Compare methods

	Actor-Network Theory Analysis	Laboratory Ethnography
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1984	1979
Originator	Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law	Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar; Karin Knorr-Cetina
Type	Material-semiotic theory and analytic method	Ethnographic field method
Seminal source	Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199256051	Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691028323
Aliases	ANT analysis, Sociology of translation, Actant-network mapping	Laboratory studies, Ethnography of the laboratory, Anthropology of science
Related	4	4
Summary	Actor-Network Theory analysis treats society and technology as a single woven fabric, mapping how heterogeneous human and non-human actors—engineers, scallops, documents, machines, regulators—are linked into networks through a process of translation. Rather than explaining technical outcomes by appeal to pre-given social categories, ANT follows the actors themselves and describes how durable arrangements are assembled, stabilised, and sometimes undone.	Laboratory ethnography is the anthropological study of scientists at work, observing how scientific facts are constructed through the mundane practices of the laboratory rather than discovered ready-made in nature. Pioneered by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life and Karin Knorr-Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it brought the gaze of the field anthropologist into the lab as if studying an exotic tribe. The method follows benchwork, inscription devices, and the conversational and material labour through which claims are stripped of their qualifications until they harden into facts. It treats knowledge as manufactured, local, and contingent, and renders that manufacture visible through immersive observation and thick description.