ACTIVIDADES 3 CONTEXTUALIZACIÓN

Firms as webs of relationships

From the ANT perspective, however, these directors would not make decisions on their own, for they are located with other actors within a flow of processes that are referred to as networks. Decision making, therefore, is not located in the actor, but is embedded in the interrelationships between actors, including the directors, which Law (1992) calls the mechanics of power, because, as Law (1992) explains, “No one, no thing, no class, no gender, can have power unless a set of relations is constituted and held in place” (p. 380). This prime characteristic of ANT, Law (1991) further describes when he states, “power, whatever form it may take, is recursively woven into the intricate dance that unites the social and the technical” (p. 18). Continuing this dance metaphor, it could be said that it is the organised sequences of relations that translates client materials into the final

accounts for a client, (or their Goods and Services Tax (GST) return, or completes an audit for a client or carries out any of the other services offered by the firms).

Each step in this dance sequence from beginning to end involves the human actor dancers and the technologies (also called actors or actants) in choreographed relationships where power is embedded not in the person, but in his or her location within the relationships of actors, a location that gives the actors their agency. For example, every step in the sequence of conversion of the client materials into the final accounts involves agency, i.e., the actor’s power to carry out an action by leading or

preventing other actors from doing so by requiring them to follow. In the context of this dance metaphor, the network can be viewed as a flow of agencies that, by each leading and inhibiting the actions of other actors, translates client materials into final compliant accounts. It is a flow of agencied relationships between actors that starts at a centre, which Latour (1990) calls the centre of calculation, where the translation of client financial materials commences, and continues as a flow of agencied relations that circulate through the firm returning to the centre with the completion of the client’s final accounts. Power, therefore, cannot be one of domination or control by one actor dancer. Rather, each actor relies on the knowledge of the other actor or actors to achieve the symmetry of the

‘dance’—the final accounts.

These firms, interpreted as networks, involve an accounting network as described above, and networks that I have called productivity and administration. There will most certainly be other networks, for example, audit, insolvency and business advice, depending on the services provided by the firms. Those networks, however, have a different focus, and therefore different translations, to those of the accounting and, therefore, involve different sets of ‘dance sequences.’ By changing

“certain material arrangements. They produce certain subject positions. And they produce certain forms of knowledge” (Law, 2001, p. 2). Therefore, by making changes to the dance sequence, to the location of the actors within the relationships, the mechanics of power between the actors is also changed, resulting in a translation of materials into the required new knowledge, for example, the productivity of the accounting actors. Thus, different networks have differently ordered relationships between actors with different mechanics of power to create the new knowledge that network requires. For example, the accounting network is ordered to translate client materials into final accounts, while the productivity network is ordered to translate client timesheets from the accountants into

calculations of productive time.

Nonetheless, these networks that constituted the participating firms are not discrete, as each collectively helps to achieve the strategy of the firm. Therefore, besides each network being

relationally ordered, the webs of networks that are the firm communicate with each other regularly or irregularly at determined points which Callon (1986) refers to as obligatory passage points. The networks of accounting and productivity are good examples of this concept, because they are programmed, through timesheets, to communicate with each other every 6, or in some firms, 10

minutes. At this passage point, the accounting actor and their timesheet and the productivity software actor who compares the timesheet to the budgeted hours to determine the accounting actor’s

productivity, come together and through their agencies communicate with, or require an action from, each other. Any breach would disrupt the productivity network and so activate the agency of a specific actor, usually the office manager, to investigate the disruption.

If the participating firms can all be described as webs of networks that operate in the social, then through the ANT lens the world ontologically is simply webs of networks of relationships that interact with each other, and in doing so both influence and are influenced by others. For example, the firms all interacted with the IRD because they send them the final compliance accounts of their clients. They also interacted with the networks of the local council, clients, the digital communications

supplier, the electricity company and the homes of the employees, to name a few. Certainly, the home is a network where, for example, the actors are organised and agencied to raise children, to maintain the home and property, or to carry out leisure activities.

Lastly, all the participating firms had very stable networks of relations, since they had been little changed over the years. This stability the networks had achieved by embedding the agencied

relationships in durable materials (Law, 1992) like textbooks, written policies, learned processes such as double entry accounting, computer programmes, templates, timesheets, and international

accounting standards that held the materials in place. Similarly, the strategy in the majority of chartered accountancy firms to retain their clients was delegated into the durable materials of client newsletters, blogs and policies that privileged the client. This embedded stability made change difficult. If the network wished to negotiate changes to the relationships within it, then changes had to be made to the durable objects, for example, the policies, processes and the technologies. The

network, Law (2003) suggests, may not be willing make such changes for a number of reasons, including the influences of other networks of firms.

Within ANT we are all actors

This actor researcher has been using the term actor to describe both the human and the technologies that are associated together and, through the mechanics of power, apply their knowledges to assist in achieving the required outcome of the firm. This interaction is one of the key characteristics of ANT in that the human actor and the nonhuman actor have equal status because, according to Law (1992), society as we know it today would not exist if this interaction of the human and nonhuman materials did not exist. This view is reinforced by Callon and Latour (1992) who point out that “there is no

artefacts” (p. 359). For example, actors could not have become chartered accountants without the schools and universities, the computers and the software programmes, the textbooks and more that have allowed these actors to generate the knowledge that has given them entry into, and knowledge of, the relationships that constitute the networks of the profession. Thus, as has been described, all are equal and all have agency.