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

This article examines the most influential guiding distinctions in social theory from the 20th and 21st centuries, based on two extensive online brainstormings and a quantitative analysis of the Top 100 sociological works ranked by the International Sociological Association (ISA). It finds that the majority of these guiding distinctions—binary oppositions such as economy/society or male/female—are "false" or analogue distinctions, meaning they are not mutually exclusive and/or jointly exhaustive, and thus require translation into "true" digital distinctions for effective theoretical use. The authors argue that this translation is essential for enabling a digital transformation of social theory, which involves converting analogue theories into digital forms, designing new digital social theories, and creating digital platforms for theory quality control and debugging. This transformation is deemed necessary because social theory currently lags behind the digital transformation of society and the proliferation of digital data, which are reshaping research and knowledge production in the social sciences.