how discrete spaces come to be relation-
ally linked together” (Murdoch 2006:58). For example, Thrift and Leyshon
(1994) employed actor-network theory to examine the dynamics of global
capital markets as they are structured by
fi
firms, nation-states, the media, and
telecommunications, all of which are deployed simultaneously to produce,
transmit, and consume knowledge about markets and other actors. Such a
perspective has helped to humanize even the most abstract of economic pro-
cesses by revealing them to be the products of agents enmeshed in webs of
power and meaning, not disembodied processes that operate independently
of the people who create them (Law 1994). The strategy of embodiment goes
a long ways toward demythologizing teleological interpretations of globaliza-
tion, which present it as “natural” and inevitable, and reveal global processes
to be the contingent outcomes of decisions made by human actors tied up in
networks that cross multiple spatial scales. As actors operate at di
fi
erent
scales, they realign the topography of power, strengthening some places and
disempowering others. Massey's (1993:61) well-received notion of power-
geometries emphasizes that in every network, “some are more in charge of it
than others; some initiate
ff
ows and movement, others don't; some are more
on the receiving end of it than others; some are e
fl
ectively imprisoned by it.”
However, critics of actor-network theory maintain that it lacks su
ff
cient
explanatory power to understand why some actors enjoy more power than do
Search WWH ::
Custom Search