Publishing sociology of technology without an article processing charge
Sociology has been studying technology for a century. It should not cost three thousand dollars to say so.
Much of the strongest current work on algorithms, platforms and data is sociological, whether or not it is labelled that way. Classification, stratification, organisational form, the social life of measurement, these are old sociological questions that happen to have acquired new objects.
Two things make that work harder to publish than it should be. The general sociology journals often treat the technical detail as background that could be cut. The technology venues often want it reframed for a computing audience, with the theory thinned and a "design implications" section bolted on. And the open access options in both directions frequently cost thousands.
What we want from sociologists
Write as a sociologist. Keep the theory. Keep the technical detail that does analytical work and cut the rest, which is the same editing judgement you would make anywhere.
We are particularly interested in:
- How technical systems redistribute discretion, who gains the ability to make judgement calls and who loses it when a process is formalised into software.
- Which forms of work become visible to measurement and which do not, and what happens to the invisible kind.
- How classifications built into systems harden into social facts, and what it takes to unharden them.
- Digital inequality that goes beyond access, differential treatment by systems, not just differential availability of them.
Ethnography, interviews, survey work, administrative data, historical comparison and theory are all welcome. We have no methodological preference.
What will get desk-rejected
A paper where the technology is the setting rather than part of the analysis. A study of gig work that never examines what the platform actually does; a study of digital inequality that measures access and stops. These are frequently good papers. They are not ours.
The practical part
No submission fee, no article processing charge, no charge of any kind. Creative Commons licence, authors keep copyright, immediate deposit in any repository. A registered DOI on every article and full Google Scholar metadata, so the work is findable from the day it appears.