--- product_id: 8861582 title: "Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)" price: "₩120168" currency: KRW in_stock: true reviews_count: 10 url: https://www.desertcart.kr/products/8861582-reassembling-the-social-an-introduction-to-actor-network-theory-clarendon store_origin: KR region: South Korea --- # Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) **Price:** ₩120168 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) - **How much does it cost?** ₩120168 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.kr](https://www.desertcart.kr/products/8861582-reassembling-the-social-an-introduction-to-actor-network-theory-clarendon) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description desertcart.com: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies): 9780199256051: Latour, Bruno: Books Review: My favorite thinker of the last 50 years. - This was the first book I’ve read by Latour himself: I’d approached his work before through Graham Harman, another author I’d recommend. I’m studying ANT as part of my PhD project. Latour is the best thinker on the subject of associations (as he explains, perhaps this just is what “social” means) that I have ever read. A perfect counterpoint to object-oriented ontology, this interdisciplinary and transformative method of focus on relations known as actor-network theory can, I am convinced, in the hands of a good researcher, trace the relations between anything and anything else in a network. It does this by erasing the nature/social dichotomy, reducing Nature to a preformatted concept irreconcilable with any real phenomenon, which in turn reopens the discussion of what Society even means: if there is no Nature, then what we call “the social” doesn’t mean what we thought. Now, Latour is not the only thinker who posits that Nature is a myth and even a dangerous mistake in terms of ecology/society. Dark ecology and OOO also say this convincingly. But whereas Tim Morton is obscurely metaphorical-mystical about it, and Harman is not excited about arguments pertaining to a product of holistic religion that has little to do with his main arguments. Latour makes his point clearly, thoroughly and effectively, that sans Nature, “social” simply means that which pertains to any association at all, whether human, nonhuman, or hybrid, and thus more data is made available (because it hasn’t been bracketed off as “merely social” and therefore somehow less real than, for example, hunger or sex or “the selfish gene”). The social includes the physical, as long as the physical does anything pertaining to a collective, and the non-physical (again, by its ability to act on others through whatever agency) is also the Real. This intervention could, very plausibly, set all the social sciences—and the popular understanding of the natural sciences as well—on a much more empirically informed and justified track. Latour’s prose is wonderful. I find him similar, as a writer, to Aldous Huxley at his best: conversational, playful, treating writing as an art form. Even when writing polemically about his enemies, he does so in a warm, jovial, only gently derisive way that pokes as much fun at himself as at his targets and invites them to return to the table where we can all go back to being imperfect again. Latour has been attacked a lot for being “obscurantist”, but I’m convinced that people who can actually read (and not just “surf” pages to find something they basically already agree with) will find the opposite. Beware of reviewers who failed in theory and so have to reduce it by claiming it has no relevance to the real world: given what ANT says, these people are unsurprisingly Latour’s enemies. They don’t do anyone else any favors either. Review: I really enjoyed reading the book - I really enjoyed reading the book, and I congratulate Latour for its publication. I see the book as more or less basic text that conveys the main ideas with which Latour has been playing for some while now. The book is highly accessible and thought-provoking (i.e. inspiring), and I found myself marking more and more lines and citations therein while reading. So I liked it and it got to me; mainly this is the social-material or social-technological re-assemblage idea that Latour has been promoting, and it allowed me to freely so systems as complex and hybrid in a way that I didn’t see/phantom before. So it helped me in terms of my own conceptualization and academic writing on these topics. Also in terms of the distribution of agencies across times and places, and across human and non-human agents. So all this is good an inspiring for intellectual and scholarly research. At least this is how I found the book. Finally, I think that academic and related books are, or at least can be, scholarly inspiring not only in terms of what they have/contain or give in a direct and positive sense; but also in terms of how they enrich my academic wonderings. One way for me to note this is how I’m excited by reading the book, how many (new) ideas come to my mind, and if they infiltrate my scholarly daydreaming – if I can call it this way. And this manuscript has certainly done all this work. So I like it and recommend it. I should say that I got to read it after being quite familiar with the literature and having researched and published myself. So in this senses it’s hard for me to say how the book would be understood and received by, say, undergraduate audience, or even graduate audiences who are not familiar with the topics. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #321,713 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #85 in Sociology (Books) #11,460 in Social Sciences (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (107) | | Dimensions | 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches | | Edition | First Edition | | ISBN-10 | 0199256055 | | ISBN-13 | 978-0199256051 | | Item Weight | 1 pounds | | Language | English | | Part of series | Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies | | Print length | 301 pages | | Publication date | October 25, 2007 | | Publisher | Oxford University Press | ## Images ![Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51GFxPuEBGL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ My favorite thinker of the last 50 years. *by N***I on April 8, 2020* This was the first book I’ve read by Latour himself: I’d approached his work before through Graham Harman, another author I’d recommend. I’m studying ANT as part of my PhD project. Latour is the best thinker on the subject of associations (as he explains, perhaps this just is what “social” means) that I have ever read. A perfect counterpoint to object-oriented ontology, this interdisciplinary and transformative method of focus on relations known as actor-network theory can, I am convinced, in the hands of a good researcher, trace the relations between anything and anything else in a network. It does this by erasing the nature/social dichotomy, reducing Nature to a preformatted concept irreconcilable with any real phenomenon, which in turn reopens the discussion of what Society even means: if there is no Nature, then what we call “the social” doesn’t mean what we thought. Now, Latour is not the only thinker who posits that Nature is a myth and even a dangerous mistake in terms of ecology/society. Dark ecology and OOO also say this convincingly. But whereas Tim Morton is obscurely metaphorical-mystical about it, and Harman is not excited about arguments pertaining to a product of holistic religion that has little to do with his main arguments. Latour makes his point clearly, thoroughly and effectively, that sans Nature, “social” simply means that which pertains to any association at all, whether human, nonhuman, or hybrid, and thus more data is made available (because it hasn’t been bracketed off as “merely social” and therefore somehow less real than, for example, hunger or sex or “the selfish gene”). The social includes the physical, as long as the physical does anything pertaining to a collective, and the non-physical (again, by its ability to act on others through whatever agency) is also the Real. This intervention could, very plausibly, set all the social sciences—and the popular understanding of the natural sciences as well—on a much more empirically informed and justified track. Latour’s prose is wonderful. I find him similar, as a writer, to Aldous Huxley at his best: conversational, playful, treating writing as an art form. Even when writing polemically about his enemies, he does so in a warm, jovial, only gently derisive way that pokes as much fun at himself as at his targets and invites them to return to the table where we can all go back to being imperfect again. Latour has been attacked a lot for being “obscurantist”, but I’m convinced that people who can actually read (and not just “surf” pages to find something they basically already agree with) will find the opposite. Beware of reviewers who failed in theory and so have to reduce it by claiming it has no relevance to the real world: given what ANT says, these people are unsurprisingly Latour’s enemies. They don’t do anyone else any favors either. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I really enjoyed reading the book *by C***Y on December 7, 2013* I really enjoyed reading the book, and I congratulate Latour for its publication. I see the book as more or less basic text that conveys the main ideas with which Latour has been playing for some while now. The book is highly accessible and thought-provoking (i.e. inspiring), and I found myself marking more and more lines and citations therein while reading. So I liked it and it got to me; mainly this is the social-material or social-technological re-assemblage idea that Latour has been promoting, and it allowed me to freely so systems as complex and hybrid in a way that I didn’t see/phantom before. So it helped me in terms of my own conceptualization and academic writing on these topics. Also in terms of the distribution of agencies across times and places, and across human and non-human agents. So all this is good an inspiring for intellectual and scholarly research. At least this is how I found the book. Finally, I think that academic and related books are, or at least can be, scholarly inspiring not only in terms of what they have/contain or give in a direct and positive sense; but also in terms of how they enrich my academic wonderings. One way for me to note this is how I’m excited by reading the book, how many (new) ideas come to my mind, and if they infiltrate my scholarly daydreaming – if I can call it this way. And this manuscript has certainly done all this work. So I like it and recommend it. I should say that I got to read it after being quite familiar with the literature and having researched and published myself. So in this senses it’s hard for me to say how the book would be understood and received by, say, undergraduate audience, or even graduate audiences who are not familiar with the topics. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ another model for a non-Durkheimeian sociology *by I***A on August 22, 2008* This is a book which deserves a wide reading in the social sciences for its brazen and determined effort to deeply problematize the notion of the "social." At the same time, as I read the first few chapters, I had a sense of deja vu. The program Latour is putting forth--at least initially-- appears not so different from that of Fredrik Barth -- not Barth's early transactionalist stuff, but his later work on the anthropology of knowledge. Specifically, Barth, F. 1992 Towards greater naturalism in conceptualizing societies. In Conceptualizing Society. Kuper, A., eds. Pp. 17--33. : Routledge. and Barth, F. 1993 Balinese worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. put forth a very similar approach to the "social." Barth himself is a great admirer of Latour (see his praise for Laboratory Life and Science in Action in his 2002 piece in Current Anthropology) but Latour--at least here--doesn't seem to be reading Barth.... Latour is also taking great pains to distance himself from Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, and from critics who would label ANT as postmodernist. Highly recommended if you're interested in this sort of thing. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.kr/products/8861582-reassembling-the-social-an-introduction-to-actor-network-theory-clarendon](https://www.desertcart.kr/products/8861582-reassembling-the-social-an-introduction-to-actor-network-theory-clarendon) --- *Product available on Desertcart South Korea* *Store origin: KR* *Last updated: 2026-09-25*