enrolment

is a gathering and connecting of various resources, financial, symbolic, human, technological, spatial and so on.

Latour's idea of 'the gathering and connecting of various sorts of resources: financial, symbolic, human, technological, spatial and so on' (van Loon 2002:49).

is a machiavellian struggle to acquire, extend and maintain power through building and consolidating alliances (via such tools as rhetorical devices, appeals to authority, and extensive deployments of citations to embed the current text in a network of already established knowledge).

Under certain circumstances these generated 'objects' may escape from the lab to participate in the wider constitution of both nature and society. These 'objects' are, at first, Latour claims, no more than a set of readings or measurements, and they acquire established status as real 'things' only to the extent that the scientist in whose labs they are generated are successful in acting as their 'representatives' in the wider world of science, and so persuading, or 'enrolling', other scientist into an alliance. This process of enrollment is presented by Latour as a Machiavellian struggle to acquire, extend and maintain power through building and consolidating alliances. In his analysis of scientific literature, he emphasizes the role of rhetorical devices, the appeals to authority and the extensive deployment of citations to embed the current text in a network of already established knowledge.

enrolment, n.All

enrolment