If we accept this argument, what then should we do about it? Typically social
science researchers want to link with one another’s findings, to seek some relation
among these enactments, or perhaps extend or apply them. One approach to linkage is
to assume that we are all investigating different parts of the same thing (the elephant’s
tail, ear and trunk) and we just need to feel our way to the big thing. With learning,
there is no reason to assume that there is one phenomenon with different parts, but then,
there is no reason not to assume this. In fact, we might try interrupting our impulse to
synthesize a seamless continuity, to recognize that different things can co-exist in what
appears, or is constructed, to be seamless. Another approach is to somehow patch
together these different objects, however ambivalent or even incoherent these patches
may be. Practitioners in the workplace do this all the time, as Mol (2002) showed in
studying how an object like a disease is performed in different locations of healthcare.
In her detailed study of lower-limb atherosclerosis, she followed its enactment in
physicians’ discussions with the patient, radiology’s focus on comparing images,
laboratory examinations of artery fragments, and surgical procedures. Mol (2002)
concluded that this apparently single object of atherosclerosis actually materialised as a
very different thing in each of these spaces. A unique assemblage of routines, language
and instruments not only created a different world, but produced a different
atherosclerosis. Yet of course, all of these co-exist – they are patched together so that
the patient can proceed through diagnoses and treatment. Indeed, the actors involved
might assume they are all dealing with the same phenomenon, if perhaps from different
standpoints. But Mol argues persuasively, the actual objects of atherosclerosis enacted
in their different practices bear little similarity. In analysing Mol’s work and its
implications, Law (2004, p. 55, emphasis in original) writes: