S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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Accordingly, terms such as ‘heterogeneous network’ are used to reflect there being no distinction between humans and non–humans, as both technologies and humans all play equally important roles in the construction of actor-networks (Callon & Latour, 1981; Latour, 1987; Law, 1994). Hence any social world is essentially a social ordering, a product arising from the effect(s) of the associations within a heterogeneous network (Cressman, 2009). For example, technologies assist in the construction networks within social worlds and arenas. Computer networks, hardware and software, text messaging, buildings, planes, mobile phones and motor vehicles—while categorised as non-human materials or resources—are no different in their influence and networking than from that of humans; generalised symmetry (Van House, 2003). Callon and Law (1997) argued that in addition to the human and non-human elements, there is a third element: text. Words and communication draw on an immense network and web of individuals, instruments, data, scientific experiments and knowledge, opinions and laboratory technicians. For example, a written protocol or procedure for administering a psychiatric medication, while it may have been written by a single individual, draws for its content and meaning on a vast array of peoples, knowledge(s) and organisations. Therefore, ‘texts reflect, are produced by, and help to create, a teeming world of entities’ (Callon & Law, 1997, p. 170). Similarly, the groups within the remote nurse’s social world are not stable, solid or rigid or comprised of established boundaries. Each group is not a distinct and stable group of human and non-human objects. Rather, they are sets of relations in the form of networks (Callon & Law, 1997). Networks ‘form, their content, and their properties are not fixed. Rather their identity emerges and changes in the course of interaction … objects for