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John Law
Born (1946-05-16) 16 May 1946 (age 78)
AwardsJohn Desmond Bernal Prize
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh
ThesisSpecialties in Science: A Sociological Study of X-ray Protein Crystallography
Academic work
DisciplineSociology, Science and technology studies
Main interestsActor-network theory
Notable works"Provincialising STS" (2015)
"STS as Method" (2015)
After Method (2004)
Aircraft Stories (2002)
"Notes on Materiality and Sociality" (with Annemarie Mol, 1995)
A Sociology of Monsters (editor, 1991)
"Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: the Case of the Portuguese Expansion" (1987, in The Social Construction of Technological Systems)
Notable ideasHeterogeneous engineering
Websitehttp://heterogeneities.net/
Notes

John Law (born 16 May 1946),[1] is a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar, currently on the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. Law coined the term Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in 1992 when synthesising work done with colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation.[2]

Actor-network theory

Main article: 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 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 STS scholars Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, Law himself, and others, ANT may alternatively be described as a 'material-semiotic' method. ANT strives to map relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and 'semiotic' (between concepts), for instance, the interactions in a bank involve both people and their ideas, and computers. Together these form a single network.

Professor John Law was one of the directors of the ESRC funded Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

Bibliography

Authored

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See also

References

  1. ^ "Law, John, 1946-". Library of Congress. Retrieved 13 February 2015. data sheet (b. 5/16/46)
  2. ^ Akrich, Madeleine (2023). "Actor Network Theory, Bruno Latour, and the CSI". Social Studies of Science. 53 (2): 169–173. doi:10.1177/03063127231158102. ISSN 0306-3127. PMID 36840444. It was John Law who, from an inside-outside position, did an important job of synthesizing all the work developed at the CSI at the time taking up the term ANT (Law, 1992), a term whose origin is difficult to trace but which stems from the 'actor-network' used by Michel Callon in his analysis of the electric vehicle.

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