Reliability  and  validity  of  the  research

Section 2 sets the stage for the research projects by outlining the theories, methodologies, maps and guides which both direct and structure the research.

Theories and methodologies are the experts and the maps and guides are the sites, problems, arguments, questions, resources and methods, a two pronged framework to scrutinise an ever-moving craft.

CHAPTER 5: Theories, methodologies, methods - the experts with their data working toolboxes

Summary

The theory/methodology/method used in the research, actor-network theory, was chosen because of its resonance with both the personal history of the researcher and the task of the research. Secondary theories, such Pye’s theory of risk and certainty, Foucault’s discourse as practice and Kuhn’s paradigm theory, are also outlined as they modify the way ANT is used and how the data is processed.

The thesis is provoked by three concerns - the significance of a working life as craftsperson and teacher, craft's place in contemporary cultural, domestic and industrial spheres and its construction in sites of representation. This coalition of concerns, in a sense, self selected actor-network theory (ANT) as it is well equipped to deal with them all. ANT works from the premise that there is more to craft than the outcomes it constructs.

Historical overview of ANT

ANT was influenced by an empirical strand of the philosophy, anthropology and sociology, of science called Science and Technology Studies (Latour, 1993, p. 3).

Although now widely used as a tool in many contexts, ANT was heavily influenced by the theorisation of a piece of pivotal ethnographic research by Latour and Woolgar (1986) in a science laboratory. As anthropologists/sociologists they studied the actors and their actions in the endocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute. However ANT's claim to discover “real” science is hotly contested both from within the general field of Science an Technology Studies (predominantly concerning the claim of equal status ascribed to humans and non-humans) and especially by the “hard” sciences, in fact, starting a flare up, the so-called “Science Wars” (Fuller, 1998).

Although many have added to its current form, Latour’s contribution to ANT is the most profound. Latour is a philosopher/sociologist/anthropologist of science whose interest in Science and Technology Studies was central to the development of ANT.

ANT was not only the result of the theorisation of his incursions into working laboratories but also of its application to historical sites where breakthrough science

had been made (eg “Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment” (2000)) and to sites of technological development such as Aramis (1999). In these sites Latour studied the process not from the evidence recorded as its history but what actually happened when the science and technology was being made: how it was crafted. He argued against the orthodoxy of the so-called rational scientific method and asserted that the craft of science had much more in common with other seemingly less rational human activities than scientists readily acknowledge. Latour used language tools to mobilise his theories. For instance by replacing the word actor with actant he endowed all humans, events, actions, things, interactions, associations, ideas, etc with the same potential to impact on science and technology. He did this in order to disconnect the word actor from an exclusive association with human beings. He described the interaction of all the actants participating in the transformation of an idea into an object as a network, not in the usual sense of systems assembled to produce a result, but rather the reverse, where the pursuit of a particular result makes a network. He argued that if an actor-network is responsible for the relation between a hypothesis and a fact, it is far from sterile and is worthy of interest and evaluation. Rison (1999, pp.1-2) encapsulated Latour's ANT thus:

In what they have called a "network theory" (Latour and Callon) have developed a vocabulary that does not take the distinction between subjects and objects, the subjective and the objective, into consideration. What they call an "actant", for example, is more than a human actor. Both humans and nonhumans may be actants. An actant may be enrolled as "allied" to give strength to a position. In networks of humans, machines, animals, and matter in general, humans are not the only beings with agency, not the only ones to act; matter matters.

His research was concerned with what scientists actually do when they test hypotheses and declare results in science experiments. In essence Latour claims that scientists “craft” an experiment using humans and non-humans as mediators and these mediators network an alliance of actants to produce science "facts". Latour (1986, p.29) asks us to step back from the results of science to look at how science was crafted when he wrote:

It is therefore necessary to retrieve some of the craft character of scientific activity through in situ observations of scientific practice.

More specifically, it is necessary to show through empirical investigation how such craft practices are organised into a systematic and tidied research report.

Using the word craft in this context is provocative in science and out of favour in the visual arts. Both scientists and artists tend to ignore or deny craft's input in their fields.

However Murray’s (1992, p.3) argument for craft in science could also be applied to craft in the visual arts.

In the production of materials necessary for the discovery of natural entities, the expertise of the technician makes a difference. Latour listens to the language of the workbench.

Thus it seems that the technician can be viewed as more than an invisible slave to science, but one whose productive role equals that of a master craftsperson in the manufacture of objects. Latour’s mission as an anthropologist is to highlight the importance of material factors such as craft skills in the understanding of how science produces facts.

Facts in the end are appreciated on similar terms to any other well-crafted objects: clean, smooth, hard-wearing and importantly, useful to other scientists.

Latour’s assertion that laboratory science is more than the implementation of a rational science method makes it an ideal tool to challenge other claims of rationality. ANT is underpinned by Latour’s critique of the rationality of modernism. He argued that we (of the West) have never been modern and that modernism as a myth is exposed by the sheer weight of its non-modern products, referred to as hybrids or monsters (Latour, 1993, p.49; White, 1995, p.3).The process of making objects, when subjected to an ANT analysis undermines the tenets of modernism. For Latour modernism is not possible when humans and non-humans interact and so-called post-modernism is not simply an era that followed modernism but rather an exposé of the impossibility of modernism ever existing.

The laboratory experience

An understanding of the source of Latour’s notion of modernist science brings the researcher back to past experiences in the laboratory workshop. Employment in the 1960s as a technician in a physics laboratory workshop is a first hand experience which brought the roots of ANT together with reflective observations of laboratory life. A university physics workshop, an academic laboratory site, is not a place for the work of a craftsperson to be acknowledged. Craft in the laboratory constituted a naïve experience; craftspeople were kept in the dark by their limited educational,

social and cultural power. They blindly made objects to the researcher’s demands.

However naïve laboratory craft experiences are an ideal background for the consideration of contemporary craft because, on reflection, laboratory craft was indispensable to science; it was craft the scientists returned to when things went wrong. The indispensable craft, the only route to a science "fact", is also an analogous argument for the indispensability of craft in art. Experiences in the laboratory in the past and more recent experiences in art enable the researcher, in a sense, to be his own subject. Hence the laboratory, important as it was to science then, is important now as a background to research in sites of craft representation.

Although "progress" has rendered a recurrence of the physics workshop experience impossible, it nevertheless remains as a useful reminder of actor-network theory's empirical roots. It also enables the researcher to relive the laboratory experience as an imaginary subject of Latour's research, thus grounding "book" theory in experience. Bringing together ANT and the laboratory experience makes a homogenous and viable tool for exploring craft in sites of representation. The experience in a physics laboratory not only permitted the birthplace of ANT to be reconstructed, it honed metal craft skills for the later emergent jeweller and marked out positions in a socio/cultural hierarchy.

ANT and craft in sites of representation

So far ANT is embodied in theory and experience and must be rationalised as a method if it is to be used to explore craft in sites of representation. There are a number of key concepts and terminologies which move ANT from a theory/experience to a method. The following account delineates a pathway for craft research by tracing the ANT object from its sites of representation to its precarious place in the world.

The research is carried out in craft sites of representation, in ANT terms, centres of calculation. Latour (2000, p.304) defines centres of calculation as "Any site where inscriptions are combined and make possible a type of calculation". Calling all sites of representation centres of calculation produces a genre of sites temporarily separated from the distraction of their local aims and practices. In terms of the thesis, centres of calculation are sites which represent craft, such as organisations, institutions and events.

For a centre of calculation to function as an ANT site the hierarchical ranking of actors there must be dissolved. Instead, the mix of humans and non-humans actors in the sites are ascribed with equal status and power by being renamed actants.

Latour (2000, p. 303) "borrowed the word actant from semiotics" to replace the word actor, actor being too closely associated with human action. All actors, human and non-human, are therefore ascribed with the same potential to infer the nature of a centre of calculation.

For the mix of humans and non-humans (actants) to infer the nature of a site of representation they must “enter into relationships” (Brown, Capdevila, 1999, p.34) called networks. Networks are entities which bring together all the socio/technical actions which transform ideas into objects.

The potential for all actants in centres of calculation to create networks is modified by two macro roles actants play in network construction. Latour called these roles intermediaries and mediators. He saw intermediaries as dispensable links, feeble and open to manipulation, and mediators as strong entities which add to, and remain in networks. Latour (1993, p.80) said of intermediaries: “At worst, they are brutes or slaves; at best, they are loyal servants" to be enrolled as creative mediators if they are to become part of the network. He (1993, p.81) described mediators as “actors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it.” It is the capacity to translate that endows mediators with the power to effect representation. Intermediaries make connections and hand things on while mediators translate connections into a form which builds the network into an object. By identifying this difference Latour makes available a useful analytical tool, enabling a separation of actants at the site into links (intermediaries), to be considered and put aside, and stayers (mediators) which are retained because they build the network. Intermediaries could be seen as grammatical devices and mediators as elements of meaning. The notion of the passive intermediary and active mediator is a useful research feature of ANT; they provide a means of initially sorting actants into bundles worth studying or not.

Networks are not made without some behind-the-scenes work. Latour referred to this work as constructing chains of translation. “Chains of translation refer to the work through which actors modify, displace, and translate their various and

contradictory interests” (Latour, 2000, p. 311). Chains of translation consist of problematisation, locating a problem to share, interessement, getting everyone interested, enrollment, forming a team and mobilisation, acting together on the problem (Abramson, 1998, pp. 8-10). The word translation commonly used to describe the process of converting one set of symbols in to another (as in languages) is used in ANT when interests of one mediator is translated into terms understood and supported by the other mediators in the network, thereby strengthening the network.

When the results of translation available from a centre of calculation are no longer subject to further mediation, they are black boxed (Latour, 2000, p. 304) and the actants in the black box taken for granted. Latour conceptualised the notion of the black box to draw attention to the fact that things can be erroneously considered as indisputable facts, where the contents of the black box are, at any given time, beyond contestation and where only input and output counts. The actants (material or discursive) sealed in a black box can evade consideration in spite of their importance to understanding a centre of calculation. Black boxes are found in all fields and disciplines and it can be the task of research to open them. Their contents can conceal actants necessary to understand the practices and operations of centres of calculation. Black boxes are mobile, they can be transported as homogenous entities for use in other times and places as artifacts, facsimiles, maps, charts, photographs, words on paper, a digital code or sets of numbers. Latour (2000, pp.

306-307) called these forms immutable mobiles as they are fixed (and therefore immutable) and easily distributed as reproductions (thus mobile), inviolable versions of mediation. But in this form they are vulnerable because they can be shuffled as constituents of other genres of mobile objects (for example in sets of statistics, as graphs, charts, museum and education texts, etc.) further isolating them from their centre of calculation. Sites which represent craft are as vulnerable to black boxing as any other.

In this sense craft in sites of representation is not only the result of the calculated actions of individuals or interest groups, it can be a shuffled object in other sites and in other forms. Craft is subject to the fate of the immutable mobiles which represent it and the strength of its own networks, and how these play into other and subsequent networks.

According to ANT, when a consortium of human and non-human in action transform ideas into outcomes a deeper understanding of craft sites of representation is offered. The making stage, equally important as the idea and the outcome, captures value and worth that could otherwise go unnoticed. Indeed, by valuing acting or doing, ANT is an ideal methodology for examining craft in sites of representation.

ANT supports the notion that craft is important when an idea, hypothesis or premise is made into an object. Indeed, it asserts that objects can only be fully assessed, understood and appreciated if craft remains a factor in their later visual and sensory life. ANT also affirms that all sites where humans and non-humans interact are available for anthropological exploration and analysis. Thus it is eminently suited to open up sites where humans and non-humans organise to represent craft.

ANT also includes the researcher in the research process. Okely (1992, p.3) alluded to the importance of the researcher's constant presence when defending autobiographical anthropology "the autobiography of fieldwork is about lived interactions, participatory experience and embodied knowledge". What the researcher adds to the network expands the scope of ANT and adds to its list of applications.

ANT was influenced by of the theorisation of studies of the socio/technical world of laboratory science and how the science “method” produces published "facts". It was later adapted as a general research tool used to study, at a much deeper level and from the inside, any context where ideas are transformed into objects. This deep and inside knowledge enables an infinite re-construction of objects according to their changing environments, interests and applications. The researcher’s experience of laboratory life bared the relations between human and non-human actors and the macro and micro events they shared in the every day task of making science thus grounding ANT in direct experience. The enrolment into a network of all human and non-human actors associated with production in the laboratory is a useful concept for use other sites where craft is busily making things happen.

ANT supports the argument that ideas cannot be made into objects without craft and craft cannot be removed from objects thus contesting the notion that only those

with the power and authority to own objects are responsible for their production.

Nevertheless craft's ordinary humans and non-humans who enable the object's existence and who are constantly subjected to new technologies, fluid contextual meanings and disparate social environments, need an inquisitive, pestering theory/methodology/method such as ANT in order to be acknowledged. In this context Bowker and Star (1999. p.48) noted that “the actors being followed did not themselves see what was excluded: they constructed a world in which that exclusion could occur”.

But like any theoretical/methodological construct ANT is not an isolated entity; it has relations with others which influence the way the research is approached. It would be remiss not to include Foucault as such a relation when considering ANT as a methodology. Foucault’s notion of object formation argues that discourses (any discourse in any context) about craft can, in fact, make craft. As he (1995, p.49) attested all practices which make objects are

[a] task that consists of not - of no longer - treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.

The practices in this study are craft and if craft forms objects it is useful and important. ANT seems to be familiar with Foucault's notion of discourse construction, as both suggest that objects are formed by contextual discursive practices and both question the possibility of discrete or permanent categorisations.

This is important to a study which seeks constructions of craft in sites of representation. Justin Clemens (1996, pp.49-50) applies Foucauldian discourse construction to craft thus:

A Foucauldian analysis would rather ask "What sort of practices in what historical conditions have been called craft? Who has then done craft, and how has it been evaluated, and by whom? How has craft been used in the battle of ongoing power relations in society? And to what ends?" Furthermore, for Foucault, in a very specific sense, "craft"

could not be said to exist. It would rather be a name that one gives, or finds oneself given, with regards to situations that are constantly in flux.

Becker (2004, p.2) paints a similar picture in visual art when he says it “consists of the network of cooperative activity involving all the people who contribute to the work of art coming off as it finally does, using the conventional understandings they

Becker (2004, p.2) paints a similar picture in visual art when he says it “consists of the network of cooperative activity involving all the people who contribute to the work of art coming off as it finally does, using the conventional understandings they