The Social Life of a Social Report. The Case of Vodafone

Abstract

This paper explores the metaphor of text as ruling relations (Smith, 1990), set within the context of longstanding problems in social theory about agency and object. Materials from an ethnographic interpretive case study of the Vodafone social report are used to show how the design and the production of this report are socially constructed and how the manu-fact-uring1 of the report structures people around it. Theories of textual and graphical analysis are evaluated in making the report more of a fact, more persuasive in its nature and more authoritative in its population by the Other. Actor Network Theory (ANT) frames the research strategy while it is recognized that ANT cannot be ‘applied’ to the research itself (Latour, 2005).