*6.1.3 Actors*

ANT focuses on the actors within the socio-technical network and their contributions. Each human and non-human actor has interests and features that must be met (Latour, 2017) to obtain smooth adoption within a network. The current socio-technical network in Sudanese land registration includes the index technology; other technical systems which could be interoperable; the individuals (registration employees, citizens, administrators, surveyors) who provide and use the registration services; a specific alignment of policy makers, technical professionals and technical elements whose infrastructure and its data models were established; civil servants, monitoring and evaluation top management and decisions makers (general registrar, head of branches).

By introducing BT, a set of actors under different categories is also proposed and divided into four divisions as follows:


• Controllers: Human (managers) and objects (government, land registration authority, land record blockchain)

#### **6.2 Interessement**

Interessement is the process of getting others to accept this problem-solution [53]; it is when the primary actor recruits other actors to assume roles in the network, roles that recognise the centrality of the primary actor's role [65, 68]. The process involves convincing other actors to have interests that are aligned with the focal actor [25]. This would allow each actor to identify all the actors and resources needed to accomplish their tasks and achieve their goals [18, 25, 67]. Moreover, incentives are created for actors such that they are willing to take a detour from their earlier charted paths and pass through the OPP defined by the focal actor [25]. In other words, Interessement aims to attract other actors in the proposed solution to favour a new opportunity that confirms the problematisation phase [20]. Managers could be enrolled and empowered to achieve the aims of the changes. Those managers, in turn, would have to enrol individual groups within the organisation so that established networks can be reorganised. Those separate groups may also utilise software or tools to enhance the tasks executions in different procedures. As a result, power relationships would shift from 'top-down' implementation strategies led by the government to horizontal and distributed. The focal factor could do this through devices that seek to lock that commitment in place, blocking the actors from alternative courses of action. The signing of the formal agreement between the Sudanese lands' registration, the judiciary authority and the ministry of urban planning is one part of this. It commits them to the blockchain framework project as the only technological choice and the only course of action.

At a general level, interessement involves 'actions by which an entity attempts to impose and stabilise the identity of other actors it defines through its problematisation'. It includes locking new allies into place and cornering entities not yet enrolled. Successful interessement 'confirms (more or less completely) the validity of the problematisation and the alliances it implies' [69].

BT consensus mechanism could be considered as OPP because the data authentication processes are being verified directly before acceptance. It would be necessary to amend some procedures, dispense others; and in some cases, replace a group of tasks with only one procedure. For example, any number of service requests could be accepted at any time using a web or mobile application.

#### *6.2.1 Alignment*

Alignment involves all the strategies through which an actor identifies other actors and arranges them in relation to each other [18]. In ANT the actors' interests could differ in a way that they may support or constrain the technology. Therefore, the technology needs the alignment of actor interests in order to stabilise the network [7]. Translation involves negotiations among human actors and representatives of material actants. Negotiations establish common sets of definitions, conditions and meanings for understanding the network's phenomena. The outcome of successful negotiations is an ANT characterised by aligned interests. The degree of alignment is the degree of convergence of an actor-network [19]. Translation implies that an actor reinterprets or appropriates the interests of other human actors and the interests embedded in non-human actors according to one's own and has these interests

*Perspective Chapter: Actor-Network Theory as an Organising Structure for Blockchain Adoption… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106751*

represented in the inscription. Actors must identify the other actors who may react to it differently. They may modify it, deflect it, betray it, add to it, appropriate it or let it drop [18]. As for the land registration case, each actor has to define the chains of tasks and resources that determine the processes and the other participants who are needed to achieve this task. If conflicts arise, they must be addressed by adjusting some process.

The actors' interests are flexible and can be translated, enabling the interest alignment and the maintenance of an actor network [70]. For instance, the procedures that the owner should do to transfer land ownership are a task of multiple actors and different resources. Each of them has various processes that are needed to be done in a particular order starting with the owner's request until the buyer delivers. For example, the owner's interest may focus on reducing the time of the overall process, while the buyer's interest may focus on the accuracy of these procedures. Due to these contrasts between the interests of actors' groups, actors' networks in the Sudanese land registration authority should be updated to include the concepts of information sharing, decentralisation and transparency. The alignment of all interests could lead to a clear visualisation of the proper data flow and necessary changes in the organisation's business process.

#### **6.3 Enrolment**

Enrolment is the moment when roles are defined and actors formally accept and take on these roles [68]. It is a negotiation process to exhibit how the interessement meets the actors' interests and needs and persuades them to accept the new actornetwork [20]. This process involves defining the accepted roles of each actor in the new actor-network. As a part of the enrolment process, the enrolment commitments can be recorded in a shared memory through inscription. This is considered as the foundation of a settled actor-network and needs suitable enrolment strategies that could handle attitudes, power and politics. The goal is to boost lock-in, in which digital land registration becomes socially acceptable, has a positive social texture and socially solidify as a safe feasible interaction between the actors [7]. The process involves defining the accepted roles of each actor in the new actor-network. As a part of the enrolment process, the commitments of enrolment can be recorded in a shared memory through inscription [71]. The actors' interest's alignment within the actor network happens by enrolling others into the network by the actors who are known by cooptation [19]. However, it should be noted that enrolment is temporary and a betrayal by enrolled actors is a possibility. Actors enlist other actors into their world and they bestow qualities, desires, visions and motivations on these actors [18]. For instance, an owner may encourage another to use the land registration blockchain system and, if successful, enrols them into the actor-network. In doing this, the owner may also call on other actors to support his case [11]. The owner may call on texts (land registration authority literature), stories (of successful use and benefits gain) and the technology itself (through demonstrations).

#### *6.3.1 Inscriptions*

'An inscription is the result of the translation of one's interest into material form' [24]. They are common procedures such as managerial practice, employee contracts, standards, regulations or software requirements documentation [20]. Inscription devices (for example, pull-down menus in a piece of software) may help to stabilise

the network and thus shape and constrain land registration work [53]. All the interest within the network is translated using inscriptions attached to the technology [7, 70]. These inscriptions may involve maps, programs, user requirements, regulations, documents and even the messages and marketing related to the technology and the technology services, which typically impact actors' roles.

A Sudanese owner would be interested in increasing the price of land and reducing the intermediaries' roles in selling land. The government is interested in increasing the registered lands through land registration authority with owners of unregistered lands. Inscriptions are typically provided with more concrete content to record actors' interests within a material that varies in their flexibility, for example, policy and regulations. Therefore, the strength of the inscription may be determined by the possibility of irreversibility [20].

Smart contracts are one of the BT features that could be considered as inscriptions as they are scripts that reside on the blockchain that allows for the automation of multi-step processes [72]. Smart contracts are therefore an essential feature that supports utilising BT in land registrations. They offer a third way to perform contracts, a new paradigm, wherein legally binding agreements are backed up by real-world agreements, and can be built to run within a network of computers without any single party sabotaging parts of the agreement [45].

For instance, the lawyer actor could be disappearing in the new network. Only his/ her actions could be digitised in a smart contract that checks all the conditions at the different stakeholders to conduct the selling process and automatically executed to transfer the ownership to the buyer. This can eliminate several steps that may cost the owner and the buyer much time, effort and money.

**Figure 7.** *Relationship between translation and inscription [20].*

*Perspective Chapter: Actor-Network Theory as an Organising Structure for Blockchain Adoption… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106751*

**Figure 7** depicts the relationship between translation and inscription to address a phenomenon (the formation of an actor-network) through various interests and to establish an irreversible network [20].

#### **6.4 Mobilisation**

Mobilisation is necessary to ensure that actors represent other actors' interests [20]. Mobilisation describes network elements that display strong properties of irreversibility and are mobile across time and space; various software standards provide illustrations of immutable mobiles elements [11]. If actors enrolled in the network adequately represent the masses, enrolment manifests as active support and mobilisation occurs [24]. Primary actors assume a spokesperson role for passive network actors (agents) and seek to mobilise them to action [68]. Mobilisation could include the process of migrating records from the traditional system to the blockchain system, which leads to the same expected results.

#### *6.4.1 Black boxes*

Actor-networks could be seen as heterogeneous, and developed open systems, however, the stability of an actor-network is a kind of pact, fulfilled via 'black boxes' – settings of actors (human and non-human) that are being taken for granted and therefore they are no longer enquired [53]. A black box is a technical term for a device, system or object when it is viewed in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge required of its internal workings. Latour [19] defines a black box as a term 'used by cyberneticians whenever a piece of machinery or a set of commands is too complex'. When the actor-network determines and accepts the standards, it would be challenging to inverse them, and the actors become locked-in under these restrictions. The standards related to technology and communication are locked into a black box, and there is no need to consider the contents and the processes in this black box [15]. When the digital land registration is admissible, there is no need to inquire about how it works or seek if it follows the best method to do it. Black boxes are not necessarily restricted to physical artefacts or technologies; instead, black boxes consist of knowledge that is accepted and used regularly as a matter of fact [65]. Making a black box does not require consensus.

The actors join or quit, or even alliances changes may lead to the 'black boxes' of the network to be opened in order to revise and reconsider their contents [18]. Fortunately, the black boxes can be opened [7] to check, revise, and alter their contents, because ANT allows for such dynamism [19]. For example, land ownership transfer under the inheritance clause could have been taken for granted. However, if legal or social issues are raised according to different owner's religions, new texts issued based on the Personal Status Law based on the owner's religion may become part of actor-networks as different potential standards. At that point, the land transfer process has to be queried, and the black boxes should be opened. The reality of institutionalisation status of digital government system functions can be represented and measured via the ANT construct of black-box behaviour [15].

#### *6.4.2 Irreversibility*

A network becomes durable when actors feel no need to spend time opening and looking inside black boxes, but just accept these as given [18]. The optimum state of

the actor-network should be to become stable which is known as irreversibility state. If this is not achieved, then it can die out as fast as it began which leads to the failure of technology adoption. Digital land registration has to be an essential part of society to reach the irreversibility state and become indispensable in the context of the land registration actors and the government [11].

Below is the discussion of the potential contributions of ANT and the practical applicability to BT adoption in land registration in Sudan.
