Animals in the Making as Actors in Networks

The previous section sketched out just a few ways in which animals act in organizations and how they may be thought of as products, objects, companions, or colleagues. They can transform space and they affect social relations within those spaces. Thus, animals can be seen to engage in a range of actions—productive, routine, and transformative actions—in relations beyond themselves. They have an ability to make new directions and formations in social spaces. They create ‘fields of relations’ (Jones and Cloke 2002) by lending spaces particular qualities. They can infest, inhabit, and subvert organizations. This is what we mean by the acting capacities of animals—the relational, socially mediated being in organizational space with humans. While we remain attuned to the very different levels of power that work within such spaces, and the tendency for humans to dominate them, we argue that nonhuman animals, as part of heterogeneous social networks, fit within a contemporary paradigm of dignity to the extent that they are enrolled physically (as in the case of the scallops) and symbolically (as in the case of Olly the cat) in networks of human membership (see Mitchell, this volume).

Whether one calls this inclusive view a new ‘cosmopolitics’ or simply a critical, organizational lens on an old debate, we perceive that posthuman perspectives that blur supposedly clean lines between the species are preparing the ground for substantial change in considering the borderlines of the dignity debate. In line with the shift away from essentialist concepts of species that have historically informed a division between worthy human animals and their nonhuman subjects, we locate worth (that is, dignity) primarily in social interaction and relational meaning-making. We draw on posthuman concepts of the social as mixed species spaces of contact rather than as exclusively human spaces for human forms of discourse and action (Corbey 2005). Braidotti (2006) argues that the contemporary era is one in which “the very notion of ‘the human’ is not only de-stabilized by technologically mediated social relations in a globally connected world, but it is also thrown open to contradictory re-definitions of what exactly counts as human” (p. 197). This radical de-centring of humanity makes the theoretical space for ‘others’ of various sorts, be they cyborgs, robots, ‘monsters’, ‘food-producing’ animals, working animals, or ‘pets’.

As aphasic participants in those groupings, spaces and interactions, animals are nonetheless actors. This acting capacity, though different, makes it meaningful to talk of animals in dignity terms. Thus, we follow the line of Hughes and Sharrock who argue that social actors are simply “conscious beings whose activities have meaning for them and others” (Hughes and Sharrock 1997:137). Our argument is that dignity follows from an acknowledgement of the social, in this case the organizational, interactional capacities of nonhuman animals. We cannot act as representatives of animal experiences, and so we make no claims that dignity is meaningful to them; still, we feel that if animals can logically be conceived of as workers, actors and—to a degree—agents, then they might also be said to have dignity within work. This contention arises not from their innate being, a non-relational concept of worth, but as a result of their being thought of as actors within social networks; as a vital part of a number of interactions.

We are not seeking to erase the distinguishing features of nonhumans or obliterate the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to the point of nonsense. Rather, we aim to acknowledge the very importance of those differential features to their significance in a particular network. This network view de-centres humanity as the source of all social, and organizational meaning-making and provides the space for the unique qualities of animals to be considered as significant in their own ways, but also in relations with others. But we neither make claims about, nor attempt to index, what an animal ‘really’ is. In fact, we keep this grounding deliberately sketchy to try to avoid the human tendency to taxonomize, describe, and define animals in their ‘otherness’. As Erica Fudge (2002:162) explains:

It is hard to deny that ‘the animal’, the general singular with its definite article, wipes out all difference apart from the difference of the named from the namers ... By simultaneously using and laying bare the concept ‘animal’ as a cover-all for a disconcertingly wide range of relations, I hope to have underlined the discomfort, the variety and the limitations of those relations. And from this, perhaps, it is not only the concept, but the lived relations that might come under scrutiny.

The lived relations that Fudge refers to are precisely what we are concerned with here. As we suggested at the outset, definitions of animal and human have led to the traditional insertion of boundaries between social life as a human domain and animal life as part of nature. Taking a posthumanist approach, however, we can trace the ways in which animal capacities work in tandem with complex and messy actions, interactions and situations.