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organizational studies and was developed by science and technology scholars Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law. ANT researchers view the world as consisting of networks made up of human and non-human actors. Non-human actors include objects and concepts. The central (and in some cases seen as somewhat controversial) assumption is that non-human and human actors should be treated as equal and that objects have agency (i.e. an ability to exert power over or change in other non-human or human actors) [7]. The ability to have power is assumed to emerge from the way actors are connected and is not assumed to stem from inherent actor characteristics [8]. However, this agency is not inherent to objects on their own – rather it emerges from the way they are related to other objects, concepts and human actors in the network. Both human and non-human actors can be a component of a network but also a network in themselves, depending on the level of granularity the ANT researcher wishes to study. Box 2 provides an overview of the most common terminology used in ANT. The terms provide an overview of the principles of ANT and they are listed for easy reference. Box 2: Key terminology used in ANT Actor: the origin of action (can be human or non-human) Network: relationships between actors Black-boxing: treating a particular network as a separate unit and specifying inputs and outputs as well as their relationship with the whole network Intermediary: an individual that serves as a connection between two actors Translation: process by which actors configure and re-configure each other Simplification: composition of networks tends to reveal itself when things in a network go wrong and that they tend to be hidden when things go smoothly Punctualization: process of revealing simplifications In ANT, social phenomena are assumed to be the outcome of associations between actors [7], and the sociologist studying networks is simply seen as a component of the network. Therefore, ANT in its original “purist” form has been viewed as incompatible with interpretivist sociological approaches [7]. ANT scholars study the makeup and the shifting nature of networks and their components [3,9]. Typically, this involves focusing on some goal-directed collective activity, mapping network components, and in some cases specifying network inputs and outputs [3,8]. Based on this, it is assumed that researchers can make recommendations on how networks can achieve stability and how actors need to be re-configured to achieve a certain organizational aim. The stability of networks is assumed to be determined by the strength of relationships between actors [10]. Just as in overall sociotechnical approaches, networks are assumed to change and re-configure with the introduction of new technology (a new actor) in the organization [11]. Through tracing networks and investigating how they overlap and come into being, it is assumed that researchers can understand how power and organizational processes are generated [10,12]. K.Cresswell /UsingActor-NetworkTheory toStudyHealth InformationTechnology Interventions 89