Implementation of housing stock policy: an actor-network perspective

Due to change in regulations in the mid 1990¿s Dutch social landlords have become much more independent from government policies. As a result they have to formulate their own strategic goals on how they want to deal with their properties. At the moment not much is known about how these goals are implemented in organisations of social landlords in The Netherlands. In the paper I will explore some theoretical viewpoints derived from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that can help to understand processes of strategy implementation. Actor-Network Theory has been developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. The existence of interaction between humans and non-humans is the central assumption on which it is based. Through interaction networks are built. Strategies begin as rather small networks (e.g. an idea of one of the participants in a meeting). They then try to become bigger and stronger networks. For example by being attached to a specific budget. The more relations there are the stronger the network is. As Actor-Network Theory states, making a reconstruction of the process can shed some more light on the substance of these relations. In the paper I will also give some first results about such a reconstruction of the implementation processes in two cases at a small social housing company in The Netherlands.