Methodology of critical social research (1977–1985) Van Dijk started his career as a methodologist of critical social research at the end of the 1970s at the
University of Utrecht. His dissertation was "Western Marxism in Social Science" (1984). It analyzed the research tradition practiced at Western universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Next, van Dijk concentrated on principles of applied social research as a combination of observation and agent of social change. He experimented with a
Delphi method among employees in corporations. In this process, he first observed the effects of the introduction of computing and the Internet in the work environment and decided to explore its effect on individuals, organizations, and societies.
Digital media (1985–) Van Dijk started his digital media research with an interdisciplinary overview of the consequences of digital media and networks on people, society and organizations. The overview focused on economic, sociological, political, cultural, psychological, and legal consequences as well as relevant policy approaches. It was eventually published as
De Netwerkmaatschappij (English: Network Society (1991)). Three Dutch editions followed in 1994, 1997, and 2001. In the 1980s Van Dijk initiated the term Network Society, which he defined as a "modern society (after the industrial revolution) with an infrastructure of social and media networks that organize this society at every level: individual, group/organization and society". He claimed that in
Western countries, the individual, connected by networks, are the basic unit of society, while in
Eastern societies, interconnected groups (family, community or work team) form the basic unit. From 1999, van Dijk extended and updated his concept in four English editions of
The Network Society (1999, 2006, 2012 and 2020). In the 2020 edition, the new trends are the emergence of
artificial intelligence,
big data,
blockchain,
Bitcoin and
platform economy. Between 2000 and 2020, his research on networks and digital media or
new media focused on digital or Internet democracy,
e-government, the
digital divide and digital skills. His main books on these topics are
Digital Democracy (2000) and
Internet and Democracy (2018),
The Deepening Divide (2005),
Digital Skills (2014) and
The Digital Divide (2020). The two books on
digital democracy attempt to show that digital media mainly changes the form of the democratic processes, but not the measure of political
participation and the nature of the political system. The books on the
digital divide argue that digital inequality reinforces existing social, economic and cultural inequality. The main argument is that unequal access to digital media, inadequate digital skills and structural differences in usages of these media by different social categories amplify existing inequalities.
Power & Technology In 2020 Van Dijk began working on an overall work called
Power & Technology, combining theories of social and natural power to explain the use of technology in human history. The nine capacities developed in this book apply to natural, technical and social power. They are force, construction (design), coercion, domination, discipline, dependency, information, persuasion and authority. The first three are material power, the next three physical power, and the last three mental power. == Publications ==