Michael Burawoy

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.

Burawoy held leadership roles including Chair of Berkeley's Sociology Department (1996-1998, 2000-2002), President of the American Sociological Association (2003-2004), President of the International Sociological Association (2010-2014), and founding editor of Global Dialogue (2010-2017). He co-chaired the Berkeley Faculty Association (2015-2021). Key publications encompass Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1979), The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism (1985), The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism (1992, with János Lukács), Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (2000, with nine co-authors), Marxism Meets Bourdieu (2010), and Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment (2012, with Karl von Holdt). Awards include UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (1979), MacArthur Foundation Grants (1993, 2001), American Sociological Association Distinguished Teaching Award (2003), and Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences (2002-2007). Burawoy's reconstructions of Marxism engaged Karl Polanyi, Pierre Bourdieu, and W.E.B. Du Bois, profoundly shaping labor process theory, ethnographic methodology, and public engagement in sociology. He passed away on February 3, 2025.