Guiding distinctions of social theory: Results from two online brainstormings and one quantitative analysis of the ISA Books of the XX Century corpus

Abstract

In this article, we report on the results of two online brainstormings that have collected over 480 and over 219 guiding distinctions of social theory, respectively. We draw on the results of these brainstormings as well as on a quantitative analysis of the Top 100 sociological groundworks as listed in the ISA Books of the XX Century ranking to identify the most influential distinctions of social theory and show that the bulk of these guiding distinctions consists of ‘false’ or analogue distinctions. We further demonstrate how systematic explorations of these distinction may facilitate a still pending digital transformation of social theory, defined as (a) the translation of analogue into digital social theories, (b) the design of new digital social theories and (c) the design of digital theory platforms useful for quality checks and the debugging of existing and future social theories. This article concludes that such a digital transformation of social theory is needed as the digital transformation of society and the relentlessly growing amount of digital data are revolutionising the processes of research and knowledge production in the social sciences, whereas social theory development still follows rather conservative, analogue patterns, thus lagging behind the social phenomena and methodological innovations it aims to reflect upon.