AFTER THE INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY - LESSONS ON COLLECTIVITY FROM SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

The social sciences have devised a series of strategies in order to ov ercome the division between individual and collective action. However, science, technology and society (STS) has shown that this distinction is only one possible configuration far action and its distribution. I n order to investigate other possible configurations, STS proposes fou r principles: that the social is heterogeneous in character; that all entities are networks of heterogeneous elements; that these networks a re both variable in geometry and in principle unpredictable; and that every stable social arrangement is simultaneously a point (an individu al) and a network (a collective). If sociological analysis is to overc ome the individualism/holism division it should attend to the range of hybrid configurations.