-Although natural resource exploitation has a long tradition, modern resource
management is a more recent phenomenon. The huge variety in natural
resource exploitation has made it difficult to place the industrial harvesting of
marine living resources under political and managerial control. For most of history
fish and fishing people have for all practical purposes been unmanageable.
From the late 1960s, when it became apparent that important fisheries resources
were about to be overexploited by industrial technologies, the process to transform
fish, fishing people and fishing technologies to make them manageable has
intensified. The management process contributes to an organizational change in
the fisheries in which cybernetic forms of organization create complex and heterogeneous
networks linking together nature, society, technology, science, markets,
and policy in new ways. With Actor-Network Theory (ant) and the history
of industrial commercial fisheries in Norway, Canada and worldwide as points
of departure, this article outlines a theoretical framework for the study of how
natural and social entities are transformed and linked together to become modern
fisheries resource management.Norwegian Research Counci
