Tourismscapes
5 Tourismscapes
5.5 Actor-network theory
5.5.2 Actor-networks
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interacting materials run by objects as well as people. Continuing their holiday, people and things enact in relational ways. Therefore, as we have seen, the topology of tourism is not only to be captured in a three-dimensional space, as the integrity of objects (car, caravan, road, camping) is not only about a volume within a larger Euclidean volume, but also about holding patterns of links stable and ‘by their virtue of their position in a set of links of relations’ (Law, 1992; see also Law, 2002).
Box 5.1 The automobile and actor-network theory
The relation between people and things is well explained by Callon (2001) in his discussion of automobiles15. According to Callon, the automobile’s phenomenal success is probably due to the fact that it enables tourists to extend the range and variety of actions they can successfully undertake, freeing them to travel about without having to rely on anyone else. Thus, autonomous users endowed with the capacity to decide where they want to go, and to move about as and when they wish, are ‘inscribed’
in the automobile (Akrich, 1992 in: Callon, 2001). Paradoxically, the drivers’ autonomy stems from the fact that the functioning of the automobile depends on its being but one element within a larger network. To function, it needs a road infrastructure with maintenance services, motorway-operating companies, the automobile industry, a network of garages and fuel distributors, specific taxes, driving schools, traffic rules, roadworthiness testing centres, laws, etc. and of course the inevitable maps and credit letters from the ANWB (the Dutch motoring organization). An automobile is thus at the centre of a web of relations linking heterogeneous entities, a network that consists of people and things.
This network is active, which justifies the term actor-network theory. Action and network are two sides of the same reality. Each of the human and non-human elements comprising the actor-network participates in a collective action, which the user must mobilize every time he or she takes the wheel of his or her automobile. In a sense, the driver then merges with the network that defines what he or she is (a driver choosing a destination and an itinerary) and what he or she can do. When the driver turns the ignition key to drive to a campsite in France: ‘the driver not only starts up the engine, but also triggers a perfectly coordinated collective action. This action involves: the oil companies that refined the oil, distributed the oil, and set up petrol stations; the engineers who designed the cylinders and valves; the machines and operators who assembled the vehicle; the workers who laid the concrete for the roads; the steel that withstands heat; the rubber of the tyres that grip the wet road, the traffic lights that regulate the traffic flows, and so on’ (Callon, 2001: 63). We could take each element of the actor- network to show that, human and non-human, it contributes in its own way to getting the vehicle on the road and the tourist to France.
According to Latour (in: Murdoch, 1997: 330), a human actor (or other relevant entity) may play many different ‘actorial’ roles. These roles emerge as effects once associations have been stitched
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together. That is, as entities become enrolled, combined and disciplined within networks, they gain shape and function. Action and agency, and their shapes and forms, therefore emerge from association rather than from human agents (ibid.). They are not given properties. What actor-network theorists subsequently seek to investigate are:
… the means by which associations come into existence and how the role and functions of subjects and objects, actors and intermediaries, humans and non-humans are attributed and stabilized. They are interested in how these and other categories emerge from the processes of network building. (Murdoch, 1997: 331; see also Steins et al. 2000).
Actor-networks thus retain the main idea of what Callon and Law (1995) denote as a collectif of people and things (see also Verschoor, 1997a). The notion of ‘collectif’ differs from that of a ‘collective’ or ‘collectivity’, in that a collectif is not an assembly of people who have decided to join some form of common organization; rather, ‘a collectif is an emergent effect created by the interaction of the heterogeneous parts that make it up’ (Callon and Law, 1995: 485).
In other words, ‘it is the relations – and their heterogeneity – that are important, and not the things in themselves’ (Verschoor, 1997a: 42). Entities in an actor-network achieve their form as a consequence of the relations in which they are located. But they are also performed in, by and through those relations: ‘if relations do not hold fast by themselves, then they have to be performed’ (Law, 1992). As a consequence, everything is uncertain and reversible, at least in principle. It is never given in the order of things.
However, ‘network patterns that are widely performed are often those that can be punctualized’
(ibid.: 385). Network patterns may become routines, taken for granted and unquestioned: black-boxed collectifs (Callon, 2001; Verschoor 1997a). This is because of relations and routines that can, if somewhat precariously, be more or less taken for granted in the process of heterogeneous engineering. In other words, they can be counted as resources, which may come in a variety of forms: agents, devices, texts, relatively standardized sets of organizational relations, social technologies, boundary protocols, organizational forms – any or all of these (Law, 1992: 385).
Nobody would travel with a car and caravan to France, let alone fly to Tanzania or Costa Rica, if it were not certain that at least most of these resources will work as predicted. Punctualized resources offer a way of drawing quickly on the networks of the social without having to deal with endless complexity. Nevertheless, ‘punctualization is always precarious, it faces resistance, and may degenerate into a failing network’ (ibid.). In that case, black boxes16 burst open (Callon, 2001: 64). All of a sudden it becomes plainly visible who and what ‘acts’: war breaks out in the Gulf region and energy prices increase drastically, a plane crashes, a road collapses, borders are closed, viruses bring the Internet to a standstill, heavy rains in Costa Rica prevent travelling to certain destinations, a passport is lost17. All these times the collective action becomes visible and all the people and things that contribute to tourism are unveiled (ibid.).
As punctualization is a process – a verb and not a noun – it is a relational effect that generates and reproduces itself. The study of tourism therefore should consist of the concern with:
… how actors and organizations mobilize, juxtapose and hold together the bits and pieces out of which they are composed; how they are sometimes able to prevent those bits and pieces from
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93 following their own inclinations and making off; and how they manage as a result to conceal for a time the process of translation itself and so turn a network from a heterogeneous set of bits and pieces with its own inclinations, into something that passes as a punctualized actor. (Law, 1992: 386)
In the latter case, the collectif tends to convergence. The entities making up a collectif may converge or diverge, be more or less standardized, and their relationships may be long- or short-lived to different degrees. Convergence implies that the activities of actors in the networks can easily be linked to one another, as actors have sufficiently fine-tuned their activities so as to make them compatible with those of others from the same collectif (Verschoor, 1997a: 30).
For example, in one of the projects (which I shall refer to below as the ‘chain project’) in the framework of the Sustainable Development Agreements (SDAs; see also Chapter 7) between Costa Rica and the Netherlands, we tried to link up small-scale projects supported by the SDAs and UN Development Program (UNDP), through the intermediation of a Costa Rican incoming tour operator (Camino Travel) with a TUI-affiliated tour operator in the Netherlands, De Boer and Wendel (see Caalders et al., 2003). Of the 24 small-scale projects evaluated, only three could be included in a tour for Dutch tourists in Costa Rica. The reasons for not being included were partly related to people (e.g. a lack of adequate managerial and administrative skills, a lack of knowledge of common modes of operation in the tourism industry) and partly related to things (e.g. the quality and scale of the product; a lack of such communication facilities as telephone, fax and the Internet; inaccessibility). The mere presence or absence of a reliable telephone (or email) connection is already critical. Boer and Wendel and Camino Travel decided not to work together with 21 of the 24 projects, as it would not have been possible to perform the relations based on a relatively standardized set of organizational protocols. Knowledge, the product itself and the technology of these projects were insufficient. From the interaction between the other three SDA/
UNDP projects, Camino Travel, De Boer and Wendel, and other tourism projects and providers (airlines as well), a temporary collectif emerged. However, the continuation of relationship depends on many different actors and continuously has to be performed. The feasibility of this venture (i.e. to organize a tour of Dutch tourists in Costa Rica, including visits to three projects supported by the SDAs) is not guaranteed. For example, if there are insufficient customers, De Boer and Wendel will withdraw and the project will end.
This simple example once again illustrates how actor-network theorists deal with the dualism between local and global. As we have seen, a topological view diverts attention away from the geographical scale at which, say, tour operators or small entrepreneurs are supposed to operate, and instead focuses attention on the relational arrangement of which they are part. In particular, a topology of social relations should help us to focus on their co-constitutive nature and the spaces and times they actively construct in the process (Allen, 2003: 192). As a consequence, as Verschoor (1997a) argues, the global and local should not be used in a geographical sense only, but in relation to the project under study. Consequently, global does not necessarily mean geographically distant, and local does not necessarily mean geographically close (ibid.).
Let us again take the projects sponsored by the Sustainable Development Agreements (SDAs) as an example. Their feasibility can be seen as a function of three interrelated factors (see also Law and Callon, 1992: 46), namely:
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1. The ability of a project to construct and maintain a global network that is intended to contribute resources to the project (money, tourists, access to markets, information,18 provided by first Fundecooperacion and UNDP and afterwards Camino, Boer and Wendel and others) in the expectation of an ultimate return (e.g. tourism-related services or, in the case of Fundecooperacion and UNDP, rural development).
2. The capacity of a project to assemble a local network (of people and things needed to provide the services) by mobilizing the means contributed by the global network, with the ultimate goal of offering a return of some kind to the different actors comprising the global network.
3. The degree to which a project succeeds in imposing itself as an obligatory point of passage between the global and the local network: ‘this means that, if successful, the project should first have the ability to shape and mobilize the local network and that second, the project is able to exercise control over all exchanges between the local and the global network’ (Verschoor, 1997a: 32). Many of the projects supported by the SDAs have not or not yet been able to impose themselves as such an obligatory point of passage. Either they have not fully or have not successfully shaped and established a local network (as they do not fully qualify in terms of skills, infrastructure, technology, etc.), and/or actors from the global network (e.g. De Boer and Wendel, or Camino Travel) do not trust and hence do not count on the promised return.
Moreover, many SDA projects are more equipped to construct and preserve other global networks, by aiming at, for example, domestic tourists or students19.
More generally speaking we cannot assume that we know the scale (global or local) or size (small or large) of an actor-network, but must attempt to trace out its various patterns of association through which it obtains certain effects of size or scale (Latham 2002: 132). As actor-networks in tourism grow, they extend their influence and reach beyond a single locale into other locales, tying these together in sets of complex associations. There is therefore no difference in kind between macro and micro, or global and local actors; longer networks can simply reach further than shorter networks can (Murdoch, 1997).
