The purpose of the article is to consider three important issues from the point of view of synergetic theory: global digitalization of society, digitalization of public administration and sociology of digital society. We consider that the new trend of informatization, which replaced computerization, internetization and networkization, should be recognized as digitalization as the creation of digital network platforms that have analytical and predictive functions. In the process of studying the global digital society, two main questions will be asked: How is it different from the previous stage of information society? What problems of its development await us in the future? The authors reveal the last question with a scenario approach, denoting both a positive and an ambiguous perspective for the development of a digital society. The authors point to the need for the purposeful formation of social institutions in a digital society due to the complexity of the ongoing self-organizing processes. Consideration of the sociology of digital society begins with methodological problems associated with the study of a complex hybrid system due to the unification of real and virtual social spaces, the emergence of techno-subjects and some experience in the use of digital tools in sociology, allowing to work with interactive dynamic data.

Today, digital transformation assists us to search for information on the Internet, to digitize data, to store and broadcast it conveniently; however, digital transformation changes not only the quality of technologies, but also the social reality, the structure of society, the ways of social interactions, the social actor, and research methods. Four breakthrough technologies — cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of things — determine the direction of these changes. The question is how sociology may use these technologies for its own purposes. In this paper, the outdated approaches of authorities are considered in relation to the monitoring criteria they use to evaluate their activities. We emphasize the potential to obtain representative data by using traditional survey methods. Nevertheless, changes in the socio-psychological characteristics of respondents actualize the transition from mass surveys to big data analysis and force us to replace directly posed questions with the indirect confirmation of hypotheses. The new technologies open greater opportunities for building correlations, identifying hidden patterns, and making predictions than it was possible till now. Thus, we need scientifically based coherent patterns across individual factors in order not to see cause-and-effect relationships in random matches. Research community has to develop these patterns. Keywords: Digital Transformation, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, the methods of sociological research

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The review of a new book written by a leading Russian sociologist-theorist Sergey A. Kravchenko is presented. The book analyses the social implications and prospects of the digitalisation. The objectivity of this process leading to the complication of society, its dehumanisation and the emergence of new previously unseen risks, is noted. Scientific and technological innovations reduce the share of traditional risks, natural and technological, but increase the share of institutional risks. Sergey A. Kravchenko calls this new reality the socio-digital-natural reality, in which, primarily in social networks, both human actors and non-human (digital) actors, sociotechnical and techno-social hybrids operate. The author of the book being reviewed concludes that there is a need for a humanistic digital turn, a change in approaches and focus of modern scientific knowledge, which should be integrated and multidisciplinary, based on the social and natural sciences integration, aimed at the analysis of disequilibrium systems in which disequilibrium, turbulence do not exclude the tendencies towards organisation and self-organisation.The peer-reviewed work is an educational publication and it is aimed at developing students’ ability to think critically about the consequences of digitalisation and make balanced managerial decisions. It introduces students to the most modern and advanced sociological theories and concepts.

The authors of the present article consider anomie as a natural manifestation of the process of social evolution, especially macroevolution. Macroevolution implies a qualitative transformation of some social institutions with their system of social control into other social institutions with a different set of norms and sanctions. During the process of social macroevolution, the following scenarios are systematically observed: the old systems of social regulation cease to function effectively, and the effective functioning of the new systems of social regulation does not yet begin. All this gives rise to the phenomenon of social anomie in all its variety of manifestations. The interpretations of anomie inspired by Durkheim and Merton still dominate the research literature. However, society is changing, so the theories created a century ago can hardly embrace all the nuances of the new social reality, such as the nonlinear behavior of a social system or the acceleration of social processes. We seek to understand how the anomie theory should be updated in order it could reflect the transformations of society and changes in social actors. So we introduce the concept of reflexive anomie. This concept helps us better understand seemingly unwarranted, high-profile crimes like the cases of Anders Breivik in Norway or Stephen Paddock in the USA. We compare and contrast two of the possible approaches to explaining these cases of asocial behavior: from the perspective of narcissistic personality disorder and reflexive anomie. The comparison of the