S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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Law, 1986b). He did this because censoring interpretations could potentially hinder him from obtaining an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon under investigation, namely remote nurses delivering mental healthcare. Free association requires the abandonment of all assumed a priori relationships between human and non-human actors (Callon, 1986a). Rather than imposing assumed relationships upon the actors, they must be the focus of the analysis, not the point of departure (Callon, 1986a). As Law (1992) concisely stated: It is important not to start out assuming whatever we wish to explain...we might start with interaction and assume that interaction is all that there is. Then we might ask how some kind of interactions more or less succeed in stabilizing and reproducing themselves: how it is that they overcome resistance and seem to become ‘macro-social’. (p. 380) 8.2.2 History of actor-network theory Actor-network theory has been incorporated by a number of intellectual traditions; for example, Foucault’s (1977) theory of power, micro-politics, semiotics and anthropology (Douglas, 1966) and the philosophy of Michel Serres. However, its most identifiable intellectual predecessor is Thomas Kuhn (1962; Bloor, 1976/1991). It is also a diaspora concept that overlaps with other intellectual traditions such as symbolic interactionism, science and technology studies. Since the 1980s, the main protagonists of actor network theory have been Bruno Latour (1987), Michel Callon (1986a) and John Law (1992, 1999). Actor-network theory has been used in multiple variegations but usually in case studies of a particular topic. Examples include Latour’s (1988) work on Pasteur and explorations in the sociology and