Organizing a precarious black box: An actor‐network account of the Atlantic Schools of Business, 1980–2006

There is a growing use of actor‐network theory (ANT) throughout management and organization studies. While earlier ANT research used ethnography to “follow the actors” in the production of organization/knowledge, more recent studies use archival sources to examine developments over time. We extend the latter approach using qualitative social network analysis (SNA) and apply this to a case study of the Atlantic Schools of Business (ASB). Our contribution is two‐fold: first, through an examination of actors in the ASB networking processes over 26 years, we demonstrate how the seemingly stable surface of an organization can hide the precariousness of organizing; second, we reveal the potential fusion of ANT with SNA as a method for dealing with large qualitative datasets over long periods of time. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.