Michael Burawoy

Michael Burawoy (born 15 June 1947) is a sociologist working within Marxist social theory, best known as the leading proponent of public sociology and the author of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism—a study on the sociology of industry that has been translated into a number of languages.

Burawoy is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Burawoy was born on 15 June 1947.

Graduating as a mathematics student from the University of Cambridge in 1968, Burawoy went on to pursue postgraduate 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.

Burawoy joined the Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley in 1976 as an assistant professor.

For his book The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism (1992) he worked as a furnace operator in a Hungarian steel plant.

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.

He served as Chair of the Department of Sociology for 1996-98, and 2000-02.

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.

He has further expanded the extended case method.

He was president of the American Sociological Association in 2004.

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.

In 2006–2010, he was one of the vice-presidents for the Committee of National Associations of the International Sociological Association (ISA).

In the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology he was elected the 17th President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the period 2010–2014.