Exploring the properties of actor-networks is the task that the Paris group of science and technology studies has set itself to tackle since the beginning of the 1980s (Callon, Law, Rip, 1986). However this theory has been often misunderstoond and hence much abused. I would like in this paper to list some of the interesting properties of networks and to explain some of the misunderstandings that have arisen. I will not concern myself here with the quantitative studies especially the so called 'co-word analysis' since they are themselves misunderstood because of the difficulty of exactly grasping the social theory and quaint ontology entailed by actor-network (but see Callon, Courtial, Lavergne 1989a,b). Three misunderstandings are due to common usages of the word network itself and the connotations they imply.
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