What “the technology has to be in the analysis” means
We accept work from any discipline and reject a lot of it at the desk. This is the line, with examples on both sides of it.
We publish research on technology and social life from any discipline. People reasonably read that as "anything", submit something excellent and out of scope, and lose a fortnight. So here is the line.
The test is whether the technology does analytical work in the paper. Not whether it appears. Not whether the setting is digital. Whether removing it would change the findings.
Two studies of the same thing
Out of scope. A study of precarious employment among delivery couriers, based on thirty interviews about income insecurity, housing and immigration status. The couriers are dispatched by an app. The app is mentioned in the methods section as the recruitment route and never again. This is good labour sociology and belongs in a labour journal.
In scope. The same thirty interviews, where the analysis examines how the dispatch algorithm's acceptance-rate penalty shapes which jobs couriers feel able to refuse, and how that interacts with immigration status. The technology is doing analytical work: the finding about differential refusal does not exist without it.
Three more
Out of scope. A randomised trial of a behavioural intervention delivered by text message, where the delivery channel is incidental and the contribution is to the behavioural literature.
In scope. A study of why the same intervention produces different results by delivery channel, or of what the message scheduling system assumes about its recipients' days.
In scope. A history of a nineteenth-century filing standard, with no computers in it. Technology is not a synonym for software.
What this is not
It is not a demand that you adopt a particular theory, cite a particular literature, or frame your paper for a computing audience. Sociologists may write as sociologists and historians as historians. We have no house method and no house theory.
It is also not a quality judgement. Most of what we return at the desk is perfectly good research in the wrong place.
If you are not sure
Write to the editorial office with your abstract before you submit. An answer within a few days costs us very little and saves you a submission cycle. If it is borderline we will say that, and tell you what would need to be in the paper for it to work here.