Marlot Kuiper

72 Connective Routines of surgical care, one can for example think of the sterile gloves (materials) that actors wear, which might hinder them from taking up a paper checklist (artefactual representation of the rule). These materials can thus all be placed under the artefact heading. The question at hand is how we can understand how the different artefacts affect routines. Artefacts as ‘Actants’ In analysing the role that artefacts play in shaping routines, I draw from Actor- Network Theory (ANT). One of the focal questions ANT addresses is how artefacts are integral to the social world (Latour, 2005; John Law, 1992) An important concept is the ‘symmetry of actants’ (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005). From this perspective, there is no distinction between human and non-human actors, therefore the term ‘actant’ was introduced. Naturally, human actors and objects are not seen as ‘the same’. Latour (2005) states that an important difference is that humans are empowered with intentionality, while objects are not. Still, both can modify a state of affairs. In explaining this he puts the example of a TV remote control that makes the TV watcher a couch potato. The basic assumption is that all actants have an active role to play in social dynamics. Non-human ‘actants’, thus artefacts, play a role in structuring the social world. They only do so however, when “enrolled” and “translated” into the social world (Latour, 2005). This idea perfectly fits the assumption of Routine Theory that despite of what designers intend, the fate of an artefact like a checklist is “in the hands of others” (Pentland and Feldman, 2008). An additional insight from ANT that is congruent with ideas from Routine Theory, is that actor-networks are “stable for now”. Just like routines, these networks have a temporal dimension since the patterns of associations between the actants can change (Czarniawska, 2004; Pentland & Feldman, 2008). What we observe is therefore not permanent. While ANT thus provides valuable insights for the study of routines, there is a vital difference here. As said, ANT describes the patterns of associations among a set of actants. As routines refer to patterns of actions, actor-network is not a sufficient conceptual tool to study the role of artefacts in routines. Feldman and Pentland (2007) ought to solve this problem by including the notion of ‘functional events’. A functional event is the building block of a narrative; it is a fragment that advances the story. A functional event consists of two actants connected by some action. Functional events thus allow for a description of both patterns of