Michael Burawoy, 1947-2025: Patron Saint of Public Sociology

Michael Burawoy, whose embrace of public sociology and the public at work lead him to describe his influential academic niche as “industrial sociology,” has died at age 77. He was crossing the street in his hometown of Oakland, California the evening of February 3 when a hit-and-run driver struck him. The driver remains unidentified and at large.

Burawoy, who retired from the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, had a career that was marked by a special kind of fieldwork in which the academic literally got his hands dirty, working alongside the subjects of his study. In a 2016 Social Science Bites interview, Burawoy told interviewer David Edmonds how his hands-on approach developed after a stint working as a manager in a copper company in Zambia. Burawoy had moved to Chicago to earn a Ph.D in what he considered the “Heartland of conservative sociology.” Expanding his studies and hoping to build a Marxist theory that could displace sociology itself, “I took a job in a South Chicago factory as a semi-skilled machine operator with a view to understanding the experience of workers on the shop floor but through a Marxist’s perspective. … I told management and I told my fellow workers. I was there to study the workplace and to understand their experiences. They, however, were not the slightest bit interested in why I was there: they saw me as trouble because I so endangered their life by my incompetence!”

He may not have made Employee of the Month as a lathe operator, but his scholarly star rose as he continued this technique of inquiry “from below” in Hungary and then Russia. His particular contributions in industrial sociology and the method ethnography tended to be overshadowed by his pre-eminence in so-called “public sociology.”

He argued that while other thinkers, like David Riesman or Robrt Bellah had claims on its parentage, public sociology’s modern roots flow from C, Wright Mills’s 1959 book, The Sociological Imagination. “In that inspirational work,” Burawoy wrote (in an article titled “The World Needs Public Sociology”), “Mills famously defined sociology as turning private troubles into public issues – a mission that had been betrayed, Mills averred, by American sociology’s tendency to insulate itself from social reality[.]”

In his own words, as captured on his webpage at UC Berkeley, both highlighted his role as conduit rather than originator and yet still gave public sociology its intellectual baseline:

Michael Burawoy was born in England on June 15, 1947, to two chemists, emigres who independent of each other had fled Russia and then Ukraine before meeting as students in Leipzig. In 1933 his parent emigrated once more, alighting in the refuge of the United Kingdom. A young Michael aspired to be an astrophysicist, as so trooped to Christ’s College, Cambridge where he took a bachelor’s in mathematics. Finding his potential career choice dull, and having already made extensive visits to the United states, India and South Africa as an undergrad, he returned to South Africa and supported himself as a journalist. He then took a management job in newly independent Zambia for a copper company, Anglo-American.

His work over four years in the personnel department was taken as a full-time employee, and not a researcher in mufti. But what he learned outraged him, and he decided to approach it for an academic project as he studied sociology and anthropology at the University of Zambia. As he told Edmonds, “I began to be interested covertly – it was unethical project, you might argue – it was a project to understand what was happening to the color bar in post-colonial Zambia, the color-bar being the rule that governed the workplace in colonial Zambia and other parts of Africa whereby no white ever received any orders from any black, so what happened to the racial order in the copper industry in post-colonial Zambia.” After some internal struggle over whether he should publish or not, he did in 1972’s The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization.

Continuing his education and recalling advice he’d received while studying at Cambridge from sociologist Edward Shils, who recommended he pursue the study of sociology studies in Chicago. While he rejected that advice at the time, he now travelled to the University of Chicago, where, under thesis supervisor William Julius Wilson, he would receive his doctorate in sociology in 1976.

As noted, while at Chicago Burawoy did his fieldwork as a laborer (which was also necessary to pay his bills). This resulted in arguably his most important written work, the 1979 book Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism, which was based on his doctoral thesis. It also and influenced his approach to ethnography, of seeing, as the International Sociological Association put it, “the macro in the micro.” Over time, an amalgam of his experiences and hos teaching resulted into important methodological works, 1991’s Ethnography Unbound and 2000’s Global Ethnography.

As ISA noted, “these [books] developed important methodological arguments for the use of participant observation data in the ‘extended case’ method to build empirical and theoretical generalisations. We can see how he has regularly followed the relatively unusual pattern of moving freely back and forth between theorising and collecting serious empirical data, developing further the idea that sociologists should play a ‘public’ rather than a ‘professional’, ‘policy’ or ‘critical’ role, relating to audiences outside academia and looking for ways to improve outcomes in the public domain.”

He would repeat his bottom-up approach in Eastern Europe, in Hungary in 1988 and 1989 (he worked at a champagne factory, a textile factory, a machine shop and then a steelworks that all resulted in the book The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism) and in the final gasp of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a Moscow rubber factory and furniture factory just below the Arctic Circle. “In all these workplaces,” he told Edmonds, “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.”

Even as the influence of Marxist thought declined in social science — Burawoy described it to Ivica Mladenović as “a retreat of the Marxist academic renaissance of the 1970s” – he neither obscured his own Marxist lineage nor let it blind him. “I am definitely going with a Marxist perspective and it definitely affects what I look for,” he told Edmonds. “But it doesn’t necessarily affect what I actually see.”

In the knowledge economy, meanwhile, Burawoy served as a lecturer his last year at Chicago before accepting an assistant professorship at UC Berkeley’s Department of Sociology. He would remain at Berkeley – sans a stint in 1982-83 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – for the rest of his career, twice serving as sociology department chair.

Burawoy told Edmonds that he saw himself as a “sociological chauvinist” who nonetheless draws from whatever discipline necessary to get the job done. “I was trained as an anthropologist as well as a sociologist, [and] I’ve always been committed to the ethnographic approach to doing research. Studying other people in their space and their time, I am quite open to drawing on different disciplines. I do this regularly whether it be anthropology, whether it’s human geography, whether it’s economics.”

In the 2000s he increasing came to be seen as a sort of éminence grise, and he served as president of American Sociological Association in 2004, president of International Sociological Association from 2010 to 2014, and was founding editor of Global Dialogue.

His influence also drew from his formidable classroom abilities.

“He was an extraordinary teacher, who mentored and inspired thousands of students, changing their lives with his fierce intellect and kindness,” Raka Ray, dean of UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences, wrote in a memory posted on X. “He mentored me when I first arrived at Berkeley as an assistant professor. I learned to love Berkeley through his eyes. I learned what it meant to teach, to mentor, to do research seriously, and above all, what devotion to one’s calling looked like. I am grateful that in my present position as dean, I will always have his voice in my ear; reminding me that it is my duty to think above all about the needs of those most disadvantaged, the powerless, those who had to fight to get here.”

Oleg Komlik, founder of the Economic Sociology and Political Economy online community, in a deeply personal encomium described how “Professor Burawoy profoundly influenced my professional path and academic worldview, just as he has done for thousands and thousands of sociologists and activists around the world. He did it through his immense intellectual power, groundbreaking research (on labor and capitalism, Marxist theory, social and Bourdieusian theory, ethnography and the Extended Case Method), resolute commitment to dialogue across disciplines and borders, moral spirit, exceptional communication and organizational talents, and remarkable personal generosity.”

At his retirement in 2023, Berkeley’s sociology department established an endowment to support students in his honor , and he received the W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association for his “major theoretical and empirical explorations of labor and industrial capitalism” and his “commitment to incorporating diverse voices, particularly from the Global South, into sociological debates.” The latter was often in evidence in the past year as he pushed his fellow sociologists to morally engage with the “question” of Palestine.

While his last book, written with Karl Von Holdt, was 2012’s Conversations with Bourdieu, a 2010 edited volume, 2010’s Facing and Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology perhaps best summarizes the concerns and hopes he had for public sociology in his later life. As he wrote for the American Sociological Association in his 2004 presidential address, “We would not have to defend public sociology if there were not obstacles to its realization. To sur[1]mount them requires commitment and sacrifice that many have already made and continue to make. That was why they became sociologists—not to make money but a better world.”