Michael Burawoy

Burawoy was a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the American Sociological Association in 2004. 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 ISA for the period 2010–2014.

Life and career

Burawoy was born in England on 15 June 1947; his parents had fled Russia and Ukraine, met as students in Leipzig (both having doctorates in chemistry) and arrived in Britain in 1933. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1968, before going 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. He served as Chair of the Department of Sociology for 1996–98 and 2000–02.

Aside from the sociological study of the industrial workplace in Zambia, Burawoy studied industrial workplaces in Chicago, Hungary, and post-Soviet Russia. His method of choice was usually participant observation, more specifically ethnography. He further expanded the extended case method. 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 looked into the nature of postcolonialism, the organization of state socialism, and the problems in the transition from socialism.

Burawoy moved away from observing factories to looking at his own place of work—the university—to consider the way sociology was taught to students and how it was put into the public domain. His work on public sociology is most prominently shown in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 2004, where he divided 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.

As President of the International Sociological Association, he stated at the 2014 World Congress of Sociology, "Between economics and political science, sociology is not social science. It is rather scientific socialism... Our role as sociologists is to watch, engage and challenge an unequal world... So sociologists of the world, unite!"

In 2022, The University of Johannesburg awarded Burawoy an honorary doctoral degree "for making considerable theoretical and methodological contributions to the development of Sociology", citing the "profound impact" of his contributions. In his acceptance speech, Burawoy remarked that "South Africa opened my eyes to the mysteries of Apartheid and later to many worlds of oppression and struggle". Burawoy commented that he saw South African sociology as "way ahead of the rest" and "at the vanguard of what I call 'public sociology'".[[File:]]

In 2023, UC Berkeley's Sociology Department established an endowment to support students in honor of Michael Burawoy following a gift of $100,000 from alumna Suava Zbierski-Salameh (a former student of Burawoy). The Dean of Social Sciences, Raka Ray, remarked that "Burawoy's impact on sociology is monumental" adding that "his national and international presence alongside his tireless dedication to Berkeley, makes him a pillar of our community."

In 2024, Burawoy received the W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA). The citation read that "Burawoy's work has contributed enormously to our ability to grasp the social world", and described his advocacy for public sociology as "a critical intervention in the field". The citation further highlighted his "seemingly infinite devotion and intellectual energy".

Burawoy advocated for Palestinian solidarity in the ASA, writing and organizing in support of an ASA "Resolution for Justice in Palestine".

Burawoy was killed in a crosswalk in Oakland, on 3 February 2025, by a speeding driver who fled the scene. He was 77. His ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery on 8 April 2025.