S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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With reference to Table 8.2, the more complex the task, the denser the network of human actors involved. When non-human actors are added to this analysis the networks become much greater in number and infinitely more complex and dense. Hence the medication tablet example is no longer an identified object (tablet) but an object with all the associated physical and non-physical elements, which brought about its creation and existence in the remote community at that time. Most nurse participants in the study spoke in terms of an actor, an object or organisation. They did not refer to the networks situated behind or through each other. This is reflective of remote nurses and study participants only seeing or thinking of a network as a single block (Latour, 1992). An example could be remote nurses referring to sending mental health patients off to hospital, without actually considering and explaining what benefit or treatment the mental health patient would receive. The taken for and single block assumption, in the reference to a hospital, is that the mental health patient will receive treatment and their mental health status will improve. There is no consideration of the complex network which is involved, any breakdown of which may not result in an improvement. Actor-network theory parlance refers to such simplificatory effects as punctualisations. Latour (1992) posited that the more widely performed an action the stronger its acceptance as a knowledge claim; the more often they are punctualised. This results from heterogeneous engineering; routines, the very basis of systems, become taken for granted.