Desde meados dos anos 1960 novos temas tornaram-se cada vez mais caros a sociedade de forma global. Dentre esses temas, o relacionamento entre as ações humanas com o meio ambiente passou a ser visto e discutido nos mais diferentes setores da sociedade, o que fez formatar uma nova dimensão de desenvolvimento, que abarcasse outras variáveis além do crescimento econômico, tais como as advindas da área social e ambiental (SACHS, 2009a e 2009b; VEIGA, 2010). Apesar disso, as discussões acadêmicas levantam o fato de que tal termo carece de um quadro conciso de significados, adquirindo um caráter pluridimensional. Dentre deste debate, o Brasil e sua proeminência de caráter mundial no setor de produção de combustíveis alternativos, se constrói enquanto a base desta pesquisa, que teve como propósito tecer relações mais sólidas entre estes dois temas, especificamente, a sustentabilidade e o etanol de cana-deaçúcar. Para isso, procurou-se entender quais são as traduções de sustentabilidade no setor sucroenergético, ou seja, de que forma o tema da sustentabilidade está sendo estrategicamente definido pelos atores que se relacionam de forma direta com o etanol de cana-de-açúcar, e assim realizar um cruzamento com os principais aspectos de sustentabilidade presentes na literatura sobre a questão. Para a consecução dos objetivos foi utilizada a Teoria Ator-Rede como ferramenta metodológica. Nesse sentido, a sustentabilidade se encaixou como o ator principal da pesquisa, pois causa transformações nos mais diversos atores aos quais se associa. Os resultados se destacam pelo fato de que a interdisciplinaridade é incipiente no setor, muito devido às falhas e dificuldades na divulgação de informação e dados e à baixa participação dos diferentes setores nas discussões. Uma das consequências do pouco diálogo entre as áreas se encontra no fato de que o setor traduz a sustentabilidade baseada na abordagem chamada de Tripé da Sustentabilidade. Nesse sentido, a visão mais integrativa, tão importante para este tema, perde relevância, havendo ênfase prático e teórico para uma das três dimensões da abordagem, qual seja, a econômica, que é operacionalizada através de investimentos em inovações tecnológicas. Apesar desta contestação, para o setor tal carência de paradigmas integrativos se assinala de forma negativa. Para que um estado mais desejável deste setor seja alcançado é fundamental que o seu estado atual seja aclarado em seus meandros, permitindo a formulação de ferramentas de sustentabilidade. / Since the mid-1960s new themes have become increasingly matters of concern in global society. Among these subjects, the relation between human actions with the environment came to be seen and discussed in many different sectors of society, which arranged a new dimension of development that would encompass other variables than economic growth, such as those regarding social and environmental areas (Sachs, 2009a and 2009b; Veiga, 2010). Nevertheless, academic discussions highlight the fact that this term lacks a concise framework of meanings, what acquires a multidimensional characteristic. Within this debate, the prominence of Brazil in the production of alternative fuels builds the basis of this research, which aimed to weave stronger relations between these two issues, specifically, sustainability and sugarcane ethanol. Thus, this dissertation tried to understand what are the translations of sustainability in sugarcane industry, ie how the topic of sustainability is being strategically defined by the actors that relate directly to the sugarcane ethanol and, therefore, achieve a junction between this and the main aspects of sustainability in the literature on the issue. To achieve the goals, Actor-Network Theory has been used as a methodological tool. In this sense, sustainability is embedded as the main actor of the research, because it causes changes in several actors to which it associates. The resultsemphasise the fact that interdisciplinarity is incipient in the sector, largely due to failures and difficulties in disseminating information and data and the low participation of different sectors in the discussions. One consequence of the lack of dialogue between the areas is the fact that the sector translates sustainability based approach called Triple Botton Line. In this sense, a more integrative susteinability view loses relevance, as it\'s clear a practical and theoretical emphasis in one of the three dimensions of the approach, namely, the economic, which is operationalized through investments in technological innovations. Despite this challenge the sugarcane sector itself, points this lack of integrative paradgms in a negative way. For a more desirable state of this sector , it is essential that your current state is cleared in its intricacies, allowing the formulation of sustainability tools.

This thesis is a case study which looks at the creation of two theatre productions. Using the literature of Actor-Network Theory as a methodological provocation, it analyses the processes by which networks of actors created these theatre pieces with particular attention to where agency was observed. Through data gathered through observing material interactions, the thesis develops the concept of the (play)text: an object that is an expression of the ideas of the text, but is not the text itself – rather, a bricolage of ‘translations' of a piece of written and rehearsed work bound together by time and combined action. Conceiving of the eventual product – the (play)text in performance – as an example of the ANT concept of an agencement, a network of different people and objects working together to maintain a stable construction, but one which perpetually refines and redefines each of its component parts – this thesis proposes that the (play)text is an example of a dynamic and fractional artistic object, stabilised only briefly in the moments of its performance. Examining the theatre production process in this way contributes to ANT literature by providing specific examples of an artistic object created materially and agentively; it also highlights the limitations of the ways in which theatre has been used as a metaphor within Organisation Studies. Finally, it contributes to work on process change in showing an object which is, though it appears constantly improvisational and changing in its form, stabilised by material interactions.

This thesis is an inquiry into possibilities and problems of a sociology of translation. Beginning with a recognition that actor network theory represents a sociological account of social life premised upon on recognition of multiple ontologies, interruptions and translations, the thesis proceeds to examine problems of interpretation and representation inherent in these accounts. Tensions between sociological interpretation and social life as lived are examined by comparing representation of nonhuman agency in both an actor-network and a science fiction study of doors. The power identified in each approach varies from point making to lying. A case is made for considering fictional storytelling as sociology and hence, the sociological value of lying. It is by close examination of a fictional story that this study aims to contribute to a sociology of translation. The greater part of the thesis comprises an ethnographic study of a televised children's story. Methodological issues in ethnography are addressed and a case is made for a complicit and multi-site ethnography of story. The ethnography is represented in two particular forms. Firstly, and unusually, story is treated as a Storyworld available for ethnographic study. An actor network ethnography of this Storyworld reveals sociologically useful similarities and differences between fictional Storyworld and contemporary, social life. Secondly, story is taken as a product, a broadcast television series of six programmes. An ethnography of story production is undertaken that focuses attention on production performances, hidden storytellers and politics of authorship. Story is revealed as an unfinished project. A prominent aspect of this thesis is a recognition that fictional storytelling both liberates and constrains story possibilities. This thesis concludes that, in addressing critically important tensions in sociological representation, fictional stories should be included in sociological literature as studies in their own right.

Nous présenterons dans le cadre de cette thèse les résultats d’une étude qualitative basée sur deux logiciels (HôpitalManager et CURSUS 3), implantés à la clinique La Sagesse de Rennes ; étude qui a pour objectif, de souligner les enjeuxcommunicationnels que pose ces outils dans les pratiques cliniques. Ces outils sont considérés aujourd’hui comme des dispositifs de modernisation, de rationalisation, de changementdes pratiques, et des interactions entre le patient, le médecin et les dispensateurs de soins. Ainsi, notre objectif est donc demontrer qu’en plus des enjeux techniques, managériaux, politiques et économiques qui sont identifiés par de nombreuxchercheurs, il existe des défis en termes de communication.Les interrogations que nous soulèverons du point de vue de la recherche en Science de l’Information et de la Communication, autour de ces processus de rationalisation, s’inscriront dans une problématique de changementorganisationnel, de circulation d’information ou encore de normalisation des pratiques professionnelles. Dans cespréoccupations, la technologie déduit tout son raisonnement à partir d’une seule prémisse, celle de la performativité dans les organisations. Ce que nous retenons des travaux d’Orlikowski, réside dans le fait que ce qui compte pour évaluer l’efficacité et la performance d’une technologie n’est pas l’artefact technologique, mais c’est la technologie en pratique(Orlikowski, 2000). Ainsi, notre objectif est de montrer que le discours médico-intégratif, est un énoncé performatif quirepose sur des modalités de communication / We present in this thesis the results of a qualitative study based on two programs (Hopital Manager and CURSUS 3),located at the clinic La Sagesse of Rennes; this study aims to emphasize the communicative challenges posed by thesetools in clinical practice.Those tools are now considered as devices for modernization, rationalization, change of practices, and interactions between the patient, the doctor and caregivers. Thus, our goal is to show that in addition to technical issues, managerial, political and economic factors that are identified by many researchers, they are also challenges in terms of communication.The questions we will raise, from the point of view of research in Information Sciences and Communication, deal with rationalization process, and will be part of an issue related to organizational change, information traffic or standardization practices. Considering these concerns, technology deduces any reasoning from one premise, the one of performativity in organizations. What we choose to select in Orlikowski’s work has to do with the fact that what matters, in order to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of technology, is not technological artifact, but technologies in practice (Orlikowski, 2000). Thus, our goal is to show that the integrative medical discourse is a performative utterance based on communication patterns

BACKGROUND. Researcher have identified a relevance for profit-seeking new ventures to implement “Business Sustainability 3.0” standards in order to face current social and environmental challenges, like scarcity of resources. Research, moreover, suggest that new ventures would me more open to implementing the standards of “Business Sustainability 3.0”. The authors of this thesis initiate this field of research in the context of a new venture in the form of a single case study. PURPOSE. The purpose of this study is to explore the implementation process of “Business Sustainability 3.0” standards in a new venture. The aim is to identify challenges in the implementation process and how they can be approached by new ventures. METHODOLOGY. The implementation process of “Business Sustainability 3.0” standards was researched based on a single case study in a new venture striving to achieve the standards. The authors conducted a semi-structure interview with a sustainability manager within the company. The empirical data was analyzed based on the translation process of the Actor-Network Theory. RESULTS. The authors conclude that a new venture cope with “Business Sustainability 3.0” by making use of being a new venture founded with a specific purpose and by addressing challenges that appear during the implementation process. Two measures are suggested to support addressing these challenges: striving for transparency and internalizing the standards for the company’s compartments. The Actor-Network translation process is considered to be a suitable method when analyzing the integration process of “Business Sustainability 3.0”.

Within the discipline of early childhood education research, the present study will focus on the Swedish preschool curriculum text, using a sociomaterial approach offered by Actor-network theory (ANT). The study adopts ethnographic methods, foremost participant observations in a preschool, to generate knowledge of how the curriculum text comes to act through moments in the everyday preschool work. The doctoral thesis consists of three research papers. Research paper I explores the delayed access to the field through the occurrence of a water leak. Through the focus on the value of breakdowns in ANT, the water leak becomes an empirical event where the researcher is allowed to learn about the mundane objects and practices making a preschool work, such as schedules and lists. Research paper II reports on the case of the curriculum concept of children´s interests (Moberg, 2017). Here, empirical moments are highlighted where the curriculum concept of children´s interests is defined and made to act by children and materialities. Finally, research paper III (Moberg, in press) reports on the case of an evaluation meeting where an evaluation text is to be produced. Here, the curriculum text is highlighted as vulnerable in its inability of embracing pedagogical dilemmas and ambivalence in the preschool everyday work. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Manuscript. Paper 3: Accepted.</p>

Under the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945) a calculated killing of chronic “mentally ill” patients took place that was part of a large biopolitical program using well-established, contemporary scientific standards on the understanding of eugenics. Nearly 300,000 patients were assassinated during this period. Nurses executed this program through their everyday practice. However, suspicions have been raised that psychiatric patients were already assassinated before and after the Nazi regime, suggesting that the motives for these killings must be investigated within psychiatric practice itself. My research aims to highlight the mechanisms and scientific discourses in place that allowed nurses to perceive patients as unworthy of life, and thus able to be killed. Using Foucauldian concepts of “biopower” and “State racism,” this discourse analysis is carried out on several levels. First, it analyzes nursing notes in one specific patient record and interprets them in relation to the kinds of scientific discourses that are identified, for example, in nursing journals between 1900 and 1945. Second, it argues that records are not static but rather produce certain effects; they are “performative” because they are active agents. Psychiatry, with its need to make patients completely visible and its desire to maintain its dominance in the psychiatric field, requires the utilization of writing in order to register everything that happens to individuals, everything they do and everything they talk about. Furthermore, writing enables nurses to pass along information from the “bottom-up,” and written documents allow all information to be accessible at any time. It is a method of centralizing information and of coordinating different levels within disciplinary systems. By following this approach it is possible to demonstrate that the production of meaning within nurses’ notes is not based on the intentionality of the writer but rather depends on discursive patterns constructed by contemporary scientific discourses. Using a form of “institutional ethnography,” the study analyzes documents as “inscriptions” that actively interven in interactions in institutions and that create a specific reality on their own accord. The question is not whether the reality represented within the documents is true, but rather how documents worked in institutions and what their effects were. Third, the study demonstrates how nurses were actively involved in the construction of patients’ identities and how these “documentary identities” led to the death of thousands of humans whose lives were considered to be “unworthy lives.” Documents are able to constitute the identities of psychiatric patients and, conversely, are able to deconstruct them. The result of de-subjectification was that “zones for the unliving” existed in psychiatric hospitals long before the Nazi regime and within these zones, patients were exposed to an increased risk of death. An analysis of the nursing notes highlights that nurses played a decisive role in constructing these “zones” and had an important strategic function in them. Psychiatric hospitals became spaces where patients were reduced to a “bare life;” these spaces were comparable with the concentration camps of the Holocaust. This analysis enables the integration of nursing practices under National Socialism into the history of modernity. Nursing under Nazism was not simply a relapse into barbarism; Nazi exclusionary practices were extreme variants of scientific, social, and political exclusionary practices that were already in place. Different types of power are identifiable in the Nazi regime, even those that Foucault called “technologies of the self” were demonstrated, for example, by the denunciation of “disabled persons” by nurses. Nurses themselves were able to employ techniques of power in the Nazi regime.

There has been great scholarly interest in examining the management, proliferation, and dynamic articulations of borders through an actor-network lens in recent years. In tracing the networks of Mohamed Harkat, the irregular arrival of a particular group of Tamil migrants, and Deepan Budlakoti, I demonstrate how the border is a fluid entity composed of socio-technical actors dispersed across time and space capable of producing varying degrees of membership statuses. In exploring the cases of these non-citizens, this thesis aims to understand what each of these multi-level networks tells us about the notion of borders and bordering practices alike. This study contributes to the expanding literature that situates the border as a fluid and malleable entity that is made up of interwoven socio-technical practices, discourses, symbols, institutions, and networks through which power is dispersed and the binary distinctions between membership and non-membership increasingly become layered concepts.

Empirical studies that reviewed e-government status in developing countries found that e-government research scholars preferred to ask, ‘What is happening?’ rather than ‘Why is it happening?’. This showed little use of theory when it came to e-government study. Although high failure rates can happen anywhere, e-government research seemingly forgets to raise the question of why. To fill this gap, actor-network theory (ANT) was employed by this thesis as an analytical lens to investigate the failure case study of the Smart ID Card project, which was expected to revolutionise Thai public services with a single multi-propose ID card. Critical realism was the philosophical standpoint that framed the basic thinking in this study. It was intended to reflect on the e-government failure phenomenon; query its realities, and find a new set of answers. To achieve the aim of this study, both documentary research and in-depth interviews with relevant key persons were conducted, in order to synthesise the casual relationship and failure mechanisms in the Smart ID Card project. Firstly, the lens of ANT observed the causes of failure that originated from the problematization process, which referred to the role of the focal actor, the Cabinet, and less room for other actors (e.g. main public agencies and citizens) to negotiate in forming the actor-network of the Smart ID Card project. This led to unrealistic, unreachable objectives in the actor-network and opened the door to failure right from the beginning. Secondly, the interessement process, which had great importance in locking actors into position, was incomplete. Thus, the focal actor failed to enact standardisation, laws, regulations and a budget through negligence or lack of concern. This resulted in the failure of both human and non-human actors to enter the actor-network. Thirdly, the uncontrolled chaos in the enrolment process weakened endurance of the actor-network in facing its obstacles, for example, the emergence of a counter-network, which aimed to attack the main actor-network, the transformation of a non-human actor (Smart ID Card) that became a Trojan actor, and the instability of the focal actor. These obstacles brought disassociation among actors in the actor-network and led to the final moment, the betrayal. Fourthly, the betrayal resulted from errors in the earlier moments, which caused betrayal everywhere in the actor-network. All relevant human and non-human actors betrayed the actor-network by not working or supporting it properly in attempting to achieve its goals. Finally, the actor-network of the Smart ID Card project collapsed and could not function to reach its objectives. This meant that the Smart ID Card project did not revolutionise Thai public services as planned. This thesis is one of few theory based-works that contribute to the use of ANT modification as a unique vehicle for investigating failure phenomenon, especially in e-government projects in developing countries. The lessons learned from the story of failure in this study provide new solutions that open the door to successful e-government development.

Denna uppsats bygger på en observationsstudie som undersöker den aktivitetsbaserade kontorsmiljön utifrån hur den fysiska platsen och miljön styr och styrs av de människor och objekt som befinner sig på platsen. Syftet är att bidra till en djupare förståelse för hur makt kan manifesteras genom att handlande möjliggörs, uppmuntras och begränsas i fysiska rum, såväl av objekten som av människorna som befinner sig på platsen. Till skillnad från tidigare studier i fältet, som främst har fokuserat på hur det aktivitetsbaserade arbetssättet påverkat de anställdas hälsa, välmående och motivation, så ämnar denna uppsats att deskriptivt kartlägga den studerade kontorsmiljön och hur interaktionen mellan aktanter på arbetsplatsen ter sig. Detta görs genom att genomföra en deltagande observationsstudie på en arbetsplats med aktivitetsbaserad kontorsmiljö. Genom att utveckla och använda en teoretisk ansats baserad på främst Actor network theory utgångspunkter, Akrich (1992) begrepp script och de Certeaus (1984) begreppspar strategier och taktiker analyserar vi våra observationer på arbetsplatsen i strävan att undersöka hur aktanters handlande styr och styrs av den miljö de är en del av på kontoret. Studiens resultat visar att den aktivitetsbaserade kontorsmiljön i flera avseenden inte skiljer sig, eller skiljer sig marginellt, i praktiken från så kallade traditionella kontorslandskap. Kontorets utformning är beroende av de sociala och arbetsrelaterade relationerna mellan kollegor, som många gånger i högre grad förklarar strukturen på nätverket och dess möjliggörande av ett visst sätt att handla. Vidare visar analysen att vissa aktanter blir obligatoriska passagepunkter som definierar, formar och styr sin omgivning i relativt hög utsträckning. Produkten av relationerna på kontoret är den makt som manifesteras. Denna makt finns i alla typer av handlingar, men visar sig också vara en del av traditionellt studerade makrostrukturer som exempelvis intressekonflikten mellan arbete och kapital.