Some Remarks for a New Sociological Theory of Sustainability

This paper explores theoretical and methodological strategies for rethinking some principles of sociological theory in the light of the fact that the basic sociological concepts—for instance, time, space, and relations among individuals and groups— could facilitate better observation and understanding of contemporary societies. Thanks to a selected literary review and an analysis of some representative social phenomena—such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and smart cities—we can hypothesize that sustainability could be an effective strategic paradigm for the exploration of new social structures and processes, and the revision of sociological tools for their analysis, as well as the development of a draft sociology of sustainability. The concept of network is an appropriate starting point. The paper uses an inductive structure that is based, firstly, on the hypothesis that contemporary social analyses of society are inadequate. The frequent use of prefixes and suffixes—added to classical sociological concepts, to describe social actors, processes, and relations—reveals how inconsistent current production of epistemological categories is, as well as how dependent current researchers and scholars are on the legacy of their “fathers.”