Mapping the literature on surveillance capitalism: Towards an empirical research agenda

Surveillance capitalism (SC) — as intended by Shoshana Zuboff — is a fairly recent concept, but it has already attracted the attention of many scholars from various fields within social sciences. Despite this interest, a comprehensive review of the available literature on this concept is lacking. To address this gap, we systematically mapped the contributions on SC. Working on a database of 486 papers downloaded from Scopus and Web of Science, we conducted descriptive statistics to analyze the distribution of contributions over the years, the most cited works, the predominant approaches (i.e., theoretical, empirical, methodological, etc.), and the co-occurrence of keywords. Additionally, we performed a close reading of a purposive sample of 50 articles. Our analysis revealed that empirical works remain limited compared to theoretical contributions. Furthermore, both theoretical and empirical papers often lacked a specific focus on the value(s) of data, with many scholars concentrating on surveillance, privacy, and big data. Building on these findings, we propose “future research directions” to guide and inspire empirical research on SC and to better address matters of value. Specifically, we identified four main directions: “privacy and beyond”, “big data and their relation to digital platforms”, “surveillance and the culture of surveillance”, and “platformization of consumer culture”. For each “direction”, we discuss ad hoc methodological implications and strategies.