Organizing rocks: Actor–network theory and space

Abstract

In an ethnography of the organizing of an underground mine, this article critically engages with actor–network theory’s theorizing of space, particularly the risk of drifting into spatial pluralism. Inspired by Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple, a space multiple approach is enrolled in which seemingly disparate enactments of the mining operations are understood in terms of coexistence and difference, inclusion and exclusion. Such an account attempts to cast aside a kind of neatness that jeopardizes the empirical openness that makes actor–network theory so fruitful to work with in organization studies dealing with spatial complexity.

Introduction

We are in Kiruna, Sweden, 200 km above the Polar Circle. The mine, deep inside Mount Kirunavaara, was established in 1898 and has ‘grown up’ together with the town of Kiruna. It is also a key reason for the construction of the technological megasystem (hydropower, railway, harbours, mines) shaping the northern part of Sweden since the early 1900s. The ore body has a uniquely high iron content (up to 69%) and, as far as is known, the ore disc is 4 km long, between 80 and 120 m thick and at least 2 km deep. It was formed 1.6 billion years ago following intense volcanic activity and later tilted to its current position. The mine, operated by the state-owned company LKAB (Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag), is the largest and, some claim, most modern underground iron ore mine in the world. There are about 600 km of underground roads, the equivalent of driving from Paris to Geneva. From inside the gates, it takes approximately 25 minutes by car to reach workplaces at the current main level, 1365 m below ground. From the harbour in Narvik, Norway, the iron ore pellets from Kiruna are exported to a world market (mostly to Europe, some to China and the Middle East). The mine’s claim on land surrounding the mountain is vast. New mountains are made out of waste rocks, the dams keep growing, the reindeers are forced from their grazing lands (undercutting a core element in the indigenous Sami people’s culture) and new tunnels below ground undermine the town of Kiruna, forcing the city centre and 5000 out of 18,000 denizens to move.

While the mine is fixed to the Kirunavaara mountain, organizing it is spatially complex. Where does the mine begin and end? Where is the mining done? By revoking part of a literature now widely accepted in organization studies, actor–network theory (ANT; see Czarniawska, 2009; Czarniawska and Hernes, 2005; Hassard et al., 1999; Woolgar and Coopmans Neyland, 2009; and in anthropological studies of mining, see Golub, 2014; Li, 2015; Welker, 2014), this article seeks to highlight some of the spatial complexity of organizing rocks.

ANT has always triggered a stronger sensitivity to how space matters as it strives to not impose a priori assumptions on actors and their ‘world-building capacities’ (Latour, 1999: 20; see Czarniawska, 2004; Law and Mol, 2001; Law and Singleton, 2005; Mol and Law, 1994). Hence, as a literature, ANT is primarily empirical, ‘seeking to make sense of complex social situations’ (Hassard et al., 1999: 388) and being attentive to ‘the creation of presences and absences’ (Jones et al., 2004: 725). However, ANT is still haunted by a conceptual conundrum: while opening up for spatial complexity, the lure of the Network risks drawing representations into a singular, network space, ‘othering’ spaces that might be critical for organizing (rocks, for example). It thus also loses some of its possibilities as an ontologically relativist yet epistemologically realist approach (Lee and Hassard, 1999) to space. Indicating the vitality of ANT, this risk of othering (Law, 2002, 2004) has been acknowledged (Brown and Capdevila, 1999; De Laet and Mol, 2000; Latour, 1999; Law, 1999, 2002; Law and Singleton, 2005) and dealt with either by (1) complementing network space with other spaces that only are allowed to exist outside of the network or by (2) allowing other spaces to interfere but which are depicted in very diffuse ways. Following Annemarie Mol (1999, 2002), at stake here is a drift into spatial pluralism.

In her study of atherosclerosis, The Body Multiple (Mol, 2002), seemingly underused in organization studies (Czarniawska, 2009; a notable exception is Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010), Mol suggests a way forward by providing a case and a vocabulary with which to resist the drift into spatial pluralism. She outlines and practises a space multiple approach, thus encouraging organizational scholars to consider organizing as spatially a matter of difference and coexistence, exclusion and inclusion. In this empirically grounded article about the organizing of rocks, the first research question is: How can a space multiple approach highlight spatial complexity of organizing (rocks)?

As Alcadipani and Hassard (2010) argue, ‘when multiplicity is taken into account new possibilities are opened and “negative” aspects can be undermined’ (p. 427). Hence, opening up for space multiple also opens up for ‘the politics of what’ (Mol, 2002). In this article, the second research question is: What does a space multiple analysis of organizing (rocks) reveal about power and ethics?

The next section details the theoretical discussion on the drift from spatial pluralism towards space multiple. Following this, we describe the methodological underpinnings and choices of the ethnography of the mine. In the empirical section, we depict the case in a noncoherent mode, that is, what Mol (2002) calls scenes, practising her vocabulary. In the discussion, we elaborate on issues of spatial multiplicity, power and the ethics of organizing.

ANT: spatial pluralism versus space multiple

A hallmark of ANT is the network, which is used to explain both what travels in space (immutable mobiles, i.e. ideas or things, keeping their shape wherever they go; Latour, 1987, 1990; Law, 1999) and space itself – networked space (Law and Mol, 2001; Mol and Law, 1994). The network concept is relational and about actors managing (or not) to expand networks by keeping them stable (Callon and Latour, 1981). If some things ‘hold their relational shape as they circulate around the globe, then long-distance control is a possibility’ (Law and Singleton, 2005: 335). In classic ANT grammar, it has become black boxed. Yet, powerful networks are not spatially bigger in terms of scale; macro actors are on the same level as micro actors (Callon and Latour, 1981). Dominating actors have managed to associate successfully with humans and nonhumans, and by becoming macro actors, their networks have longer orbits than other actors (Latour, 1999). In terms of space, the ‘network’ world is empirically flat.

But what about ideas or things that show configurational variance (so-called mutable mobiles)? Two attempts, beyond the network, stand out as particularly influential in the literature: fluid and fire space. Fluid space has been depicted as something in which elements and their spatial relations change. For Mol and Law (1994: 657), anaemia, as their ‘object’, can be ‘here’ and ‘there’, but each ‘one’ is not part of a single network since the anaemias and the links between them vary. Mol and Law then point to a network possibility in their case, that anaemia ‘here’ and ‘there’ is about two networks, but argue that it cannot be so: ‘We’re looking at variation without boundaries and transformation without discontinuity. We’re looking at flows. The space with which we’re dealing is fluid’ (Mol and Law, 1994: 658; De Laet and Mol, 2000; Law and Mol, 2001). Fire space, in comparison, is ‘energetic and transformative, and depends on difference – for instance between (absent) fuel or cinders and (present) flame’ (Law and Singleton, 2005: 344; Johansson and Metzger, 2016). Compared to fluids, fire makes its presence ‘in the form of a dancing and dangerous pattern of discontinuous displacements between locations that are other to (but linked with) each other’ and is ‘much more dynamic, more sporadic, less predictable, and, yes, more discontinuous than is suggested by the concept of flow’ (Law and Singleton, 2005: 347).

While challenging conceptions of space, these concepts introduce the risk of invoking spatial divisions, that is, pluralism. For example, when writing about objects and space, Law (2002) states that ‘these spatialities and the objects which inhabit and enact them are unconformable, that they are Other to one another’ (p. 92). Law and Mol (2001) discuss the travel of mutable mobiles as flowing like fluid and argue against looking at mutable mobiles as ‘something that moves within the network’, but rather ‘[t]hink of it instead as an Other to the network and its spatialities, something outside a network’ (italics emphasized, p. 613). In terms of fire space, it is not clear what messiness and radical disruption imply, other than fire ‘cannot be narrated smoothly from a single location’ (Law and Singleton, 2005: 348).

Notwithstanding, it is sometimes acknowledged that fluids and fires could interfere with the network topology by sometimes being in concert with it, sometimes in conflict with it, sometimes only partially interfering with it and where at other times more ‘intricate’ relations take place (Law and Mol, 2001; Law and Singleton, 2005; Mol and Law, 1994). One reading of this development of space within ANT is that fluid and fire space are not allowed to interfere with network space. Network space is separated from, enacted as Other to, fluid and fire space. Yet, in other passages, other possibilities are revealed. Different spaces and objects can interfere with each other. One argument is that this indecisiveness stems from the strength of the network concept.

In the joint effort to renew ANT, in its ‘and after’ (Law and Hassard, 1999), Law (1999) notes that ‘the notion of the network is itself a form – or perhaps a family of forms – of spatiality: that it imposes strong restrictions on the conditions of topological possibility’ (p. 7). Law claims that attempts to break free from the network have been achieved by naturalizing the network’s ‘topological assumptions’ (Law, 1999: 8; Law, 2002). Brown and Capdevila (1999) observed that the term network seems so natural that it requires no explanation, in contrast to undifferentiated space, which is ‘at all times immanent to the apparent order of the network’, but ‘always fundamentally “unrepresentable” to the network’ (p. 36). In ANT, ‘undifferentiated space is constantly withdrawing, a space which the network must perpetually “go after”’, which threatens the whole programme of ANT to either ‘look totalitarian or to collapse into a realist account of scientific discovery’ (Brown and Capdevila, 1999: 36).

In sum, when reviewing spatial concepts that are central in the ANT literature, it seems as though ANT, including its ‘and after’, has drifted towards a spatial pluralism and that this risk is known to some scholars in the field. Brown and Capdevila depict this problem by implying that the network metaphor gains such a strong naturalistic stance that it forces attempts to do things differently and to look at the world from a different standpoint. On the one hand, and as Mol notes, to ‘look at the world from different standpoints’ could result in breaking ‘away from a monopolistic version of truth. But it [doesn’t] multiply reality’ (Mol, 1999: 76, italics in original). This means that different understandings of spatial metaphors within ANT end up in different and ‘mutually exclusive perspectives, discrete, existing side by side, in a transparent space’ (Mol, 1999: 76).

Mol’s answer is to open up for a space multiple approach. She highlights the difference between plural and multiple in relation to her case on atherosclerosis:

The ontology that comes with equating what is with what is done is not of a pluralist kind. The manyfoldedness of objects enacted does not imply their fragmentation. [—] This, then, is what I would like the term multiple to convey; that there is manyfoldedness, but not pluralism. In the hospital the body (singular) is multiple (many). (Mol, 2002: 83–84)

Mol reminds us that a view of reality through ANT is to say that reality is done and draws our attention to the word enact ¹ to highlight that what is done has to be complemented with the spatial question of where it is done or enacted. She refers to this as ‘spatial specification’ (Mol, 2002: 54):

In a single medical building there are many different atherosclerosis. And yet the building isn’t divided into wings with doors that never get opened. The different forms of knowledge aren’t divided into paradigms that are closed off from one another. It is one of the great miracles of hospital life: there are different atheroscleroseses in the hospital but despite the differences between them they are connected. Atherosclerosis enacted is more than one – but less than many. […] Thus, far from necessarily falling into fragments, multiple objects tend to hang together somehow. Attending to the multiplicity of reality opens up the possibility of studying this remarkable achievement. (Mol, 2002: 55 and 5)

In her space multiple approach, Mol (2002) defines three modes or strategies – coordination, distribution and mutual inclusion – to show how different enactments of a body are done, causing it to be multiple yet coexisting and hanging together (more than one, but less than many; cf. Blaser, 2009; Lavau, 2013; Street, 2011; Welker, 2014). Coordination is organizing by adding up (settling issues hierarchically and providing reasons to act) and calibration (establishing common measures). Distribution is organizing disputes that cannot be smoothed away: ‘[t]hey are lived with’ (Mol, 2002: 87), by inferring spatial divisions between different enactments. Inclusion is organizing where ‘living as a part of what is other, or of holding what is other inside the self’ is done and where different enactments that are seemingly ‘opposed to one another may also depend on one another’ (Mol, 2002: 142 and 143–144).

These modes are not of an epistemic concern, that is, to study how people ‘go about knowing the world or on whether the world is knowable at all’, but an ontological concern about studying ‘what kind of worlds are there and how they come into being’ (Blaser, 2009: 11) and how ‘coexistence comes in varieties and takes different shapes’ (Mol, 2002: 151; see also Law and Singleton, 2013, 2014). In our analysis of the mine, we investigate the analytical usefulness of these modes when studying the spatial complexity of organizing (rocks).

A mine under an ‘ethnographic microscope’

We conducted an ethnography of the Kiruna mine between January 2015 and March 2017 by visiting Kiruna 15 times and staying 2–4 days each time. Empirical openness permeated this basic research project, designed to follow a phenomenon with no fixed beginning or end (Law and Singleton, 2014). This openness did not rule out being systematic. We systematically approached the question of where the mine begins and ends by empirically moving in two directions – inside-out and outside-in. Inside-out implied starting with people and places inside the gates and then snowballing outwards (asking workers, for example, who/where do you think we should go). Outside-in implied starting from what at first might seem unrelated people and places (e.g. artists, a theatre and tourists) and then searching for enactments of the mine. Both a priori and during these movements, we remained open to common analytical boundaries in organization studies such as inside/outside the gates, below/above ground, white/blue collar, work/home and the mine/the community. Similar to anthropological accounts of mining (Golub, 2014; Kirsch, 2014; Li, 2015; McDonald et al., 2012; Welker, 2014), being cautious about boundaries took us to places and people and different enactments of the mine that we had not anticipated a priori.

We met workers, managers, ombudsmen and contractors inside and outside the company gates. We followed some of them inside the gates to their different workplaces both underground and above ground (approximately 50 hours, effective time shadowing workers and managers). We also met local politicians, officials, local youth, Sami people, artists, tourism entrepreneurs, other researchers as well as members of the company’s board. Many of the conversations were not recorded because they happened on the hoof or in informal meetings, although we did collect over 40 recorded conversations. While striving to have open conversations (Czarniawska, 1997, 2012; Mol, 2002), we have been systematic in the sense that they have all been about their relations to the mine, work and community. We have talked to and followed actors as whole human beings in their whole reality (not only, for example, at work, as workers).

The company’s top management in Luleå put an end to all direct observations inside the gates in late 2015, due to the fact that we had not anchored the project with them. We had only – as the Swedish Research Council’s ethical guidelines stipulate – anchored it with the individual workers and managers we were visiting (the people quoted in this article have given their informed consent, some under the condition of being anonymous, which is why we have treated everyone equally – no one can be traced based on what is included in this article). We also made friends in Kiruna, visited private homes and were frequent guests at various hotels, restaurants and shops in the town.

Besides this empirical material, we read official reports from the company, the municipality and by other researchers. We also followed a variety of relevant actors on different social media, read news articles in the local media and national newspapers and read novels and nonfiction books related to Kiruna and the mine. In short, we tried to absorb this mining community and the people doing the mine as fully as we could. However, as we sought to un-bracket the mine, we got physically stuck in Kiruna. Perhaps, we fell in love with Kiruna (on love, see De Laet and Mol, 2000), or at least were overwhelmed by the empirical material just ‘in’ Kiruna?

The scientific stance in this project positions participants as ethnographers (world-builders), who show and tell us about what working in and/or living with a mine is like (Holmes and Marcus, 2010). Our field studies are not a smooth one-directional process, because ‘[m]ethods are not a way of opening a window on the world, but a way of interfering with it’ (Mol, 2002: 155; Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010; Law, 2002, 2004; Law and Singleton, 2013, 2014). Essentially, without those we met, walked and talked with, we would not have learned about space multiple. They drew our attention to coexistence and difference, inclusion and exclusion and, similar to Mol’s experience, it was us, not them, who had problems ‘shifting’ between multiple realities, by showing us how reality is done and how it multiplies depending on where it is done. With them, we could start to articulate how organizational attempts to transform iron ore leak and overflow (Callon, 1998). A wide range of actors continuously try to draw in the mine, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Different actors lever their enactments of the world and, in so doing, jointly engage in what Lavau (2013) calls ‘ontological cleavage’, meaning both ‘to hold firmly to and to split apart’ (p. 428) the mine. We also found that our empirical openness helped to avoid the risk of either cozying up to, or being coopted by, certain stakeholders. This is especially so in mining, as there are strong local and national interests and significant economic, environmental and social impacts (Kirsch, 2014; Welker, 2014).

Although ANT, including Mol, has been with us as researchers since 1999 and has been essential to the design of this project, Mol’s ontology of the body multiple only gradually became more seminal as we struggled to make sense of the organizing of the Kiruna mine with the spatial metaphors of ANT. This iterative, reflexive process between reading, field studies and analysing is difficult to fully account for, as we simply cannot sort out the ‘order of things’ in the research process. This article, though, is a systematic effort to enrol a space multiple approach.

Below, we have selected ‘sketches of separate scenes’ (Mol, 2002: 53) in Kiruna where mining operations are enacted. Our selection is not based on the fact that these scenes are the only ones showing spatial multiplicity, but rather that they juxtapose ‘each other by way of specification or point of contrast’ (Mol, 2002: 53).

Organizing a mine

The red line

A core strategic enactment of the organizing of the mine that we came across numerous times in Kiruna, both inside and outside the gates to the mine (albeit not an official expression used by the company), is the red line. In short, this means that, for the mine to work, the ore must be transformed. This process begins underground with a method called sub-level caving, ‘based on creating cavities in the orebody through drilling and blasting, and allowing the ore to fall down to underlying levels by means of gravity, from where it is transported onwards by train or loaders [trucks]’ (LKAB, 2017). The ore is crushed underground and then skip-hoisted approximately 1.4 km vertically in two stages up to the processing plant located above the mine, where it is separated, processed and mixed into what the company calls ‘green pellets’. The mix differs depending on different customers’ demands. Basically, the red line begins underground and ends in the works. Disturbances to this line are very costly.

Sometimes the red line is extended. The former CEO of the company added that after pelletization the ore is hauled by train along the Malmbanan railway (Sweden) and the Ofotbanen railway (Norway) to the port of Narvik, where it is exported. In his words: ‘I count the boats, because when they leave I can send the invoices’ (lecture at Luleå University of Technology, November 4, 2015). The company recently invested more than a billion SEK in order to increase the capacity of the loading in the port and also brought back the previously outsourced train drivers. So, an extended red line takes us from drilling and blasting to loading boats, from drillers to stevedores.

The red line is a powerful enactment of how the mine works (and where it is done) and contains more or less successful attempts at organizing a mine operation. Although the red line is regularly disrupted, on most days it is an amazing accomplishment. After all, neither the mine nor its iron ore explodes into fragments. However, the red line, or its extended version, is not a sufficient explanation as to how and why the mine works.

Steel builds wealth

We are at the town hall and in the office of a local politician. The politician doubts that the mine will manage to keep the population in the municipality stable and will definitely not increase it. The curves for the number of inhabitants in Kiruna and the number of employees at LKAB in Kiruna also started to diverge at the beginning of the 21st century. Automation, technological developments and work schemes facilitating commuting from outside the municipality are mentioned as reasons for this. Many workers commute by car, train or even plane from small villages in the north, from the coast and the south, and some even from abroad. At the time of our study, about 40% of all the working hours in the mine were done by contractors. The local union does not resist this, because some members like it. The politician is critical though, because it reduces the municipality’s tax base.

The politician says that sometimes the mine is a ‘wet blanket’, in that it prevents other industries and sectors from developing. Kiruna is too dependent on the mine. The historically contingent enactment of the company as ‘The Patron’ is still strong, as is the common saying ‘when the company has a cold, society sneezes’. But the politician also directs us to something important at play in the enactments of the mine: ‘If you wake a miner up very early in the morning, he will rise, stand like a soldier and say: “Steel builds wealth”’.

This enactment of cause and effect is also found on the company’s website: ‘The mining operation produces several million tonnes of crude ore each year, which is converted into steel – which builds prosperity’ (LKAB, 2017). A common expression used by the company is that it helps build ‘attractive communities’. One of the top managers of the company at the time stated, when receiving an honorary doctorate from Luleå University of Technology, that the iron ore is basically good for everybody, including the tourism industry. Miners, contractors and customers stay at local hotels and eat at local restaurants. The underground museum in the Kiruna mine is also a popular tourist destination.

During our field studies, we encountered many metaphors enacting ‘steel builds wealth’. Besides the ‘old’ metaphor of ‘The Patron’, there is the mine as ‘Mother’ who provides for the community’s very existence, ‘The Motor’ that drives everything else and ‘The Dream factory’ (the works above ground) through which the ore is transformed not only into the ‘green pellet’, but also into an attractive community, progress, welfare and affluence. Kiruna is a wealthy place by domestic standards and has a very low unemployment rate. ‘Steel builds wealth’ is widely used by the former and present CEOs and is a key phrase in the LKAB’s jubilee book ‘The book of LKAB. The national treasure of Sweden’ (LKAB, 2015). The company produces wealth that trickles down to other parts of Sweden, allowing it to progress as a nation. Mineralization is classified as a ‘national interest’ by the Swedish state, accompanied by a globally acknowledged exploration-friendly legislation.

‘Steel builds wealth’ is a powerful enactment, but one that, as is the case with the red line, is not larger in scale (as in macro). It is rather a widely dispersed enactment (with long orbits), because it has become associated with many different actors and is ingrained in sayings, ways of thinking and world-building attempts (Latour, 1987, 1999). Even in their many critical accounts of the mine (e.g. the mine as a ‘wet blanket’ on other sectors in the region, resembles ‘Mordor’, or being hellish to work in, ‘the Basement’), people still come back to ‘but without the mine we’d be nothing’ and the historically important quandary of ‘what would Kiruna be without its ore?’ This connects to a local, common enactment that ‘the stone must get up and out’, whatever it takes. So, a wider enactment – steel builds wealth – connects to several local enactments – the stone must get up and out – although empirically the relation is not necessarily transitive, that is, that the smaller fits into the bigger. It is instead intransitive, in that it hangs together through inclusion, opposed to one another yet dependent on the other.

The reindeer cannot be where the mine is

In and around Kiruna, the reindeer have deeply rooted ways of roaming the land that are guided by seasonal changes. The domestication of reindeer is at least 5000 years old and connected to the indigenous Sami people. The Sami are the only people in Scandinavia to be recognized and protected under the international conventions of indigenous peoples (although, we hasten to add, not by the Swedish Government). They were rated as an inferior race by science (through dubious ‘scientific methods’ based on ‘race hygiene’) and as having no right to mandate and govern their own practices until the 1970s (until the government appointed a Sami spokesman). The Sami people’s relation to other ethnicities claiming indigenous rights is also tension filled.

Reindeer are essential to the Sami culture and the reindeer industry, tied to particular Sami villages, is (as with minerals) classified as a national interest of Sweden. Historically, in Sweden as in so many other places, there is a dark side to the coexistence of modernity and a civilizing process on the one hand, and traditional ways of life and indigenous people on the other. Mining has over time been at the centre of this history. Today, this coexistence implies an increasing dependence on mining at the expense of Sami culture and the reindeer industry, a development that is highly problematic for both the Sami people and the reindeer. A slogan used by contemporary artists and activist Sami people is: ‘We are still here!’

We are in a private kitchen meeting a young Sami. He switches on the computer, clicks on a program and says: ‘There is your iron ore’. On the slide, the company’s land area is much bigger than the town of Kiruna. He points to the screen and shows us what it looked like in 1906: ‘They had started mining operations then, but there were reindeer there’. These days, he continues, ‘The black lines, that is the territory of my [Sami] village [—] The red line is the mine’. This is a different red line. The map shows that the Kiruna mine is right in the middle of a central reindeer route and how the available areas and routes have been severed. He points to different parts of the map to show the zones in which trespassing is forbidden due to their instability from mining, other interference zones and the railway (referred to by another Sami as the biggest predator of them all). He also tells us that the reindeer want to go to the (for the Sami people) holy Kirunavaara because they have always done that: ‘This is what it looks like, this is the reality, you see the fence, it forces the reindeer to go this way instead of that way’.

He switches to another program and shows us recent photographs of the reindeer managing to get inside the forbidden area (‘LKAB doesn’t like me showing these pictures’), then switches back and shows us the new freight yard: ‘There is the viaduct, next to the freight yard, but the reindeer won’t go there because there is farmland, so instead we have to move the reindeer across the railway track. It’s dangerous’. There are regular incidents, reindeer on the motorway drinking (in winter they eat salt from the roads), going astray and helicopters regularly have to be used: ‘This is the reality, and this might explain why we have a problem with the herd no longer growing in number and why it is continuously moving about. They get disturbed by something all the time’.

From this Sami’s point of view, reindeer herding becomes harder and more expensive every year. It takes longer to do, the reindeer are stressed, do not eat and reproduce properly, are killed in the traffic and the costs are rising. We are also told that mental health, especially among the younger Sami, is a serious problem. Different joint projects are carried out between the mining company and the Sami people to organize the herding. The company, it is claimed, pays for some of the extra costs, but refrains from others. The Sami lack resources as well as mining and legal competence, and therefore the financial support from the company is essential for Sami villages with reindeer in the area. They also meet regularly in different fora: in private meetings to talk about how to behave publicly towards each other and to plan and carry out research projects in relation to herding (e.g. the GPS technique, helicopters, emergency preparations) and on occasion also in court.

In this scene, there are two radically different enactments, based on two seemingly incompatible national interests – mining and the reindeer industry. In the above two scenes, the locally produced enactments are supported by being a ‘national interest’ that is supported by both policy and law. Despite this, the mutual inclusion of the national interests of the Sami and local outcomes in favour of mining is riddled with tension. The same goes for the mutual inclusion of the national interest in minerals and recent attempts at exploration. These enactments nevertheless hang together, and mining and herding both work and are mutually dependent on each other, albeit under rather different conditions. As the mine occupies more and more space, there is a slow and insidious ‘crowding out’ of the Sami people and the reindeer. The young Sami showing us ‘There is your ore’ enacts a living experience of unfairness and injustice in terms of how the mine (of local and national interest) and the state-owned but also local company have gradually taken over the land. The iron ore is, as the Sami tells us, about colonialism.

There is a coexistence between what is markedly different due to mutual inclusion and intransitivity, although injustice is an essential part of this story as well. Doing the mine implies marginalization. Supporting this is also distribution – local coexistence is carried out by mutual, yet unfair, attempts at living next to each other. Geographical ‘corridors’ are designed and redesigned by administration, technology and science, the municipality, the company and the Sami (and the reindeer that now and again find their way into the marked and fenced territory of the mine). Thus, ‘[t]he architectural divide is duplicated by a divide between human [and nonhuman] populations. [—] The different worlds may be inhibited by different people’ (Mol, 2002: 112), but there are only some actors who can make a difference.

Scaling up ‘the stone must get up’ to ‘steel builds wealth’, and the other way around, is not easy or without controversy. The same goes for scaling up LKAB and the Sami position ‘on the ground’ and their respective support from being a national interest. Crucially, it is a separation that is not necessarily blurred, but that, as earlier quoted, is rather ‘about the coexistence of what is markedly different’ (Mol, 2002: 142) and a dependency on each other.

The town cannot be where the mine is

As the ore body steeply inclines under the town of Kiruna, a new city centre is currently being established to the north east of the existing one. It is estimated that 5000 denizens in the urban area will be forced to move, along with parks, squares, historical buildings, shops, offices, hotels and so on. In formal language, parts of the town are ‘moved’ or ‘reconstructed’, but the fact is that the greater part of the affected area is being torn down. Another fact is that the iron ore is scattered (a local supplier said that ‘God was in a good or bad mood, depending how you view things, when he created the North’), which makes land a scarce resource in and around Kiruna, despite its remoteness and sparse population.

We are at a local hotel with a manager (also an expert on rock mechanics) whose division is responsible for monitoring seismic activity and putting reinforcements in place to avoid collapses. This division also provides information to the environmental authorities and is responsible for investigating ground deformation and making prognoses on which the urban transformation is based. In other words, it estimates how excavation affects land and when houses need to be moved or demolished. The manager tells us that there are so-called chimney caves, where collapses reach right down to production level. Further out from the mining processes, there are crack zones, which could be up to 1 m deep. There are deformation zones further out too. These three zones should be – and are – devoid of human activity and, preferably but not always, devoid of reindeer.

The manager tells us about an emotional tension for workers at a particular block, due to a fatal incident there in 2008 as the mountain sagged. He also tells us that another block is rather unsettled, and that the deeper they go, the harder it gets due to the seismic activity. Already at this level (1365 m below ground), the seismic activity can be equivalent to very small earthquakes. It is impossible to really foresee all the possible events: ‘You cannot imagine a mine as something static. It is in constant change; it changes behaviour depending on the depth’. The prognosis continuously changes, but ‘we measure and we know that “this line” is stipulated by law, I don’t think there are any huge problems’, apart from the communication issue, ‘which might be our fault, we have not succeeded in explaining things’. For the manager, the zones and the mountains as reactions to the expanding excavation are primarily a dynamic yet techno-scientifically and controllable problem and second a pedagogical problem (technical/knowledge problem for the municipality).

Moving to another place, the Community House, all the complex analyses of how the mining is causing the mountain to move are built into an exhibition for all (locals and visitors) to see, with clearly mapped territories and statements of when and to where houses and people are moved. There is even a mini-model of the mine and the community on which lines and dates are stated. In this model, there are no Sami, reindeer, uncertainties, disorders or risks. It is an enactment based on science, risk, probability, measurements and mechanics and is coordinated into one model, one prediction (Mol, 2002: 80). It is an enactment of solid boundaries. Although most of those we talked to know that the boundaries are moving, the zones and the time lines boil down to this model of the mine and the urban transformation. These boundaries are attempted to be upheld through coordination (adding up by hierarchization and calibration by establishing common measures) and distribution (spatial divisions) – between the mine, the zones, the people and the houses. Where the mine is, the town cannot be.

However, the mine and its operations are not larger (or smaller, as in the model) than the town, or vice versa. The two objects contain and are dependent on each other (inclusion), for example, the town allows the company to use some of its land and vice versa; the company pays for several employees at the municipality in order to work with the urban transformation and so on. The town and the mine are integrated, but also geographically incompatible. While coexistence is enacted on the premise that where the mine goes the town cannot, it also holds the promise of a necessary modernization and continuation of the town.

So far then, there are interferences between the ‘red line’, ‘steel builds wealth’, ‘the stone must get up’ and ‘the town’, but neither the mine, nor its residents and animals fragmentize or fall apart, even though buildings are literally torn down, people are moved and reindeer routes are shrinking. The organizing of rocks hangs together. But it is also fragile.

Mining the catastrophe

Located behind Kirunavaara, yet still inside the gates and with a view of surrounding mountains constructed from waste rocks, are the dams. The dams are not visible from the town or the administration building, which an expert claims is one reason for their low-key nature. Another reason, the expert tells us, is ‘because the dams are the mine’s and the works’ toilet; it’s where they pee and poo’. However, this toilet is lethal, because whenever and wherever a dam is broken, the impact on people and nature is usually massive.

There is water in the mountain, some of which is also used in production, but it flows irregularly and unpredictably: ‘It goes in all directions’ (Lavau, 2013: 428) and penetrates what ought not to be penetrated. Water is ambiguous in that it challenges the certainty of science and this ‘[a]mbiguity does not go away, it drifts’ (Lavau, 2013: 428). Through a pipe, water mixed with waste from the mine and the works pours into the dams. According to the expert, it is often too ‘wet’ and therefore a problem. Above ground, where the processing occurs (following the pipe closer to its sources), we walk up and down the steps with a manager at the works to see how the iron ore is separated, mixed and turned into pellets. There is dirt, mud and ore everywhere, on the ground, on machines, on windows and in our nostrils. Some of it is flushed away with a hose and one of the workers we meet says that sometimes he spends most of the day flushing: ‘We just flush, we flush’. This mix of water and waste, a drifting compound in itself, then finds its way through the pipe to the dams.

Back at the dams, there is a small house right beside the last section of the dam, where water has been purified enough to be reused in the mine and the works. It is a neat system. There is a pump station inside the house and it is important, because, if the pump stops, the whole mine stops in about 10 minutes. According to the expert we meet, the dams need to be improved, but it is difficult to get the management to listen. Renewed hope comes with the new CEO, who previously worked at a company where a dam incident is said to have reinforced his stance on taking dams seriously.

The dams’ distributed geographical location implies that they are enacted as nonexistent and as a toilet (not part of the red line, they do not build wealth). Although the dams enable the mine and the works, this architectural distribution is vulnerable. The difference between enacting a dam as invisible, as a toilet and as highly felt and essential is approximately 10 minutes. In a worst-case scenario, the dams would not only ruin the mine, but also the habitats in and around Kiruna.

A young worker

This final scene contrasts with the others in that it is more person centred and relates to how the people we meet as ethnographers talk about how to live with a mine. It also serves to show how they, and not us scientists, seemingly effortlessly navigate or switch between enactments that showcase how reality multiplies: coexistence and difference, inclusion and exclusion.

On a couple of occasions, we meet a young underground worker who joined the workforce after leaving school. Underground, at work repairing machines, she talks about the sound of the mountain and how moving down from 775 m to 1365 m scares her, because the mountain moans as it cracks, often for long periods of time. There are visible cracks in the shop floor where she and her workmates have their station and she believes that sooner or later the mountain will collapse: it is just a matter of ‘not on my shift’. She tells us a story about how the mountain shook during a coffee break and how she ran to check whether her workmates were still alive.

She talks about inhaling dust mixed with gases from the blasting and worries about her long-term health. She says that she lifts weights in her spare time to cope with the heavier parts of her work (she also thinks that working out is fun). When she was new to the job, she could not cope with all work tasks because she was not strong enough. Although she can do almost everything now, the parts that she cannot carry out are traded with male colleagues. However, men’s bodies do not always fit into certain physical settings (getting in between ‘things’), whereas hers does. There are also stories about the gendered labour process in mining (Rolston, 2014) being more suited to men when it comes to doing their ablutions, or relieving themselves in the tunnels, and how she complained to the management about the displays of naked women on the walls in the shop and that nothing happened until she started to hang up similar pictures of men.

She talks about living with her mother in a small apartment in Kiruna, both of whom work at radically different times (one of them sleeping when the other is awake) and how her mother moved to live in a trailer (on the coldest nights – remember we’re in the Arctic – she was allowed to sleep at work). Despite making good money (for her age and education the mine pays very well) and having a boyfriend who also makes good money, buying a house is not possible. The reason, she says, is because the company brings in contractors from outside Kiruna with more buying power, which raises the prices of local property. Four of her relatives, who do not work in the mine, live in a one-room apartment with their cats, because no other apartments are available (and are too expensive anyway). She tells us that when visiting them it is clear how the mine divides the community. She and her boyfriend, on the other hand, contacted the company’s own estate agency and as a result were given a bigger apartment.

She says that work is a money-maker and the mine is the place that provides her with it, but she also talks about her strong feelings for the mine and her job. Although she is not from Kiruna, does not overly care for the town and regularly travels back ‘home’, she says she will work in the mine forever. When travelling, she longs for the mountains and her job. It is almost a love affair.

Many more scenes like this one could have been written. Coexistence and difference and inclusion and exclusion are drawn into people’s stories as though they were the most natural things in the world. The young worker tells her stories at a local hotel, not in the spaces that she refers to, and the mine multiplies when she shares them. However, the mine also holds together (not least through her) as she moves through fear, health problems, repair jobs, muscles, money, patriarchy, housing prices, social injustice and longings.

Discussion

Based on the five scenes, analysed through Mol’s three modes of organizing, it is highlighted how more than one but less than many mines are enacted depending on where the mining is done. A more traditional actor–network study investigating and analysing the organizing of rocks would run the risk of exclusively focusing on the core strategic enactment, the red line, as a stable and dominating network. Having existed for more than 125 years, the mine has succeeded in expanding downwards and sideways. What needs to be explained are the processes by which other actors and networks crucial to the organizing of the mine have been either associated with the red line (Latour, 1999) or silenced (Callon, 1986) by it. For the other scenes to be allowed entry into such an analysis, they need to be cast as inside the network, where for the time being the power struggles are perceived as over. Opponents and the opposition are black boxed, and the mine keeps working.

If not cast as inside the network, a pluralist spatial attempt would cast the other scenes as outside the network. While showing intricate and complicated patterns on their own, no interferences would be allowed with the network and, if they were, would be vaguely accounted for. In any case, recognizing the other scenes would be at the expense of their power to enact difference. The red line becomes a Leviathan. Pluralistic attempts to investigate and analyse the organizing of rocks would thus make visible what would normally be invisible (black boxed inside the network), albeit at the expense of being irrelevant for the organizing of rocks.

Turning to how space multiple challenges such organizational analyses, the space multiple task of following ‘what is being done and what, in doing so, is reality in practice made to be’ (Mol, 2002: 160) shows that the scene of the red line is important, but not enough for the organizing of rocks to work. Enactments in the other scenes interfere with the red line and it is precisely due to coexistence and difference, inclusion and exclusion that organizing rocks works. The unbracketed case in which enactments of the organizing of rocks are multiple and discontinuous opens up for serious and unsettled empirical controversies and vulnerabilities (such as the mine stops 10 minutes after the pump house fails, the expanding mine increasingly colonizes the Sami people’s traditional way of living, the expanding mine forces an urban transformation requiring parts of the town to be torn down and relocalized, and entrepreneurs and commuters making the housing situation difficult for young local adults and their families).

Although each enactment may be marginal in comparison with the red line, and be constantly in danger of becoming even more marginalized, taken together, all the scenes of coexistence and difference, inclusion and exclusion (Jensen, Sandström and Helin, 2009) tell a different story about power. All the enactments, including the red line, do the mine differently and do it differently together, not in isolation (plural) or inside something else (network), which helps unravel a different understanding of organizing (rocks).

According to Mol (1999, 2002), such taken-togetherness also opens up the ‘politics of what’ for a discussion about whether ‘we really want this?’ and ‘what could be done about it?’ ‘We’ is meant in the broadest sense, in that there is no actor ‘who can choose for or against it’ (Mol, 2002: 179) by standing, or being analytically cast as outside the reality, or by being positioned inside a network. The ‘politics of what’ needs to be jointly established and is as such inherently a question of ethics, of ‘doing good’: ‘Like ontology, the good is inevitably multiple’ (Mol, 2002: 177).

Herein lies a difference between a study of a disease in a hospital and organizing rocks in terms of ethics, of doing good:

Mol notes that different enactments of the body have different moral and political entailments, but she deliberately brackets these and excludes them from her inquiry. This is appropriate for her object, a disease that her interlocutors all agree has deleterious effects on human health. By contrast, among those enacting mining corporations there is no consensus about whether their very existence should be regarded, on balance, as positive or negative. (Welker, 2014: 5)

While the interlocutors in Mol’s study can ethically agree about ‘deleterious effects on human health’, no such consensus is to be found with regard to mining (on this point, see also Golub, 2014; Kirsch, 2014; Li, 2015; McDonald et al., 2012; Rolston, 2014). The enactments of the mine take place in relation to issues that are dear to humanity, thus creating a maelstrom of ethical issues: irreversible environmental destruction, animal species under threat, conditions of existence for indigenous people, exploration of resource peripheries, social injustice, gender, health and safety and local democracy. All these issues are enacted in the scenes, but how might they be jointly established or ethically balanced as good or bad, positive or negative? Doing space multiple research does not give us the answer to this question, but opens up and extends the possibilities for addressing it.

Conclusion

Showing that other worlds are possible (Law, 2004; Law and Singleton, 2005, 2013, 2014; Mol, 2002) or how enactments can be remade or unmade (Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010) is difficult. This account has been an attempt to cast aside what we see as a kind of neatness that jeopardizes the empirical openness that in our view really makes ANT so fruitful to work with. Casting more doubt on empirical phenomena that have become taken for granted is an essential ANT trajectory.

Space is the terra incognita that Latour (1999) claims to be the ‘most exciting aspects of ANT because they show the extent of our ignorance and the immense reserve that is open for change’ (p. 19). Admitting that space ‘is a much harder task than we thought at first’ (Latour, 1999: 20), ANT has also been critically targeted for becoming too vague and for the difficulty of understanding why certain parts of space are dropped, pacified and end up in the spatial background (see, e.g. Bloomfield and Vurdubakis, 1999; Thanem, 2011). Latour (1999) has countered this by arguing that the problem instead lies in a vocabulary that is not poor enough, that is, not sufficiently undetermined, sensitive and open. Mol seeks another way, where the ethnography of the body multiple is carried out without explicitly relating to several of the key concepts developed by ANT scholars, particularly the network concept. Mol barely touches on her own previously developed concepts either, with fluidity as the most relevant example. Our reading tells us that the strategy has been to set free and start afresh.

Things might have been different if Mol (2002) had engaged in criticizing ANT and space instead of refraining from it. We are not dealing with a Leviathan here; there are always options and much is at stake due to the circulating dominance of the network concept. Therefore, instead of setting clarity (Bloomfield and Vurdubakis, 1999; Thanem, 2011) up against more poorness (Latour, 1999), or sidestepping (Mol, 2002), we rather suggest getting rid of the epistemology of network once and for all.