Michael Burawoy's research while affiliated with University of California, Berkeley and other places
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Publications (112)
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
Marx and Bourdieu embark from similar criticisms of philosophers as suffering from the illusion that ideas make history—what Marx calls ideology and what Bourdieu calls scholastic reason. Marx and Bourdieu both identify the source of this fallacy in the failure of philosophers (and other intellectuals or academics) to recognize the peculiar conditi...
Uno de los debates más polémicos que atraviesa a la sociología es qué hacer con el canon de Marx, Weber y Durkheim: ¿abandonarlo, comenzar con uno nuevo o reconstruir el existente? En este artículo examino las afirmaciones de Connell, la principal defensora de la idea de abandonar el canon. Ella afirma que este es una imposición arbitraria que no t...
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...
Traduction by Sébastien Antoine, Cécile Piret et François Rinschbergh of Michael Burawoy’s text: « Making sense of Bourdieu » first published in 2018 in Catalyst, vol. 2, n° 1, Spring. Translated and here published with the kind authorization of journal’s publisher.
Living sociology refers to the life of sociology, seen as a field of competing scientific research programs. The dynamism of each program requires, on the one hand, engaging internal contradictions and external anomalies and, on the other hand, extended dialogue among the programs themselves. Living sociology also refers to the life of sociologists...
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 dominat...
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...
Max Weber’s famous essays “politics as a vocation” and “science as a vocation” leave open the question of what one might mean by “sociology as a vocation”. What might “sociology as a vocation” have meant for Weber? In today’s conditions what might we mean by “sociology as a vocation”? The answer will vary from place to place, but can there also be...
Tradução do texto originalmente publicado como “Introduction: Reaching for the global” (In: BURAWOY, Michael et al. Global ethnography: Forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), realizada por Flávia Ferreira Mendes e Elizardo Scarpati Costa.
Como a etnografia pode ser global? Como a etnografia pode ser alguma coisa além de micro e a-histórica? Como o estudo da vida quotidiana pode compreender processos grandiosos que transcendem fronteiras nacionais? Afinal, observação participativa, como os sociólogos a criaram, visa uma interpretação subjetiva das situações sociais ou das bases da in...
Matthew Desmond’s “Relational ethnography,” is a manifesto for a relational turn in ethnography, liberating it from the “substantialism” of bounded places, processed people and group culture. Substantialism, however, proves to be a largely mythical category that obscures two types of relational ethnography: Desmond’s empiricist transactional ethnog...
Sociology was founded as a positivist and universal science that obscured its national parameters. A first response was to attack false universalism with the particularism of indigenous sociologies, but this effectively reproduced the domination of northern sociologies. A second response has been to recognize and trace the superimposition of nation...
This paper reflects on the resurgence of social movements in recent years in the Arab world, Europe and the United States, through the lens of a number of articles published in Global Dialogue, the magazine of the International Sociological Association (ISA), which existence coincides with such movements. These, although having national and regiona...
Neste artigo, Michel Burawoy revisita o mundo esquecido do Socialismo de Estado, refletindo sobre suas experiências como operário na Hungria (1983-1988) no crepúsculo da União Soviética (1991) e em seus desdobramentos sobre o mercado (1992-2002). Pelo prisma do chão de fábrica, o autor examina as peculiaridades da produção socialista e como esta fo...
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 sociolo...
Ethnographic revisits have become an increasing practice in the social sciences, designed to advance the understanding of history through the linking of micro processes and societal structures. In this article I revisit my study of Zambianisation on the Copperbelt, conducted between 1968 and 1972. The methodology of the extended case method is used...
Public sociology and the sacrifices it entails, richly described in the case studies in this monograph, are driven by moral commitment. This is one element of sociology as a vocation. The other element is sociology as a science. The case studies are built on an embryonic sociology of commodification, understood in its historical dimensions and its...
In this appendix we describe two successive efforts in the use of digital media to develop courses that brought together distinguished sociologists from around the world. In the first course, we put together a vision of global sociology that revolved around issues of marketization while in the second we were more attentive to the public engagement...
This introduction sets out from the unresolved paradox to be found in the writings of Bourdieu, namely the theoretical impossibility of public sociology and his own sustained practical engagement with publics. I appropriate and develop his concept of the 'field' to account for his success as a public sociologist. It requires us to understand that p...
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Michael Burawoy, former president of the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association, is one of the most distinguished social scientists of the early 21st century. Having been engaged in ethnographic fieldwork for a great deal of his academic career, Burawoy has lately turned his attention to the internal divisi...
Michael Burawoy, former president of the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association, is one of the most distinguished social scientists of the early 21st century. Having been engaged in ethnographic fieldwork for a great deal of his academic career, Burawoy has lately turned his attention to the internal divisi...
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 scho...
The article briefly presents Manufacturing Consent, a 1979 publication directed by Allis Chalmer that deals with the way in which work discipline for manual labourers is organised through coercion and consent, based in particular on the establishment of production quota creating a kind of "game of making out" between works. The author reviews the e...
Das zunehmende Interesse an öffentlichen Soziologien kennzeichnet eine wachsende Lücke zwischen dem Ethos der Soziologen und sozialen, politischen und wirtschaftlichen Tendenzen in der Gesellschaft allgemein. Die öffentliche Soziologie zielt darauf ab, die öffentliche Debatte über moralische und politische Fragen durch das Einbringen soziologischer...
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 fo...
Sociologists Laleh Behbehanian and Michael Burawoy explore what it means to view the global through a distinctively sociological lens.
Thirteen years ago I returned to South Africa at the invitation of Blade Nzimande to address what was then ASSA—: the Association of Sociologists of Southern Africa. Much had changed since my previous sojourn to South Africa in 1968. It was then 1990. Nelson Mandela had just been released from Robben Island and the ANC had been unbanned. My two tea...
In any given state socialist country, the mode of its collapse lay at the intersection of two forces—struggles within the dominant classes, on the one hand, and struggles between dominant and subordinate classes, on the other hand. The two fed each other in different but complex ways.
O presente artigo, baseado em discurso dirigido à Sociedade Japonesa de Sociologia, na Universidade de Tohoku, recoloca as formulações centrais da sociologia pública, identificando os quatro estilos do fazer sociológico. Isso é feito à luz do cenário aberto com a profunda crise por que passa o sistema capitalista mundial. Mesmo ciente das diferente...
It is exactly 50 years since C Wright Mills (1959) penned his rendition of the sociological imagination as the interplay of biography and history, or, more actively, as transforming private troubles into public issues. Given the currency of Mills's pithy formula, one might expect sociologists to be all the more conscious of the connection between t...
The idea of a national sociology may appear strange to U.S. sociologists accustomed to thinking of their sociology as universal, but fromoutside the United States our sociology can look quite provincial, expressing the peculiarities of our exotic society. Indeed, each nation has its own distinctive field of sociology–we can define the features of a...
At a time when we look anywhere but the United States for examples of participatory democracy, when we extol participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, panchayat self-government in Kerala, or the cooperative system of Mondragon, it is salutary to learn of the democratic experiments of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)—even if they oc...
In this article the author discusses the position of sociologists and social scientists as "intellectuals" with varied forms of political and institutional participation whether professional, critical, public or public policy oriented. In contrast to Wallerstein's ideal, in which an intellectual is closer to the popular classes and at a greater d...
In this article the author discusses the position of sociologists and social scientists as "intellectuals" with varied forms of political and institutional participation whether professional, critical, public or public policy oriented. In contrast to Wallerstein's ideal, in which an intellectual is closer to the popular classes and at a greater d...
O presente artigo, baseado em discurso dirigido à Sociedade Japonesa de Sociologia, na Universidade de Tohoku, recoloca as formulações centrais da sociologia pública, identificando os quatro estilos do fazer sociológico. Isso é feito à luz do cenário aberto com a profunda crise por que passa o sistema capitalista mundial. Mesmo ciente das diferente...
The absence of any dynamic quality to the Canadian political system could probably in a large measure be attributed to its separation from the world of higher learning. The association of the intellectuals with the bureaucracy of government is clear enough. However expert they may be, or however many insights they may have into the historical proce...
This has been a wonderful SASA meeting, with greater attendance than ever, with so many young and new faces, developing new perspectives for South Africa's second transition. A new generation of sociologists is taking over and SASA, one feels, has turned a corner. It reminds me of the first meeting of your association that I attended. It was 1990 i...
Michael Burawoy revisits the forgotten world of state socialism by reflecting on his experiences as an industrial worker in Hungary (1983-1988) in the twilight of the Soviet Union (1991), and in its market aftermath (1992-2002). From the standpoint of the shopfloor, he examines the peculiarities of socialist production and how it shaped working-cla...
This article begins by describing the genesis of the idea of public sociology to better assess its meaning and significance. I then move from the particular account to a general formulation of the four types of knowledge that comprise the sociological field and its division of labor. All four types of knowledge are necessary ingredients for a flour...
In this remarkable collection of essays, Michael Burawoy develops the extended case method by connecting his own experiences among workers of the world to the great transformations of the twentieth century-the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the reconstruction of U.S. capitalism, and the African transition to post-colonialism...
For too long U.S. labor sociology has been reluctant to explore the world. By taking a global turn, we have much to learn from labor scholars and labor movements in the Global South—much to learn about our own peculiarities, about the possibilities and obstacles to building links across national boundaries, and about the implications of “globalizat...
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...
The year 1974 marked a rupture in the study of labor. It was the year in which Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was published, making a break with a moribund industrial sociology. It was a rupture inspired by the resurgence of Marxism, critical of the euphoric sociology of the 1950s. Since 1974, labor studies have undergone a mutation...
Introduction Michael Burawoy est sociologue et enseigne a l’universite de Californie, a Berkeley, ou il a passe la quasi-totalite sa carriere. Il a mene d’importantes recherches sur les mutations du travail ouvrier dans les regimes de production capitaliste et socialiste, a partir d’enquetes de terrain qui l’ont conduit en Zambie (Burawoy, 1972), d...
This article asks three questions. How does the sociologist understand the common sense of subaltern groups, whether subjugated on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity or nationality? What could be the political practice of the sociologist with regard to such groups? Finally, through what form of public discourse can sociology articulate the...
Some of the most inspiring public sociology takes place at the local level, often hidden from or obscured by professional sociology. Taking inspiration from Edna Bonacich's research with labor and Elizabeth Leonard's research with survivors of extreme domestic violence, this article sketches out what a public sociology for California might mean, an...
The nine articles in the dialogue divide into two groups: an abstract universalism constituted from above (Burawoy, Martinelli, Wievorka, Smith) vs concrete practices knitted together from below (Shen Yuan, Zdravomyslova, Habib, Baviskar and Braga et al.). In fact, a global sociology has to be constructed from below and the question is whether this...
ABSTRACTSThis paper follows the struggles of Russian coal miners who first challenged the Soviet regime in 1989 and helped precipitate its downfall in 1991. In the Arctic city of Vorkuta, the movement's most militant and radical center, the dreams of workers have again, as in 1917, become bonds of their affliction. In response to invading market fo...
Building on Karl Polanyi's theory of a societal reaction to the unregulated exchange of what he called fictitious commodities—labour, money and land— this paper links the history of sociology to the history of the market. If the first wave of marketization in the nineteenth century dwelt on the commodification of labour, prompting utopian sociologi...
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...
At its inception one hundred years ago, the American Sociological Society was concerned to separate itself from the social movements and reform impulses to which it had hitherto been connected. One hundred years of professionalism have achieved the splitting and amassed an impressive body of theory, empirical analysis, and innovative techniques, bu...
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...
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...
Writings from exile have a long and distinguished pedigree. Trotsky wrote his History of the Russian Revolution while in exile in Turkey and The Revolution Betrayedin Norway; Lenin wrote Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in Zurich and had to escape to Finland to write State and Revolution; Luxemburg wrote The Accumulation of Capitalin Sw...
The growing interest in public sociologies marks an increasing gap between the ethos of sociologists and social, political, and economic tendencies in the wider society. Public sociology aims to enrich public debate about moral and political issues by infusing them with sociological theory and research. It has to be distinguished from policy, profe...
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 sociologic...
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 sociologic...
This conversation, transcribed from a conference in April 2002, is intended to illuminate current debates about the use and abuse of the embeddedness concept in economic sociology.
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 eth...
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 transcend...
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...
"At last world.com meets ethnography.eudora. This book shows how ethnography can have a global reach and a global relevance, its humanistic and direct methods actually made more not less relevant by recent developments in global culture and economy. Globalisation is not a singular, unilinear process, fatalistically unfolding towards inevitable ends...
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 interve...
In this article I elaborate and codify the extended case method, which deploys partici-pant 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 interv...
Citations
... To retrace the circuit of socialized capital, I connect Bourdieu's principle of convertibility between capitals with Lebowitz's (2003) and Harvey's (2017) notion of secondary and tertiary circuits. 5 Although Bourdieu has been criticized on several grounds to which I return in the course of the article, using his notion of capital conversion, which was central to his writings on social reproduction, allows recuperating part of his theory within a Marxian framework (Burawoy (2021) makes different suggestions for such a recuperation). ...
... ). Burawoy, in his response, recalled the fact that he was Polish, referring to the influence of Polish sociology on his views, and the fact that he openly admired the United States a few years ago at the ASA conference62 and also that Lailonia was not Lailonia at all, but real Poland. Burowoy's answer is based on a criticism of five points, which was used by Sztompka in order to define the concept of "indigenous sociology" through the example of the kingdom of Lailonia. ...
... However, the tradition of Black utopianism is a generative case study for two reasons. First, the pivotal place of Du Bois in Black utopianism (Zamalin, 2019), early American sociology (Morris, 2015) and decolonial sociology (Burawoy, 2021;Weiner, 2018) means that 'The Comet' is a useful bridging point between utopia, sociology and race. Second, Afrofuturism, a movement focused on bringing together science fiction and the culture of the African diaspora (Womack, 2013), has become increasingly prominent in popular culture, something demonstrated by the success of the film Black Panther (2018) and Beyoncé's visual album Black Is King (2020). ...
... Doing so risks simply replicating epistemologies that are immanent to hegemonic patriarchal power structures in academic knowledge production (Choo and Ferree, 2010;Tomlinson, 2018). The claim at hand rests on a conceptualization of intervention (and obtrusiveness itself) as a potentially useful tool for data collection by stimulating subjects to reflect on, challenge, and (re)conceptualize/articulate their interpretations (Burawoy, 2021). ...
... 100). Esta iluminación de la que habla Sennett otorgará, no solamente mayores posibilidades de adquisición intelectual, posición social y crecimiento personal al sujeto perteneciente a la élite social, sino también una falaz naturalización del talento como algo inherente y meritocrático a cierta clase social, género, raza u orientación sexual; generando lo que Gramsci anotaba como una falsa conciencia de la realidad (Burawoy, 2014;Pease, 2010). ...
... For example, a public park might be removed from the land market but rented out to individuals or firms for profit-making activities. 34 This illustrates why it is useful to think of decommodification as gradational rather than absolute and to recognize that it can both restrict and support commodification and accumulation over the long run (Burawoy, 2020;Dale, 2016a;Goodwin, 2018). 35 State responses to the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate this point. ...
... Highlighting the sociological understandings of the construction of the many epistemologies of work (E. S. Costa & Almada, 2018), we emphasize the analysis of the new information and communication technologies (NICTs), pointing out the changes in the most advanced branches of "digital" capitalism. Over the last few decades, several national and international research and ethnographies (Antunes & Braga, 2009;Burawoy, 2018;H. A. Costa & E. S. Costa, 2018;Robert, Lisdero, & E. S. Costa, 2018) confirmed, through material and symbolic dimensions that permeate labor relations, the complexity of the world of work to understand work in the digital world. ...
... Numerous publications within the sociology of sport have engaged with Burawoy's seminal addresses (e.g., Bairner, 2009Bairner, , 2012Boykoff, 2018;Burawoy & Nothen, 2014;Cooky, 2017;Donnelly, 2015;Donnelly & Atkinson, 2015;Donnelly, Atkinson, Boyle, & Szto, 2011;Donnelly, Branco Fraga, & Aisenstein, 2014;Jarvie, 2007;Malcolm, 2012;Weedon, 2013). This literature highlighted a variety of ways in which sociologists of sport can engage in traditional or organic forms of public sociology, including by contributing to mainstream media discussions or writing sociologically for a non-academic audience (Cooky, 2017;Donnelly, 2015;Jarvie, 2007;Malcolm, 2012); working directly with marginalized communities or social movements (Cooky, 2017;Donnelly et al., 2011;Jarvie, 2007); conducting research that explicitly addresses broader social problems (Donnelly, 2015;Donnelly & Atkinson, 2015;Donnelly et al., 2011); making research publicly accessible through open access publishing (Weedon, 2013); and, notably for our blogging experiences, engaging with "organic intellectuals" whose embeddedness within a particular sport context positions them to enact social change (Bairner, 2009). ...
... Digital ethnography has been shown to have several advantages, especially when exploring the complex patterns of Web 2.0 or social media platforms beyond the less mobile or dispersed Web 1.0 (Rheingold, 1994). This is the main domain of interest for online ethnographers (Postill & Pink, 2012), and the approach has proved sufficiently flexible and adaptable to respond to ongoing change in the online environment (Pink et al., 2015;Robinson & Schulz, 2009). 2 Our netnography is informed by relational or trans-actional ethnography (Burawoy, 2017;Desmond, 2014). Desmond proposed a relational turn to overcome the substantialism of bounded and predetermined research entities like neighbourhoods, workplaces, gang members or political activists. ...
... We set out our perspective on why a Public Understanding of Social Science needs to be different to PUS, and begin to outline some of the issues, questions, and approaches scholars may choose to pursue in establishing a theoretically and empirically grounded programme. In doing this, we contribute to the modest literature on the social sciences in public settings (Burawoy, 2016;Cassidy, 2021;Kamwendo, 2020;Medvecky and Macknight, 2017) by examining differences between the natural and social sciences, and what the consequences may be for a Public Understanding of Social Science. ...
