infonet-economy

Available conceptualizations of ‘civil society' tend to depict the subject matter as a ‘thing', often either credited with the potential to solve today's most pressing social problems (the progressive view) or, conversely, seen as perpetuating prevailing orders of power (the conservative view). To venture beyond these essentialist imageries which envision ‘civil society' as a static configuration which is always already there, we employ the metaphor of zooming in to argue that the social is radically open, that is, neither progressive or conservative a priori but becoming progressive or conservative in the way it is enacted through heterogeneous elements. With this as a backdrop, we introduce Actor-Network Theory and After to flesh out a post-foundational understanding of the social, and use the case of crowdfunding to reflect on how technology-mediated ordering practices might bring about alternative forms of sociality. The paper concludes that Actor-Network Theory and After - despite claims to the contrary - bears critical potential in the way it pinpoints, based on empirical insights, favorable ordering practices.