Digital sociology: origin, development, and prospects from a global perspective

Zhao, Yizhang; Wang, Mingyu

doi:10.1186/s40711-023-00198-1

The Journal of Chinese Sociology

Table 1 Overview of Chinese digital sociology research

From: Digital sociology: origin, development, and prospects from a global perspective

Research topics	Content	Representative work^a
Labor economics and production	The impact of digital technology on economic form and production mode	Fan and Ning 2021; Qiu 2005; Qiu and Huang 2021a; Qiu and Qiao 2021b; Ren 2012; Shao and Zheng 2022; Wang 2021; Xu and Ye 2020; Zhang 2021; Zhang and Qiu 2022; Zheng 2019; Zhou 2021
	Changes in labor conditions and capital-labor relations	Chen 2020; Jia and Yan 2022; Li and Jiang 2020; Liang 2016; Wu and Li 2018; Xu and Zhang 2019; Zhao and Han 2021
	Blurred lines between production and consumption and new forms of exploitation	Qiu 2014
Political power and governance	Panoramic surveillance and power features
	Algorithmic non-neutrality	Zha 2022
	Political participation	Bu 2015; Chen 2013; Chen 2015; Huang 2010; Huang and Gui 2009; Ji et al. 2016; Wang and Meng 2021
	Digital governance	Chen and Li 2019; Lv et al. 2022; Shan 2022; Tan et al. 2015; Wang 2016; Yang 2015
Social relationships and interactions	Interpersonal interaction and construction of social relations	Bian and Miao 2019; Chen 2013; Huang et al. 2014; Wang and Wang 2016; Wang 2021; Cheng 2010
	Online community	Chen and Xu 2017; Chen 2022b; Feng 2021; Gui et al. 2015; Huang 2017; Ma and Wang 2015; Mao et al. 2021
	Collective identity and collective consciousness
Body and self	Internet-connected body
	Quantified self	Tang and Xie 2019
	Digital avatar
	Self-construction in virtual space
Social inequality	Digital technology exacerbates/alleviates existing social inequalities	Zhuang et al. 2016
Social inequality	Digital divide and new social inequality	Li 2006; Qiu et al. 2016; Wang 2005; Zhao 2015
Methodological innovation in digital sociology	Mining diverse data sources (such as big data)^b	Chen 2015; Chen and Fei 2017; Chen et al. 2017; Gong et al. 2019; Gui et al. 2018; Sun and Chen 2016
Methodological innovation in digital sociology	Innovating on traditional analytical tools (e.g., digital ethnography)	Bu 2012

^aThe literature listed in the table includes academic papers related to digital sociology published in the three major Chinese journals "Social Sciences in China," "Sociological Studies," and "Chinese Journal of Sociology" since 2005. The "Social Sciences in China" literature selection criteria are based on an article categorized as having a sociological topic on the CNKI database or having a sociological research institution as the author's affiliation. As some papers' research perspectives are not limited to specific topics, the author selected the essence of the research for classification based on personal understanding to avoid redundancy
^bUsing new data sources to explore topics related to digital sociology overlaps with computational social science. The empirical research listed in this section uses big data as a data source while exploring related theoretical issues in digital sociology

Back to article page