M Burawoy
Biographic Data
| ID | 12738 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Burawoy |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Burawoy |
| SIGNATURE | BURAWOY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7195-7278 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 180 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3436 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 180 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 28 |
Marxismo como ciência
This paper examines Marxism's claim to be a science. The first part considers possible models of science and argues that the most coherent is Imre Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs. In his conception scientific knowledge grows on the basis of a hard core of postulates which are protected from refutation by the development of a series of auxiliary theories. Such a research program is progressive rather than degenerating if succ…
Palestine through a South African Lens
Why and how should sociologists speak out on Palestine
The essay begins with the question of neutrality: why might sociologists keep silent on the question of Palestine? On the other hand, if they are to speak out, then why specifically support the Palestinian cause and what could be the distinctive sociological stance? The essay claims an historical approach is necessary to understand competing narratives and the linkage between twists in the past and possibilities in the future. Any historical anal…
La sociologie face à la question de la Palestine
Why Now? Thoughts on the Du Boisian Revolution
In this editorial collection, five sociologists share their opinions on why there has been a recent proliferation of scholarship on Du Bois, and summarize their own position in relation to this intellectual area. Ranging from reflections on how they “discovered” Du Bois's works, through to assessments of American sociology's reception of Du Bois's scholarship, the idea of this brief piece is to provide an insight into some of the potential drivin…
Sociology Faces the Question of Palestine
Introduction
The twin pressures of dwindling state funding and widening student access has created a crisis of higher education that reverberates into the hidden abode of teaching and learning. In this special issue we reconnect pedagogy to its context of determination (and nondetermination) by bringing theories of the labor process to bear on the dilemmas and challenges faced by teaching assistants (TAs). Our project of auto-ethnography was suspended between…
W. E. B. Du Bois’ Indian Romance
Former colonial powers are living through a moment of self-discovery. They are examining the enormous benefits they reaped from colonialism as well as the heavy costs they inflicted on the colonised. Academic disciplines have set about questioning their own foundations, some more successfully than others. Sociology, in particular, is experiencing its decolonial moment. In the United States at the centre of debate is W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)—a…
Combate na zona de dissertação
In this article originally published in 2005 in The American Sociologist, Michael Burawoy proposes a 30-year self-analysis of his supervising practice at UC Berkeley. Highlighting the power imbalance structuring the relationship between supervisor and supervisee, Burawoy unveils paths for a sociology of sociological supervising, opening the black box of the interactions, rites and interests surroun- ding the production of a dissertation – invitin…
Por qué es clásica la teoría clásica? Teorizando el canon y canonizando a Du Bois
One of the most contentious debates coursing through sociology is what to do with the canon of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim: abandon the canon, start afresh with a new canon, or reconstruct the existing canon? In this paper I examine the claims of Connell, the foremost advocate of abandoning the cannon. She claims the canon is an arbitrary imposition that bears no relation to the actual history of sociology and we would be better off examining how t…
El estado de la sociología estadounidense
Escribiendo en 1970, Alvin Gouldner diagnosticó la crisis venidera de la sociología occidental. El cemento agrietado que mantenía unida la sociología de la posguerra se estaba desmoronando. El débil consenso forjado en torno al funcionalismo es-tructural, siempre algo así como un fenómeno de élite, no estaba sincronizado con los tiempos. Los florecientes movimientos sociales de la década de 1960 (libertad de expresión, derechos civiles, movimient…
Walking on Two Legs
The State of US Sociology
Going public with Polanyi in the era of Trump
After considering different possible elements of the ‘Trump era,’ I will turn to The Great Transformation to periodize capitalism into three waves of marketization and their counter-movements. In the first wave, we follow the commodification of land, money and especially labor, so-called fictitious commodities, and the local counter-movements marketization inspired, reaching to the level of the state. In the second wave, the focus turns on the wa…
Decolonizing Sociology
Return to Fanon
Articulating the dangers and the possibilities of decolonization, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, loomed large over African studies in the 1960s and 1970s. With its arousing language, its gripping descriptions, and its compelling argument, it traverses seamlessly between the psychological and the structural, between alienation and domination. Yet, it passes lightly over the connecting tissue, the social processes that are the entry poin…
Why is classical theory classical? Theorizing the canon and canonizing Du Bois
One of the most contentious debates coursing through sociology is what to do with the canon of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim: abandon the canon, start afresh with a new canon, or reconstruct the existing canon? In this paper I examine the claims of Connell, the foremost advocate of abandoning the cannon. She claims the canon is an arbitrary imposition that bears no relation to the actual history of sociology and we would be better off examining how t…
Cultural Domination
The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences
A Review of Symbolic Violence
A Review of Symbolic Violence: Conversations With Bourdieu University Press, 2019, 240 Pages. https://www.dukeupress.edu/symbolic-violence Michael Burawoy Michael Burawoy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 99, Issue 1, September 2020, Page e9, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa010 Published: 05 March 2020 Article history Received: 03 July 2019 Accepted: 09 July 2019 Published: 05 March 2020
A Tale of Two Marxisms
The political-intellectual career of sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019), traced by a friend and collaborator. Amid the demise of actually existing socialism, a passage from class analysis to utopian imaginings, science to critique. Can Polanyi offer insights on how these strands might be joined
A Tale of Two Marxisms
Intended to capture the entangled history of Marxism, Alvin Gouldner's two Marxisms also frame the intellectual biography of Erik Olin Wright. In the 1970s Wright's Scientific and Critical Marxisms were joined, but later they came apart as each developed its own autonomous trajectory. Erik's Scientific Marxism was the program of class analysis that first brought him international fame. Begun in graduate school, it tailed off in the last two decad…
Por una sociología pública
En respuesta a la creciente separación entre el ethos sociológico y el mundo que estudiamos, el desafío para la sociología pública son las diferentes formas en las que comprometerse con sus públicos. Estas sociologías públicas no deberían estar en los márgenes sino que deberían formar parte del marco de trabajo de nuestra disciplina. De esta manera haremos de la sociología pública una empresa legítima y visible y, por ende, reforzaremos en todo s…
The Politics of Production
For a Sociological Marxism
The postcommunist age calls for a Sociological Marxism that gives pride of place to society alongside but distinct from state and economy. This Sociological Marxism can be traced to the writings of Gramsci and Polanyi. Hailing from different social worlds and following different Marxist traditions, both converged on a similar critique and transcendence of Classical Marxism. For Gramsci advanced capitalism is marked by the expansion of civil socie…
The Extended Case Method
In this article I elaborate and codify the extended case method, which deploys participant observation to locate everyday life in its extralocal and historical context. The extended case method emulates a reflexive model of science that takes as its premise the intersubjectivity of scientist and subject of study. Reflexive science valorizes intervention, process, structuration, and theory reconstruction. It is the Siamese twin of positive science…
Revisits
This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit-rare in sociology but common in anthropology-when an ethnographer returns to the site of a previous study. Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed to differences in: (1) the relation of observer to participant, (2) theory brought to the field by the ethnographer, (3) internal processes within the field site itself, or (4) forces external to the field …
American Sociological Association Presidential address
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of soc…
The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor
For a capatalist economy to function, its labor force must be maintained; that is, workers must receive a historically determined minimal day-to-day subsistence. It must also be renewed; that is, vacancies must be filled. A system of migrant labor is characterized by the institutional differentiation and physical separation of the processes of renewal and maintenance. Accordingly, migrant labor entails a dual dependence upon employment in one pla…
Public Sociologies
Journal Article Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas, and Possibilities Get access Michael Burawoy Michael Burawoy University of California, Berkeley Direct correspondence to Michael Burawoy, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 82, Issue 4, June 2004, Pages 1603-1618, http…
Between the Labor Process and the State
The paper develops the concept of politics of production through a double critique: first, of recent literature on the organization of work for ignoring the political and ideological regimes in production; and second, of recent theories of the state for failing to root its interventions in the requirements of capitalist development. The paper distinguishes three types of production politics: despotic, hegemonic, and hegemonic despotic. The focus …
From Polanyi to Pollyanna
The Critical Turn to Public Sociology
The Soviet Transition from Socialism to Capitalism
Analyses oftlze transition from state socialisnz to capitalism @pically focus on political impedimerlrs and underesritnate tlle economic obsracles to economic rransformatior1.Based or1 a c,ase srudy c?f'the Soviet ~' o o d indusrr-y, we argue tlzur there Hill he no economic tr.ansition so long as enterprises rerain two hisroric features, nanzely anarchy in pr.oduction and bar-qainit~g in exrernal r.elarions.Far.jtom consrituting a re~~olution, tl…
The state and economic involution
Public Sociologies
This symposium brings together the theory and practice of public sociology. The introduction sets out the meanings of public sociology, emphasizing its plurality and its relation to multiple publics. From there, it frames public sociology in relation to policy, professional, and critical sociologies. This constellation of the division of sociological labor varies over time and between countries. We argue for a normative model of antagonistic inte…
Manufacturing the Global
Surely, 'global ethnography' is an oxymoron? How can the global be ethno graphic? How can ethnography contribute to the understanding of global ization? After all, in anthropology, we stereotypically picture the lone ethnographer settled in his or her village, itself isolated from the world around. In sociology, we think of the ethnographer as the specialist of face to-face relations or of situational analysis, but with the context firmly brack e…
Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia
While much has been written on the unprecedented degeneration of the Russian economy, how people survive or do not survive remains a mystery. A close 5-year tracking of workers from a liquidated furniture enterprise in Northern Russia reveals two types of survival strategy: defensive and entrepreneurial. Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive domestic economy in the face of the collapse of industry and agriculture while entrepreneurial strat…
The Roots of Domination
In this article I examine Bourdieu's conception of symbolic domination as based on misrecognition and compare it with Gramsci's notion of hegemony based on consent. Drawing on ethnographic research in workplaces in the USA and Hungary I show how both theories are flawed. Gramsci does not appreciate the importance of mystification as a foundation for stable hegemony in advanced capitalism while Bourdieu's notion of misrecognition, based on the not…
L’engagement ethnographique
Observer, participer, comprendre, décrire sont les étapes clés du travail de l'ethnographe. Elles ont donné lieu à de véritables controverses, d'autant plus intenses que s'est accru l'engagement du chercheur dans la cité. Présentant des textes récents, mais déjà classiques, L'engagement ethnographique se lit comme une anthologie de réflexions sur le travail de terrain. Du terrain aux comptes rendus de situations sociales, l'ethnographie est, plus…
Marxism as Science
This paper examines Marxism's claim to be a science. The first part considers possible models of science and argues that the most coherent is Imre Lakatos's methodology of scientiBc research programs. In his conception scientific knowledge grows on the basis of a hard core ofpostulates which are protectedfrom refutation by the development of a series of auxiliary theories. Such a research program is progressive rather than degenerating if success…
Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labor Process
The Anthropology of Industrial Work
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Two methods in search of science
Transition without Transformation
The messianic reformers of the Soviet transition, whether Western or Russian, considered the socialist economy so moribund, so inefficient and so obsolete that it was an article of faith that markets could only bring economic improvement. But conditions have only got worse, much worse. Over the last 10 years Russia’s Gross Domestic Product has fallen by more than half; living standards for most have plummeted along with increased material insecur…
Facing an unequal world
To face an unequal world requires us to interpret and explain it, to be sure, but also to engage it, that is, to recognize that we are part of it and that we are partly responsible for it. In other words, inequality is not just something external to us, but also invades our own world. I begin, therefore, by examining the global community of sociology through the lens of inequality. I then consider two recent perspectives on our unequal world from…
Decolonizing Sociology
Ethnographic fallacies
Michael Burawoy reflects back on 40 years of industrial ethnography in Zambia, the USA, Hungary and Russia to discover the mistakes he made and, thus, to infer the fallacies to which ethnography is subject. He traces these fallacies not to any 'theoretical imposition' but to inadequate theoretical reflection. All methodologies are fallible and scholars should spend more time examining the limitations of their own methodologies and less time attac…
Coercion and Consent in Contested Exchange
Critical Sociology
South Africa
Race, Class, and Succession
The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor
For a capatalist economy to function, its labor force must be maintained; that is, workers must receive a historically determined minimal day-to-day subsistence. It must also be renewed; that is, vacancies must be filled. A system of migrant labor is characterized by the institutional differentiation and physical separation of the processes of renewal and maintenance. Accordingly, migrant labor entails a dual dependence upon employment in one pla…
Consciousness and Contradiction
The underlying question which has guided studies of studentprotestmay be formulated as follows: why, given the ostensible purpose of the university as an institution for the pursuit of research, teaching and learning, does it so frequently become the focus of 'oppositional' political activity ?Whyare students, whose defining activity is 'studying', so easily politicized? The thesis of this paper is that the university performs not just a single f…
Beyond Contract
Marxism and Sociology
Social Structure, Homogenization, and 'The Process of Status Attainment in the United States and Great Britain
Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labor Process
The Anthropology of Industrial Work
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Manufacturing Consent
Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an …
Manufacturing Consent
The Anatomy of Work
Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1979). Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books 1979). Richard M. Pfeffer, Working For Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press 1979). Andrew Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press 197…
The Collapse of the Weimar Republic
Manufacturing Consent
Manufacturing Consent
The Hidden Abode of Underdevelopment
Introduction
The written and the repressed in Gouldner's industrial sociology
Between the Labor Process and the State
The paper develops the concept of politics of production through a double critique: first, of recent literature on the organization of work for ignoring the political and ideological regimes in production; and second, of recent theories of the state for failing to root its interventions in the requirements of capitalist development. The paper distinguishes three types of production politics: despotic, hegemonic, and hegemonic despotic. The focus …
Marxist Inquiries
This collection exemplifies the resurgence of Marxist ideas in contemporary social research. Its purpose is neither to cover all the areas of Marxist research nor to survey alternative Marxist perspectives or schools. Rather the volume assembles nine examples of the most interesting work being done today by younger sociologists who are seriously pursuing the rich and provocative arguments to be found in the ongoing Marxist tradition. All contribu…
Karl Marx and the Satanic Mills
This paper sets out from a theoretical paradox in Marx's analysis of capitalism: that the working class is the victim of the logic of capitalism: that the working class is the victim of the logic of capitalism and at the same time os supposed to rise up against that logic. Traditional resolutions of this paradox are inadequate; the resolution proposed here involves the distinction within the sphere of production between the labor process and the …
Marxist Inquiries
Mythologies of Work
Comparative studies of capitalist and state socialist countries have rested on weak empirical bases, namely the comparison of ideal type models or comparisons of the realities (often distorted) of one society with an ideal type of the other. This is particularly true of the firm, which has remained a black box in conventional analyses of state socialism. On the basis of case studies of two comparable firms, one in the United States and one in Hun…
Factory Regimes in Comparative Perspective
Making Nonsense of Marx
Sociology (125 works) · Political science (105 works) · Law (72 works) · Philosophy (62 works) · Epistemology (53 works) · Social science (50 works) · Politics (49 works) · Economics (46 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (44 works) · Law (40 works)