Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer
Abstract
Is sociology the study of social questions, or is it the study of associations? In this paper the author takes the second position and extends the study of our associations to nonhumans. To make the argument clearer, the author chooses one very humble nonhuman, a door-closer, and analyzes how this “purely” technical artifact is a highly moral, highly social actor that deserves careful consideration. Then the author proposes a vocabulary to follow human and nonhuman relations without stopping at artificial divides between what is purely technical and what is social. The author builds “its” or “his” own text in such a way that the text itself is a machine that exemplifies several of the points made by the author. In particular, the author is constructed and deconstructed several times to show how many social actors are inscribed or prescribed by machines and automatisms.
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Engineering disciplines tend to leave organizational factors out of their equations, but also social sciences and management studies focus strongly on distributed agency between human and machine, addressing the organization often just as a static environmental condition than as a dynamic set of actors and rules.
“It may not be surprising that engineering disciplines tend to leave organizational factors out of their equations, but also social sciences and management studies focus strongly on the”
From Keeping the organization in the loop: a socio-technical extension of human-centered artificial intelligence (2023) · cites this paper as Latour 1988
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- Authors
- Johnson, J.
- Corresponding author
- Johnson, Jim
- Venue
- Social Problems
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1988-06
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 298-310
- ISSN
- 0037-7791 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-8533
- OpenAlex
- W2135164979
- Cited by
- 892
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 35 · 2024: 50 · 2023: 33 · 2022: 32 · 2021: 36 · 2020: 49 · 2019: 40 · 2018: 48 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 42 · 2015: 36 · 2014: 46 · 2013: 24 · 2012: 41
- FWCI
- 140.91
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Social Problems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
- Social Sciences › Geography, Planning and Development › Geographies of human-animal interactions
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
- Keywords
- door closers, non-human actors, human-nonhuman relations, sociology of technology, technical artifacts, moral agency, automatism
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