Materials are social constructs, but they also have agency

Abstract

A puzzling matter about materials, particularly structural materials, is that they exhibit both a rather extraordinary extension in time, bridging over many historical and prehistorical ages, and a dynamic dimension, changing as they are in time to the point that materials may not be easily recognized as similar today as thousands of years ago. To understand this dichotomy, it is necessary to reach beyond materials science and STEM disciplines and to collect concepts and methods from SSH. Materials and energy are at the core of the physical world in which society functions: they provide the structure of the artifacts that we need, along with the ability to make and use them. They do not exist in an absolute, Aristotelian world, but are invented along historical time, by people to meet their needs, hic et nunc. Materials are social constructs, as is the “theory” (technology, science in modern language) that gives us the keys for making them. As society changes historically, people’s needs evolve and “new” materials are created on the shoulders of older ones, in a kind of evolutionary process. This is the view of social constructivism. This evolutionary metaphor is a first explanation of the continuity between, say, iron from a Roman bloomery and steel, as a contemporary commercial product. This has been formulated as the Social Cycle of Materials (SCM) by sociologists of Knowledge and Innovation, as a process of continuous innovation in which materials are socially constructed over and over again, a process often called “progress”. The continuity from old to new materials needs to be explained by some other model, however, to be fully understood: indeed, why is iron enduring so much, when it might have been displaced by another material at each evolutionary step and it didn’t. The explanation we propose is to accept that “materials have agency”, i.e. that they themselves are the actors of their own perenniality. This refers to another model, the Actor Network Theory (ANT) of Latour et al., which analyzes how change is pulled by a combined network of actors, that include people, organizations, non-human living entities and inanimate things as well.

Materials and Actor Network Theory, a way to flesh out Life Cycle Assessment?

“…An introduction and a bibliography about ANT can be found in [1,2]. As a matter of fact, the present article is a companion paper to reference [2]. This kind of questioning has been a recurring feature of the SAM (Society & Materials) conferences, since their onset [3].…”

“…On the other hand, they increase the complexity of LCA and it is not clear if the "mythical practioner", who is in charge of producing an LCA, can keep up with all these additions to the methodology. The consequence of this is that many of these new features take time to become mainstream and may even stay unnoticed or too complex to bother with 2 .…”

“…Materials also have agency [2]. This very important property of material is not often mentioned in material science textbooks, which originate from the STEM community, as the concept of agency is clearly born of the SSH community and of the particular school of ANT.…”

“…More specifically, we want to explore what ANT (Actor Network Theory) can offer to try and progress in this direction. An introduction and a bibliography about ANT can be found in [1,2]. As a matter of fact, the present article is a companion paper to reference [2].…”

“…We want now to introduce ANT and explore how it can be used as a tool to broaden and redefine LCA as it is practiced today. It can also help think about materials, as developed in [2]. This is ambitious, as it is a first attempt, and it is also risky, as we do not know how close we can reasonably get to our "dream target", as we are moving forward one step at a time.…”