What makes human-animal relations “organizational”? The De-Scription of anthrozootechnical agencements

International audienceQuestions concerning animals’ role in society have received little attention from OrganizationStudies. This article develops and tests some theoretical and methodological propositions aimedat contributing to the elaboration of an analytical framework for interpreting our organizedrelations with animals and furthering our understanding of what makes human–animal relations‘organizational’. First, examining the role of animals in the ‘non-human turn’ that has been emerging,especially with the Actor–Network Theory and the Symmetrical Anthropology project, it adressesthe limits of the ‘non-human’ category to analyze situations of coordination of collective actioninvolving animals. It then develops the concept of anthrozootechnical agencement to envisage therole of animals in the course of action through the lens of their relational properties and appliesthe notion of script to propose an operational formulation of the specifically organizational trialsto which these particular agencements are subjected. Based on three case studies (the role of theleash in the organization of human–dog relations, the management of wolves’ return to France, andthe production of milk on a dairy farm), this article shows that two main types of operation makehuman–animal relations ‘organizational’: first, the organization of anthrozootechnical relations isconstituted by and constitutive of the combination of three types of specifically organizationaltest to which these particular agencements are subjected (the performance test, the coherencetest, and the dimensioning test); second, the work of organizing anthrozootechnical relations thenconsists in elaborating, executing, and transforming heterogeneous scripts that are never strictlyindexed on the nature (human, animal, technique) of the entities they concern