Michael Burawoy

Michael Burawoy
Born 15 June 1947
England
Nationality English, American
Alma mater University of Cambridge (BA)
University of Zambia (MA)
University of Chicago (PhD)
Known for politics of production
factory regime
hegemonic despotism
extended case method

Michael Burawoy (Russian: Майкл (Михаил) Буравой) is a British sociological Marxist, best known as author of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism—a study on work and organizations that has been translated into a number of languages—and as the leading proponent of public sociology. Burawoy was also president of the American Sociological Association in 2004 and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006–2010, he was vice-president for the Committee of National Associations of the International Sociological Association (ISA). In the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology he was elected President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the period 2010–2014.

Biography

Graduating as a mathematics student from the University of Cambridge in 1968, Burawoy went on to pursue post-graduate study in the newly independent African nation of Zambia, while simultaneously working as a researcher for Anglo American PLC. Completing a master's degree at the University of Zambia in 1972, Burawoy enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, finishing a sociology dissertation with an ethnography of Chicago industrial workers, later to become Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism.

Aside from Burawoy's sociological study of the industrial workplace in Zambia, Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in Chicago, Hungary, and post-Soviet Russia. His method of choice is usually participant observation, more specifically ethnography.[1] Based on his studies of the workplace he has looked into the nature of postcolonialism, the organization of state socialism and the problems in the transition from socialism.

In more recent times, Burawoy has moved away from observing factories to looking at his own place of work- the university- to consider the way sociology is taught to students and how it is put into the public domain. His work on public sociology is most prominently shown in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 2004, where he divides sociology into four separate (yet overlapping) categories: public sociology, policy sociology (which has an extra-academic audience), professional sociology (which addresses an academic audience familiar with theoretical and methodological frameworks common to the discipline of sociology), and lastly critical sociology which, like public sociology, produces reflexive knowledge but which is only available to an academic audience, like professional sociology.

Selected works

Books

Author (or co-author)

Collaborative and edited books

Articles

References

  1. ↑ See his collaborative work on: Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
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