From a graduate student’s point of view, that’s the hardest thing to face in the field—how fragmented it is. The problem is that there just aren’t that many people. There are only about 15,000 sociologists in North America, I think. It was bad when I was a graduate student twenty-five years ago, it’s much worse now. It’s very frustrating for people and it’s hard to overcome. One of the things I like about the construction of something called economic sociology is that for the first time in 30 years there is a synthetic field – not a field which wants to break the field into smaller and smaller parts—but a field that wants to say that politics and law and economic processes and organizations and social movements are all part of the same thing. So to me, this is what this economic sociology thing is all about. It is more synthetic than breaking it into a smaller piece.
http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/a-general-theory-of-chest-bursting-sociology/
My enthusiasm for the concept of Digital Sociology arises from the possibility that it could perform a similar function. But the obvious risk is that it could do precisely the opposite, if it encourages a tendency to view the ‘digital’ in isolation from the ‘social’.
Mark Carrigan 