Rate My Professor Michael Burawoy

University of California, Berkeley

Social Science Sociology Economic Sociology Social Theory Social Stratification Ethnology

5.0

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5.04/23/2026

Always respectful and encouraging to all.

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About Michael

Michael Burawoy was a Professor of Sociology in the Social Science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, joining as Assistant Professor in 1976, advancing to Professor in 1988, and retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2023. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1968, an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Zambia in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1976. Burawoy's research featured participant observation in industrial workplaces across Zambia, the United States, Hungary, and Russia, illuminating postcolonial contradictions, the organization of consent under advanced capitalism, class consciousness and work organization under state socialism, and dilemmas of post-Soviet transitions to capitalism. He pioneered the Extended Case Method, outlined in his 2009 book The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition, for drawing broad conclusions from ethnographic studies. Later, he examined the university as a workplace, advocating public sociology and developing a labor theory of pedagogy with graduate students.