Abstract
I believe that I met Bruno Latour for the first time in print either via the chapter written with Michel Callon (Callon & Latour, 1981) or the second edition of Latour and Woolgar’s (1979/1986) Laboratory Life – I do not remember the order in which I read them. In real life, I met Bruno at the 11th EGOS colloquium in Paris in July 1993. His keynote at that conference was entitled ‘Can sociology of science teach anything to the study of organizations?’.Oh yes it could, and it did – mostly thanks to him. Indeed, I dared to call him ‘An accidental organization theorist’ (Czarniawska, 2014).
I may have described him that way because of the richness of his sources and inspirations. Was he a philosopher, a sociologist, an anthropologist, or all of these? In 2002 (Latour, 2002) he designated Gabriel Tarde as his spiritual guide and predecessor. Richard Rorty (2007) saw in him a Deweyan, which Latour confirmed in his last speech at the 150th jubilee of SciencesPo (16 September 2022). Michael Lynch (1982), in turn, was of the opinion that Latour’s attitude was that of the Schützian idea of sociologist as a stranger.
Latour studied a great many organizations. His first field study was conducted in French factories on the Ivory Coast. Trying to understand why the expatriate cadres had difficulties finding African replacements, he noticed the asymmetrical ‘anthropologizing the Other’, then pervasive in Western anthropology. The remedy would be an ethnography of such modern practice as science (Latour, 2013b), rending a California laboratory the perfect site. Although not all laboratory researchers were convinced that this was the way they wanted to be described, for us in organization studies, Laboratory Life was the first close-up description of work processes that was not done in the normative spirit of action research or of critical management. After all, according to Latour, and I cannot but agree, the task of social scientists is not to tell the people they study what to do, but to provide the general public – especially young people who are choosing their future careers – with a better description of various types of jobs and professions.
In 1993 he came out with We Have Never Been Modern, and it made us rethink quite a few matters. In this book, Latour presented a history of separation of social from technical as a time-related accident of modernist thought. The modernist scholars first separated ‘nature’ from ‘culture’ in an act of purification, and then joined them in one or another revolutionary project, such as an idea of ‘sociotechnical systems’. But there is nothing in the social, said Latour, that is uniquely human and nothing in the technical that excludes humans. Humans and non-humans – such as animals, artefacts and machines – have always existed and acted in collectives, dependent upon one another, inseparable.
Latour received an honorary doctorate from Lund University in 1996, and I was among the scholars who were there to greet him. In the same year, his Aramis or the Love for Technology came out, showing us how to use belles lettres when presenting research results. (In my opinion, the two main characters, the Master and his Pupil, were modelled on William of Baskerville and Adso in Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose.) In 1998, he showed us how to combine text and photography in Paris ville invisible (with Emilie Hermant – not translated into English until 2006).
Pandora’s Hope (Latour, 1999) was a collection of previously published essays and a true methodological inspiration for young scholars looking for new and interesting ways of conducting field studies. Especially enriching was the story of a 1991 expedition, during which Latour was a member of a research group comprising a botanist, a geographer and two pedologists on their excursion into the Amazon forest near Boa Vista, a small town in Brazil. They worked, and he photographed and described what they did. Their fieldwork concerned the Amazon forest; his fieldwork concerned research work. But maybe it was there and then that his passion for climatic issues began?
In November 2001, Latour delivered a closing speech at the International Conference on Spacing and Timing in Palermo, Italy. He then summarized his contributions to both sociology and organization theory in Reassembling the Social (Latour, 2005). The subtitle of this book was An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, and it is ANT, as it is commonly known, for which Latour is best known. The book is perhaps more a summary than an introduction, but it also presents a useful introduction to the history of ANT. Its crucial notion of translation came from Michel Serres (Steven D. Brown, 2002, has presented a useful summary). Another source was the ‘actant theory’ of French-Lithuanian semiologist, Algirdas Greimas, whose course in semiology both Callon and Latour attended. Greimas introduced the notion of narrative program: a change of state produced by any subject affecting any other subject. He meant grammatical subjects, which may or may not reveal themselves as persons. Accordingly, he replaced the term ‘character’ with the term ‘actant’: ‘that which accomplishes or undergoes an act’ (Greimas & Courtés, 1982, p. 5). An actant, if successful in its actions, may become an actor, especially if it manages to connect to other actants. This term applies not only to human beings, but also to animals, objects or concepts – and was therefore well suited to Latour.
Later, Latour dedicated himself primarily to the issues of climate change, and his work was closely followed by our colleagues with interest in this topic. But he did not forget organization studies. He ran courses for doctoral students at the School of Business, Economy and Law in Gothenburg in 1999 and 2006 and accepted an honorary doctorate from my university in 2008. He wrote another organizational ethnography in 2010, and in 2011 once again delivered a keynote at the EGOS colloquium – this time in Gothenburg. His 2011 speech was called ‘The monadological principle and organization studies’ and suggested that the thoughts of Leibniz and Tarde had a fascinating connection with contemporary organizing – a connection that only Bruno Latour could assemble. Even when he returned to philosophy in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Latour, 2013b), he admitted that organizing was one of such modes of existence. The chapter dedicated to organizing was based on a speech he delivered at the University of Montreal in May 2007, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate (Latour, 2013a).
In 2013, he received the Holberg Prize in Bergen, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize for social sciences. Their Academic Committee reasoned as follows: Bruno Latour has undertaken an ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, challenging the most fundamental categories such as the distinction between modern and pre-modern, nature and society, human and non-human. (https://holbergprize.org/en/holberg-prize/prize-winners/bruno-latour, accessed 2022-09-09).
This is how I ended my chapter on Bruno Latour as an accidental organization scholar: I believe that it is precisely because Bruno Latour never intended to conduct organization studies that his work made us see beyond the iron cage of our own discipline. Interested in science and technology, he saw beyond the ossified structures of formal organizations, ignored the micro and macro hierarchies, and depicted a flat world, where connections between hybrid entities are constantly built and stabilized. (Czarniawska, 2014, p. 102)
I knew about his health problems, but I believed they had been resolved. I listened to his talk at SciencesPo’s 150th Jubilee on 16 September 2022, and though I could see he was not well, I hoped it was transitory. I loved and admired him as a person, a thinker and a writer. We in management and organization studies owe Bruno a lot.
