Nevertheless, in our opinion and as we will try to explain, the very problem of these approaches is to situate Nature, Objects, Societies (and their rules, division of labour and so on), Subjects or Instruments (such as Discourse) as the touchstones of any kind of explanation. Even the use of all of them as in Engeström’s model is perverse, given the fact that not only these concepts have multiple ‘meanings’ for many different groups (it should be better said that they enact them differently) but, overall, we are taking their painstaking and unstable genesis for granted! These should be the things to be explained, not the explanatory resources.

Our modest suggestion is that, first of all, we should reconsider the relations between all those terms and how these stances have been segregated from a huge work of entanglement through a non-reductionist empirical type of study of all the practices, heterogeneous associations and dissociations of the materials that are forming and reforming, in a recursive dynamics, the heteromorphic and changing ‘groups’ we live by (Latour, 1993; 2001).

Nevertheless, in our opinion and as we will try to explain, the very problem of these approaches is to situate Nature, Objects, Societies (and their rules, division of labour and so on), Subjects or Instruments (such as Discourse) as the touchstones of any kind of explanation. Even the use of all of them as in Engeström’s model is perverse, given the fact that not only these concepts have multiple ‘meanings’ for many different groups (it should be better said that they enact them differently) but, overall, we are taking their painstaking and unstable genesis for granted! These should be the things to be explained, not the explanatory resources.

Our modest suggestion is that, first of all, we should reconsider the relations between all those terms and how these stances have been segregated from a huge work of entanglement through a non-reductionist empirical type of study of all the practices, heterogeneous associations and dissociations of the materials that are forming and reforming, in a recursive dynamics, the heteromorphic and changing ‘groups’ we live by (Latour, 1993; 2001).

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