Patterns as, and Via Actants

Actants play a crucial role in understanding the interconnectedness of human and non-human entities in shaping social, technological, and scientific realities. The concept of Actant broadens our perspective to view society as a network of interactions between various entities, going beyond just human actors. By exploring patterns and meanings embedded in culture and nature, we can gain insights into the evolution of societies and organizations.

Greimas’s structural semantics and narrative theory

broadened in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to understand the interconnectedness of human and non-human entities in creating social, technological, and scientific reality.

Actant refers to any entity that can act to influence a network, anything that can modify other entities through action.

we create the ACTANT triad between actor constraints and constructors.

Actors are humans in various forms, including roles. Constraints either connect or contain. Constructors transform things but remain essentially unchanged in the act of transformation.

Indigenous community will tell you that people can’t be separated from the physical environment and its flora and fauna.

The English learnt the tricks of utilising local rivalries with the occasional use of overwhelming force, which served them well in India.

Wales was England’s first and will hopefully last colony, or penultimate one if we leave before the Scots. But the Scots volunteered to join the Empire; we were conscripted through violence.

Cynefin as the place of your multiple belongings

If we want to understand any culture, we need to understand the patterns of meaning, to quote Alasdair McIntyre, that arise from “the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources”.

Understanding the present and its evolution from the past is something too often forgotten in organisational change, with its tendency to begin with a romanticised future state.

Actors are humans in various forms, including roles.  Constraints either connect or contain.  Constructors transform things but remain essentially unchanged in the act of transformation.