ABSTRACT
Technology plays an important role in social and organizational life, and this role is becoming more and more significant. Bruno Latour, born in 1947, is a French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher, who has studied processes leading to the development, application and impact of science and technology in societies. His work has preceded renewed attention to technical work in organizations and the interplay between the material and the social world, the so-called ‘socio-materiality discourse’ in organization studies (e.g Barley, 1996; Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). This attention was much needed, as technology and science had been neglected in organization studies for far too long. In fact, this is the main message Latour has dispatched all the time: humans – social agents – should not be separated from non-humans, since ‘things’, too, belong to the real world. Sociology should not only deal with social but also with physical phenomena, as Latour (2000) rightly claims.
