Ordering, materiality, and multiplicity: Enacting Actor–Network Theory in tourism

TLDR

Actor–Network Theory is introduced, noting its growing use in tourism research and its sensitivity to heterogeneous orderings, which informs ontological politics that shape research methods and practice. The article demonstrates how Actor–Network Theory has been translated into tourism research by presenting and discussing the concepts of ordering, materiality, and multiplicity. The authors discuss how recent Actor–Network Theory approaches emphasize multiplicity, resulting in multiple versions of each ordering attempt. The authors conclude that Actor–Network Theory offers a radical new way to describe tourism by critically investigating its ontological conditions.

Abstract

In this article, we demonstrate how Actor–Network Theory has been translated into tourism research. The article presents and discusses three concepts integral to the Actor–Network Theory approach: ordering, materiality, and multiplicity. We first briefly introduce Actor–Network Theory and draw attention to current Actor–Network Theory studies in tourism with a focus on how the approach is sensitive toward heterogeneous orderings. The following section discusses how more recent Actor–Network Theory approaches emphasize multiplicity and thus multiple versions of every ordering attempt. This leads us toward ontological politics, which have bearings on how we approach and understand research methods and how we perform tourism research. In conclusion, we argue that Actor–Network Theory enables a radical new way of describing tourism by critically investigating its ontological conditions.