Remembering Michael Burawoy: A True Inspiration for 21st Century Sociologists | Jos Chathukulam

On February 3, 2025, Michael Burawoy (age 77 years), a world-renowned Marxist Sociologist, died in a road accident. He was hit by a car while walking near his home in Oakland, United States. Burawoy joined the Berkeley Sociology Department as an Assistant Professor in 1976, after earning a PhD in sociology. After 47 years of service, he retired in 2023. With the passing of Burawoy, the world has lost not only a prominent public intellectual and compassionate educator but also a scholar who pioneered the ‘public sociology’ (sociological methods to engage with society or public on social issues) and industrial sociology. He was also a staunch advocate for resistance politics both within academic and non-academic circles. Burawoy has made immense contributions in the field of industrial and labour studies and he adopted more of a hands-on approach in his research by working in industrial workplaces to get an empirical understanding of racial capitalism, how capitalist production manifests in terms of interaction with managers and workers through the lens of control, coercion and consent. For instance, Burawoy has worked in the coal mines of Zambia and South Africa, factories in Chicago and construction sites in Northern Russia.

In colonial Zambia, “colour bar” was a parameter/rule that governed the workplaces in the country, particularly copper mines. In his 1972 book titled The Colour of Class on Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianisation, Burawoy presented the ‘Colour of Class’ through the lens of ‘extended case method’: a participant–observation study of the cooper industry, extended over space and time, linking micro-process of Zambianisation to macro-forces of class structure along with Gouldner’s notion of succession and Fanon’s class analysis of the colony and post-colony.

His field work as a semi-skilled machine operator in a South Chicago factory influenced his approach to ethnography (macro and micro) and inspired his most important work titled Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism in 1979. In this book, he attempts to understand the experience of workers on the shop floor through a Marxist perspective. He also worked at a champagne factory, textile factory, machine shop and steelworks in Eastern Europe and Hungary in the late 80s. In 1991 he worked at a rubber factory in Moscow and a furniture factory below the Arctic Circle. In Burawoy’s own words, “In all these workplaces, I was often faced with lots of surprises. I was not expecting to find people working so hard in South Chicago. I was not expecting the reproduction of the color bar in Zambia. I certainly wasn’t expecting the Hungarian workplace to be an efficient workplace.” [1] It is interesting to note his observation that “people working so hard” in all these workplaces, especially at a time when researches and debates on why workers are not being productive. In his 1985 book titled The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism, Burawoy wrote: It is an unfashionable book …. It defends an unfashionable thesis about an unfashionable class formed in an unfashionable place,” (Burawoy, 1985). Here unfashionable class refers to the ‘industrial proletariat’ and place is the ‘point of production’. He places the ‘politics of production’ within a polemical context. This seminal work offers a comparative analysis of workers experiences across capitalist, socialist and post-colonial countries especially after Marxist vision of worker insurgency and revolutionary transformation fell out of favour in both the capitalist and socialist worlds (Park, 2024).
Burawoy is also credited with strengthening Ethnography, a late 19th century fieldwork method into a sociological methodology that promoted an assessment of the micro being located within ‘meso’ and the ‘macro’. He named this approach as an ‘extended case study method’, which applies theoretical frameworks to specific cases and prompts intricate macro-level inquiries that needs to be investigated by placing the world as the context for fieldwork. It has been argued that the ‘extended case study method’ renders participatory sociology in its truest sense by avoiding the objectification and instrumentalization of the groups under examination.

Burawoy’s case study method is an extended version of Indian Sociologist M N Srinivas’s book view and filed view. Srinivas believed in participant observation as key methodological practice for ethnographic research and he viewed villages as microcosms of Indian society and believed social change was gradual with the support of empirical data through fieldwork.

Burawoy was no ordinary sociologist and he distinguished himself from other counterparts through his public sociology and industrial sociology through the eyes of pragmatic Marxist sociology. There is no doubt that Burawoy will be missed but we can hope that he has transcended to a more higher level of consciousness, as one of his colleague rightly put out “I dream that Marx and Gramsci and Polanyi and Fanon are waiting for you with a cup of tea”(Paret, 2025).

Recent Works of Michael Burawoy

• "Why and How Should Sociologists Speak out on Palestine?" The Sociological Review (forthcoming)
• "Du Bois: From Discovery and Recovery to Reconstruction." Sociology Compass (2024)
• "Sociology Faces the Question of Palestine." (Critical Sociology, 2024)
• "Laboring in the Extractive University," Introduction to Toward a Labor Theory of Pedagogy (Special Issue of Work and Occupations 51(1), February, 2024) written with Margaret Eby, Thomas Gepts, Justin Germain, Natalie Pasquinelli and Elizabeth Torres Carpio.
• The Making of Black Marxism: The Complementary Perspectives of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. (Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois)
• Decolonizing Canons: A Conversation with Chinese Sociologists. (Tsinghua Sociological Review, volume 20, 2023)

(Author: Jos chathukulam is the Director of Centre for Rural Management (CRM), Kottayam, Kerala. He is the former Chair Professor, Sri. Ramakrishana Hegde Chair on Decentralization and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru. Email:joschathukulam[atgmail.com)

References

• Paret, M. (2025, February 5). In Memoriam: Michael Burawoy. Berkley Sociology
• Park, O. H. (2024). Reading Burawoy’s The Politics of Production Now: On the Political after Post-Politics, Critical Sociology, 2024, 50(6) 931–942