John Law (sociologist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Law is a sociologist currently on the faculty at Lancaster University and key proponent of Actor-network theory. Actor-network theory, sometimes abbreviated to ANT is a social science approach for describing and explaining social, organisational, scientific and technological structures, processes and events. It assumes, controversially, that all the components of such structures (whether these are human or otherwise) form a network of relations that can be mapped and described in the same terms or vocabulary.

Developed by two leading French STS scholars, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, British sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a 'material-semiotic' method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and 'semiotic' (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and 'semiotic' (for instance the interactions in a bank involve both people and their ideas, and computers. Together these form a single network).