Perspectives on using Actor-Network Theory and Organizational
Semiotics to Address Organizational Evolution
Alysson Bolognesi Prado and Maria Cecilia Calani Baranauskas
Institute of Computing, StateUniversity of Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil
Keywords: Organizational Semiotics, Actor-Network Theory, Organizational Evolution, Norms.
Abstract: Systems design for a changing organization has long been in the research agenda of several academic and
industrial communities, and still is an open problem. This paper draws on Organizational Semiotics and
Actor Network Theory to delineate a method for clarifying and representing the social forces involved in
organizational changes. A case study illustrates the approach in which all actors – people, technical devices
and other objects –are modelled in the social level, tracing back the norms flow, their sources, enabling to
negotiate the change with the appropriate stakeholders.
1 INTRODUCTION
Enterprises and organizations are always subject to
internal and external pressure for change. Market
and politics from one side, and managerial decisions
and personal preferences from the other make the
propagation of novelties and collective evolution a
non-linear process, with forces acting in several
directions. The pervasive adoption of an always-
evolving Information Technology brings more
complexity to the scenario.
Organizational Semiotics – OS for short –
describes an organization as a “structure of social
norms, which allows a group of people to act
together in a coordinated way for certain purposes”
(Liu 2000, p. 109). The OS seeks for the cognitive
and behavioral universals of the participants of the
organization to a better understanding of the
environment in which an information system will be
deployed and run.
However, when studying the readiness of an
enterprise for the adoption of new technology, this
theory may not cover factors such as support to
managers and business process (Jacobs and Nakata,
2012). Some organizational researchers (Jacobides
and Winter, 2012; Holt et al., 2007) argue that
collective phenomena are not defined by previous
structure but instead are the result of reciprocal
actuation between individuals.
Actor-Network Theory – or ANT – claims that
social is not a specific domain of reality or some
particular attribute of people, but rather is the name
of “a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a
translation, an enrollment” (Latour, 2005, p. 64)
that occurs involving the stakeholders, their interests
and the means used to achieve them. This dynamic
point of view contributes to understand situations in
which the state of affairs is not well stabilized and
social structure is being reconfigured.
The potential of using ANT and OS together
have been already pointed out by Soares and Sousa
(2004) aiming at balancing social and engineering
approaches to introduce technology in organizations,
and explored by Underwood (2001) to understand
the diffusion of shared meanings, a prerequisite to
the success of Information Systems. These trials
provide good examples of positive aspects of
merging both theories and encourage the expansion
to address social, pragmatic and normative issues.
This paper proposes a method to trace back the
social forces involved in organizational changes. By
unveiling the network of interferences and
mediations present in a social scenario and locating
the sources of conflicting interests, it is possible to
drive the actions needed to improve the
organizational structure.
In the following sections we present
Organizational Semiotics and Actor-Network
Theory and discuss how they can complete each
other to be used as support for understanding
changes in organizations. A case study is briefly
presented for illustrative purpose, followed by the
discussion and the conclusions.
173
Bolognesi Prado A. and Cecilia Calani Baranauskas M..
Perspectives on using Actor-Network Theory and Organizational Semiotics to Address Organizational Evolution.
DOI: 10.5220/0004437701730181
In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2013), pages 173-181
ISBN: 978-989-8565-60-0
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
2 THEORETICAL
BACKGROUND
Changes in organizations can be seen as social
activities, since they require discussion and
negotiation among the involved people. To
understand social phenomena in general, the
Sociology traditionally takes one of two opposite
approaches: structuralism or agency (Vandenberghe,
2008). The first defends the primacy of a social
“field of forces” that shapes human behavior, while
the latter sees the individual actions and choices as
the sources of the perceived social reality (Hewege,
2010).
The structuralist approach begins with the
definition of social fact: a human manifestation that
is not part of the physical, biological or
psychological domains. For example, the advent of
money and economics cannot be attributed to the
psychology of a single individual, neither to her
body functions or the laws of matter.
A social fact is recognized by the “power of
external coercion which it exercises or is able to
exercise over individuals” (Durkheim, 2007, p. 10)
giving rise to a structure that is beyond people but
directs their behavior. This vision leads to distinct
treatment for people and objects by placing them in
separate plans. Modeling software with a social
component turns out to be mainly based on
structures that represent people and their relations
(Hendler et al., 2008), limiting their possibilities of
behavior according to a subset of existing social
rules. The dynamics of communities is less
addressed by such software development.
The agency-based approach sees the capacity of
individuals to act independently and to make their
own free choices as the source of social phenomena.
The social structure is just a consequence of the use
of physical and cognitive abilities of individuals
according to their interests and intentions. Following
the same example above, according to this theory,
money was created by people interested to ease
some trade relations and evolved over time, driven
by decisions, needs and innovations, to a more
complex concept.
In the following sections we present the two
theoretical sources that support this work:
Organizational Semiotics and Actor-Network
Theory.
2.1 Organizational Semiotics
The Organizational Semiotics proposes to see an
organization as an information system that uses
signs and norms to coordinate people working
together. Norms capture patterns of behavior and
signs carry meaning and promote communication.
At first, organized groups of people can be seen
as driven by informal norms, whose performance
relies on oral culture, constant negotiation of
meaning, and individual abilities, beliefs and
patterns of action. Some situations ruled by literate
culture, bureaucratic procedures, and normalized
behavior constitute an inner structure, that is
captured in formal norms. Within this structure,
some tasks can be automated and humans replaced
by computers or other technical information
systems. These three layers are nicknamed
“organizational onion” (Figure 1). Each layer
emerges, relies and depends on the outer ones.
Figure 1: The organizational layers of norms (adapted
from Liu, 2000).
Wright (1958) identified and conceptualized six
distinct types of norms: rules, prescriptions,
directions, customs, moral principles and ideals.
Particularly, prescriptions and customs define the
conducts of people. The former are characterized by
having an explicit issuer or authority and attached
sanctions in case of disrespect. The later have no
such features, being acquired and forwarded by
members of a community by means of imitation and
social pressure and becoming regularities in
individuals’ behavior.
Norms can also be classified as perceptual,
evaluative, cognitive or behavioral, according to the
nature of the phenomenon they govern: to identify
things, to attach a value to things, to grasp causality
in flows of events, and to coordinate activities,
respectively (Stamper et al., 2000). Liu (2000)
shows a general syntax to represent behavioral
norms in organizations:
whenever <condition>
if <state>
then <agent>
is <obliged | permitted | prohibited>
to do <action>.
Semiotic is the science that studies signs as units
of signification and communication. According to
Morris (1938), Semiotics is organized in three
levels: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. The first
ICEIS2013-15thInternationalConferenceonEnterpriseInformationSystems
174
deals with the structures and relations between signs,
the second with their meanings and the third with the
intentions and contexts of use. Stamper (1996)
added a physical and an empirical level on the lower
end and a social level to the upper level. This is
called the semiotic framework or “ladder” (Figure
2).
The three lower levels (shaded) are often related
to the computational structure of organizations,
encompassing hardware, networks, protocols, data
encoding, logic and software. The three upper levels
correspond to exclusively human attributions: in the
semantic layer data is comprehended and meaning is
assigned; in the pragmatic layer the system is used
with a certain purpose; and if this purpose
presupposes or implies other people participating on
the system, it reaches the social level. This last level
is responsible from negotiation of the meanings of
signs and the definition of norms of behavior.
Figure 2: Semiotic framework, depicting levels in which
signs’ presence and activity can be studied (adapted from
Liu, 2000).
2.2 Actor-Network Theory
The Actor-Network Theory is a recently proposed
theoretical-methodological framework that aims to
provide an interested observer with a “sensitivity” to
better capture how social phenomena evolve. It
proposes to see the human interactions as chains of
associations distributed in time and space that
depend upon the continuous agency of its
participants on each other and whose structure is
dynamic, as a result of this joint action.
ANT is theoretically rooted in the principle that
the basic human social skills are able to generate
only weak, near reaching, and fast decaying ties
(Latour 2005, p. 65). It is also asserted that all the
forces responsible for sustaining the social
aggregations come from the participants of the
phenomenon. Therefore, to explain social structures
such as organizations, that are expected to last
longer and mobilize many different people to work
together, it claims that non-human elements must be
equally addressed.
The participants of the social realm create
associations among each other, intending to obtain
support to propagate forces, share intentions, and
mobilize other allies. These aggregates must be
between humans, between non-humans, frequently
are heterogeneous, but these distinctions are not
considered relevant. Instead, it is fundamental to
identify the role they fulfill in the associations, when
transporting meaning or intentions: as intermediaries
or as mediators.
An actor is an intermediary in a chain of
associations when he or she or it forwards the
actions received without transformation. The
behavior of an intermediary is predictable and the
outputs are determined by the inputs. On the other
hand, a mediator inserts some new behavior to the
system. Mediators modify, distort, enhance or
translate the inputs received. They are creative and
show some variability and unpredictability when
acting upon the others. While faithful intermediaries
often fade out in the studied scenarios, mediators
appear resolving asymmetries and conflicts between
the other actors.
According to ANT, social groups are
performative, their existence relies on the constant
action of the participants upon each other. Therefore,
all the elements involved in a social phenomenon are
actors, in a broader sense that encompass both
human and non-human. No intentionality is assigned
a priori to an actor; the focus is on their potential of
mediation, interaction by physical or cognitive
means, and contribution to the outcome of a
situation.
The process of building the associations among
actors is named translation and depends on the
success of steps in which an actor, in the desire to
change a certain state of affairs, looks for other
actors whose acting skills are beneficial, stimulate
their interests to join, defines roles and ensures
compliance with the responsibilities assumed. A
successful translation must follow these four well-
defined steps (Callon, 1986):
Problematisation: the problem that may be
collaboratively solved must be defined;
Interessment: potential allies have to be
convinced to act conjointly;
Enrollment: the role of each actor in the group is
defined;
Mobilization: the allies must be put to act
associatively and control structures must be
specified to keep them acting as agreed before.
The strength with which these movements unfold
and mechanisms to ensure its stability and
preservation define the success of the formed
PerspectivesonusingActor-NetworkTheoryandOrganizationalSemioticstoAddressOrganizationalEvolution
175
network as a whole. When actors become connected,
the consequences of success or failure spread
through, creating a mutual interest that the group
succeeds. When the translation is effective and the
various actors are driven to act as one through the
mechanisms of mutual control, their complexity is
abstracted in a black box. So the network becomes
itself an actor.
From the methodological viewpoint, ANT
proposes to “follow the actors in their weaving
through things they have added to social skills so as
to render more durable the constantly shifting
interactions” (Latour 2005, p. 68). This quest is
oriented to the sources of uncertainties a researcher
may face when exploring social groups, in an
allusion to the principle of uncertainty from the
quantum physics. The observer is always accounted
as part of the representation and explanation of the
studied phenomena. Each actor studied has his own
frame of reference and shifting from one frame to
another always adds some uncertainty.
ANT recommends that we follow the actors
closely, investigating the circulating entities that
make people act, understanding how each actor is
recruiting the others, looking myopically to the
phenomena in order to grasp details and covering the
whole scenario (Fioravanti and Velho, 2010). When
inquired about what make them act, actors are
granted the ability of reflection and theorization,
their explanations must be fully respected, including
the used language and the figurations given to the
causes of actions.
It is also advised to abandon some distinctions
prior to the analysis: local and global are not
hierarchically separated, but flattened and
differentiated only by the extension and durability of
their connections; truth and error are values applied
by actors with different strengths in each frame of
reference and not a researcher’s filter; and both
human and non-human actors must be monitored
symmetrically, being equally left to express
themselves and be attributed some power or agency.
There is a list of occasions where objects become
visible as actors and their role as mediators is
enhanced enough to be studied: breakdowns,
accidents and the proposal of innovations and
novelties. When it is not possible to observe objects
in situ, it is allowed to recover objects’ histories and
the state of doubt or crisis in which they were born.
3 RATIONALE FOR COMBINING
ANT AND OS
The Organizational Semiotics acknowledges the
informal layer as the place for discussion,
negotiation and uncertainties. Only when a state of
affairs is stable, norms can be formalized and shifted
successively to the formal and technical layers. This
movement may lead to give up individual meanings
and intentions, and rendering impersonal forces that
apply the norms.
Since Organizational Semiotics is widely used to
provide conditions to develop and deploy software
into enterprises and for social groups (Bonacin et al.,
2012; Liu and Benfell, 2011; Gazendam et al.,
2003), it searches for the structural features of these
sets of people, being less relevant how and who in
particular defined the structures. Given this intense
appeal to pervasive and impersonal norms, OS’s
character is predominantly structural.
The ANT comes as a conciliatory proposal
between agency and structure, in a position that can
be named structurationist (Vandenberghe, 2008).
For being focused on actors and the means by which
they can interfere in the course of actions, ANT
proposes that one of the goals of actors’ movements
is to build a stable structure that, once established,
governs future actions in a certain degree.
Patterns strengthened by the passage of time and
the creativity required by uncertainties in the future
are the essentials for society. Latour (2000)
metaphorically represented this by the figure of
roman deity Janus (Figure 3), who simultaneously
looks to the past and to the future, mediating
stabilized affairs and the need for innovation.
Figure 3: Two-faced Janus, from roman mythology, is
used by ANT as a metaphor for the ambivalent character
of the social aggregates: existing structures mold behavior
(ancient face at left, looking to the past) and new behavior
redefines structures (younger face at right, looking to the
future). Extracted from Yonge (1880).
ANT highlights that the “fields of forces”
generated by norms according to OS’ perspective
(Al-Rajhi et al., 2010) are instead the sum of social
forces generated, stored and replied by actors and
conducted through the associations between them,
ICEIS2013-15thInternationalConferenceonEnterpriseInformationSystems
176
regardless of being human or not. Customs are not
seen as anonymous anymore: they reach people
through the associations each actor has. Although
they do not have an authoritative issuer and neither
an explicit penalty for being broken, ANT affirms
that there is a process of translation that make people
behave accordingly and that can be observed and
studied. This process is better perceived in moments
of group creation or of instability.
Norms are embodied in documents and devices.
Sharing patterns of behavior is not always a face-to-
face phenomenon. In this sense, both OS and ANT
share a semiotic-materialism viewpoint (Law, 2009).
Knowing the sources of these patterns is
fundamental when someone is interested in changing
them. Besides, knowing the nature of these
reservoirs of rules, examples, laws and models – as
human or non-human – allows us to choose an
approach to tackle the change.
4 ADDRESSING
ORGANIZATIONAL
EVOLUTION: A PROPOSAL
This paper presupposes the scenario described by
Sani et al. (2012) in which innovation and changes
come from the outermost layer of the semiotic
onion. Since at this point norms may be conflicting
and provisional, there are behaviors and concepts
that are not universal, but localized in individuals or
subgroups with shared opinions. To grasp these
subtleties for further analysis, the following steps are
proposed:
1. Follow the actors through their daily activities
related to the business processes to be
understood, changed or improved. Let us call
each of them as focal actors (Carrol et al.,
2012);
2. Identify actors’ patterns of behavior and
represent them as the existing norms. Provide an
identifier for each norm (Sun et al., 2001) for
the sake of faster referencing;
3. Identify the actors that are promoting such
norms through successful translations that keep
agents working according to their interests. Let
us call them associates;
4. Question about the unfulfilled intentions of
existing norms, i.e., undeveloped or
unsuccessful translations;
5. Follow the chains of intermediaries and
mediators that converge into the associates, in a
recursive process.
The outcomes of these steps can be used to find
points of conflict or inconsistency, and can be scored
using the proposed syntax for each norm:
Norm <norm-id>:
whenever <condition>
if <state>
then <focal-actor>
is <obliged | permitted | prohibited>
by <associates>
to do <action>.
The final product of the steps can be summarized
using a graphical notation to represent all the
involved actors and the norms they are subjected to.
Human actors are represented as circles, non-human
as squares and composite entities (human and non-
human together, as for instance, external
organizations) are depicted as triangles. Edges show
associations between actors. Arrows represent the
flows of influences that feed norms; solid ones are
actual perceived norms and dashed ones are intended
only. This is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: proposed representation for the different types of
actors and the norms of behavior they exhibit and enforce.
5 AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
FROM A CASE STUDY
A case study was conducted following an action-
research approach (French and Bell, 1973), since the
focus of the participants were in producing changes
in a real-world situation and improving the practices
of an organization. ANT and OS were used as tools
when applicable, and the successive trials and cases
of success informed the method described in this
paper.
The IT team of a public University was requested
by the Human Resources Department (HR) of the
same institution to build a web version of a legacy
system, already used in client-server mode, which
was custom built by a third-part software factory
fifteen years ago. This moment was seen by the
managers as an opportunity to document, review and
PerspectivesonusingActor-NetworkTheoryandOrganizationalSemioticstoAddressOrganizationalEvolution
177
improve business processes.
The dialogues below were simplified and
translated from a series of conversations with the
involved actors, following their own daily activities.
We started from the main user of the system,
member of the Human Resources Department staff,
who we will refer to as HR-STAFF-1:
HR-STAFF-1: When I use this screen, I must first
type the teacher’s name and ID, set the status to
‘1’ and click ‘save’. Then change the status to ‘2’
and click ‘save’. Again, change the status to ‘3’
and ‘save’, and only now I can input the other
data: workplace, date of admittance and so on.
Then click ‘save’ again and it’s done.
When asked about the reason for that behavior,
she just replied:
HR-STAFF-1: When I started to work here, my
colleagues told me to do so. And also, see: when I
insert a new teacher, the only value the system left
for me to choose for ‘status’ is ‘1’. And only when
‘status’ reaches ‘3’, the system enables the other
fields for me.
In fact, analyzing the available source code, the
IT team confirmed that such behavior was
deliberated, but produced no intermediary effect or
outcome other than enabling and disabling fields on
the form. This brings us to the first recorded norm:
Norm N1:
whenever teacher data is inserted into
HR database
if it is a new teacher
then HR-STAFF
is obliged
by SYSTEM, HR-STAFF (coworkers)
to set the status to 1, 2 and 3 in
sequence.
The HR staff member was sometimes advised by
a senior consultant, who worked there since the time
the legacy system was being developed. Although
she does not use the system anymore, she provided
some additional information about the motivations
for the development of that software:
HR-SENIOR-CONSULTANT: there is a
Deliberative Act that says the hiring process of a
new teacher must begin at a Faculty, and then
wait for approval by the Legal Department. Only
if approved, HR proceeds with registration. The
former HR Director believed that the system must
reflect such rule, and all the involved workers
must use the system.
The Deliberative Act is an official document,
available at the local intranet for the researcher’s
inspection. Analyzing the text and the senior
consultant’s story, new norms were detected:
Norm N2:
whenever hiring a new teacher
if the process is beginning
then FACULTY
is obliged
by DELIBERATIVE-ACT
Figure 5: Actor-network and the flow of norms gathered during case study. Some arrows, although existing in the real data,
were omitted for the sake of readability.
ICEIS2013-15thInternationalConferenceonEnterpriseInformationSystems
178
to send the filled forms to Legal
Department.
Norm N3:
whenever hiring a new teacher
if the forms are filled by Faculties
then LEGAL-DEPARTMENT
is obliged
by DELIBERATIVE-ACT
to verify their content. If approved,
send them to Human Resources; if
rejected, send them back to
Faculty.
Norm N4:
whenever hiring a new teacher
if the forms are approved by Legal
Department
then Human Resources Department
is obliged
by DELIBERATIVE-ACT
to insert teacher’s data on the database.
Norm N5:
whenever hiring a new teacher
if the forms moved in workflow
then FACULTY, LEGAL-DEPARTMENT, Human
Resources Department
are obliged
by FORMER-HR-DIRECTOR
to inform process status, meaning:
1-Forms filled by Faculty;
2-Legal Dept. approval;
3-Registering in the HR database.
The senior consultant also informed that norm
N5 was not accepted by Faculties and Legal
Department, since they were not interested in using
the Human Resources software only to inform the
hiring process’ situation. Therefore the FACULTY
and LEGAL-DEPARTMENT actors chose not to
follow N5, being subject only to N2 and N3. Figure
5 represents all actors studied and the scenario of
norms they are enforcing and to which they are
subject.
The detection of these points of conflict in the
norm flow leads to the situation where an
organizational structured can be improved: either N5
is discarded, by negotiation with the current Human
Resources Director, or its translation is completed
by convincing Faculties and Legal Department to
use the system. This decision is to be taken by the
current Human Resources Director, in negotiation
with Legal Department and Faculties.
5.1 Discussion
By knowing the role of the actors as intermediaries
or mediators, and being aware of the process of
translation, we are able to find the trials of
introducing innovations. For instance, the former
HR Director translated norms N4 to N5 according to
his own interests, being a mediator. The legacy
software developer, on the other hand, acted as a
faithful intermediary, implementing such behavior
on the system (see Figure 5).
Non-human actors share the responsibility of
keeping the others acting as expected by their
designers. The SYSTEM kept HR-STAFF
performing according to the FORMER-HR-
DIRECTOR’s intentions, although the other
stakeholders, who were not connected to the system,
ignored the norm N5.
During the representation of the actor-network,
associations between actors do not always carry
norms. They represent the flows of information and
interests among all the involved entities. For
instance in the case study, HR-SENIOR-
CONSULTANT does not enforce or is subject to
any norm. She provided de path through which the
norms N2 to N5 became known. The ANT
representation makes explicit the presence of this
informant as a source of uncertainty. The role of the
researcher is also highlighted as an active actor.
Although incomplete translations do not exist as
a global shared behavior, they play an important role
in the dynamics of organizations, because from the
ANT point of view, they are precursor of norms or,
as seen in the case study, generate local patterns of
action that may be obsolete and subject to
improvement. Using ANT, local sub-cultures can be
disassembled, analyzed and explained; for example,
the existence of norm N1 was maintained by the
SYSTEM and the HR-STAFF by means of a
custom, although the justification for such behavior,
FORMER-HR-DIRECTOR, was not directly acting
anymore.
It is also noteworthy that the passage of norms
from the formal to the technical layer is not a
passive process of diffusion, but instead subject to
the active interference of actors' interests,
capabilities and comprehension, for instance, the
sequence of translations N4 → N5 → N1. Norms
always reach people through a network of
associations that may be heterogeneous in actors’
nature and intentions.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Systems design for a changing organization is far
from being a solved problem. The Actor-Network
Theory argues that individuals’ intentions are the
source of social structure and provides a good
methodological and theoretical support to find those
interactions and understand how such structure
emerges and is maintained. Organizational
Semiotics, on the other hand, has a long tradition in
PerspectivesonusingActor-NetworkTheoryandOrganizationalSemioticstoAddressOrganizationalEvolution
179
providing a deep understanding of the enterprises
and, once patterns are established, guiding the
software development.
By seeing the whole organization as a single
information system and considering that all actors
involved – people, technical devices and other
objects – may have the same importance in the
social level, through the proposed method and
representation, we were able to trace back the norms
flow through the network of actors and reach their
sources, enabling to negotiate the change with the
appropriate stakeholders of a case study.
This work will be continued by experiencing the
presented approach in the design of social network
systems (Pereira et al., 2011). Given the nature of
these environments, with few enforced rules and
norms emerging organically, the system design
requires the capability to deal with structural
instabilities, uncertainties and continual evolution.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is part of the EcoWeb project, funded by
CNPq through the process 560044/2010-0.
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