Michael Burawoy (1947-2025): A Scholar Committed to taking Sociology to the Public Sumangala Damodaran

The Marxist sociologist wrote incisively about the way in which capital-labour relations played out in practice in industrial workplaces.

When Michael Burawoy was doing his doctorate at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, he spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory, attempting to understand why workers work as hard as they do and why they routinely consent to their own exploitation, even with knowledge of this fact.

The book that resulted from his doctoral dissertation, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1979), became a basic text in industrial and labour studies. He later worked as a furnaceman at the Lenin Steel Works in Hungary and also in a rubber factory in Russia.

The Marxist sociologist was killed in a hit-and-run incident in Oakland in the US on February 4.

With Burawoy’s passing, the world of industrial and labour studies has lost a towering thinker, an empathetic teacher and someone who was firmly committed to the politics of resistance in the academic world as well as outside. Most recently, he was actively involved with the student protests against the genocide in Gaza at UC Berkeley, from where he retired in after an illustrious career in the Department Of Sociology from 1976 to 2023.

Burawoy, British by birth, started working in sociology from his Master’s degree in Zambia, where he got interested in studying industrial workplaces. He distinguished himself from the regular academic researcher by working in different industrial workplaces to understand how capitalist production manifests in terms of the way capitalists (or their managers) and workers interact on shopfloors and how the entire process of production unfolds in terms of everyday aspects of control, coercion and consent.

During his stint as a Master’s student in Zambia, he worked in the copper mines and came to understand the intersections between race and class, the way in which racial capitalism is so persistent and how democratic states allow racial hierarchies to shape class dynamics.

He was keenly interested in the lived experiences of workers on the shop floor and the political consciousness that arises from industrial life, in interaction with the structure of state power and authority in specific economic systems. Another of his acclaimed books, The Politics of Production (1985), is a comparative analysis of workers’ experiences across capitalist, socialist, and postcolonial countries.

Burawoy’s commitment, not only to comparative analysis of working lives and production regimes in different parts of the world, but to working class politics and political movements for emancipation, took him repeatedly to Southern Africa, first to South Africa at the height of Apartheid, to Zambia for his Master’s degree and then back to South Africa as Apartheid was being dismantled, in 1990 and then until the present.

His long-term interactions with activists and labour studies scholars in South Africa contributed to his distinctive formulation of the idea of “public sociology” and his persistent argument for the academic discipline to reach outside its citadel to different publics.

In his own words, it involved the sociologist’s engagement with “labour movements, neighbourhood associations, communities of faith, immigrant rights groups, human rights organizations” such that the conversations became part of sociological discourse.

His commitment to public sociology also resulted in persistent critiques of the neoliberal turn in his own university and conversations with those in other academic institutions cross the world around severe crises in academia.

To scholars and academics working with trade unions, worker organisations and in industrial and labour studies in the developing countries, including in India, Michael Burawoy’s life, work and methods of analysis have been pivotal and inspirational.

For many, like me, who had the opportunity to meet him and listen to him speak, the image of a kind, extremely humorous and infectiously agile person will remain, even as he will be sorely missed.

(Sumangala Damodaran is Director of Gender and Economics with International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs).)

(This article was originally published in the Scroll.in  on February 6, 2025)