RIP Michael Burawoy

In memory of Michael Burawoy

The world mourns Michael Burawoy’s passing. Literally, the world. … add countries…And, we Hungarian sociologists feel fortunate and honored to have known him, conversed with him, worked with him and learned from him over the last four decades.

Michael, born in the UK to a family that descended from Russian Jews, initially studied to become a mathematician at Cambridge, but in Zambia where he worked as a young research assistant, took an unexpected interest in Sociology. After earning his MA in Sociology at the University of Zambia, he enrolled in the Sociology Ph.D. program of the University of Chicago (graduating in 1976), where his exposure to the ethnographic tradition of the Chicago School of the 1920s and 30s must have hardened his interest in qualitative research methods. His dissertation based on ethnographic fieldwork in a metallurgical factory matured into the 1979 book Manufacturing Consent that earned him great renown and a tenure-track position at the University of California at Berkeley, with one of the most eminent Sociology Departments in the U.S. As a Marxist, his perennial interest in industrial labor wasn’t surprising, but he undertook his study not from the heights of political theory and ideology, but from within the perspective of the working class, the presumed agent of a communist revolution. As Gramsci and Althusser, he too was interested in the hold the bourgeoisie had over the proletariat, but for him this hegemony resided less in ideology or culture and more in how workers’ consent was elicited and maintained in production itself. But how different were things in a putative workers’ state? After reading Miklós Haraszti’s Darabbér (1980, based on a study in the 1970s), he decided he had to see things for himself. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, he embarked on fieldwork in socialist Hungary. After short stints at a textile and a champagne factory in 1983, he entered the Lenin Steel Works in Csepel in 1984 as a blue-collar worker operating a monstrous dinosaur of a radial drill. Gaining entry, not so much with his coworkers but with the Hungarian government and company management was no small feat even in as liberal a socialist country as Hungary was at the time. Hungarian organization scholar János Lukács (with whom he co-authored The Radiant Past (1992) was instrumental in securing the necessary permissions for Michael to start his ethnographic fieldwork. He received a much warmer welcome from his mates on the shopfloor than he had in the factory in Chicago: they affectionately called him Misi or Jackson (after Michael Jackson, who was probably the only famous Michael his Hungarian colleagues have heard of), they took him to parties, drinking together and even helping him in his work. As a good sociologist would, he couldn’t help but tied this difference in reception to Hungarians’ divergent working conditions and a unique factory regime under central planning that itself was already undergoing significant reform.

But blue-collar workers were not the only circle in Hungary where Michael found friends; while he was a fellow at the Sociological Institute at MTA (1983-1987) , Elemér Hankiss, László Bruszt, Csaba Makó, Péter Galasi, and Gábor Kertesi also helped him feel at home and to understand late state socialism. From the U.S. side, Iván Szelényi had also been a champion and facilitator.

With the collapse of the party-state in Hungary, Michael didn’t lose his interest in the lives and circumstances of blue-collar workers in state socialism, and he embarked on collaborative research projects in a Russian furniture factory. Though the Soviet Union also collapsed eventually, he stayed with Russia to study not so much the transition to capitalism, as was commonly called in the early 1990s but rather the messy implosion of central planning which compelled unpaid or unemployed industrial workers and their families to return to farming.

By the late 1990s, as the alleged end of history arrived, and neoliberalism and flexible accumulation seemed to be the only game in town, Michael’s students started to return with fieldwork data from all over the world that seemed to tell the same story of the juggernaut of globalization. Once again, Michael felt compelled to look at these new processes from below. However, he felt that the methodology he elaborated with his graduate students in Ethnography Unbound (1991), the extended case method--about which he first learned in Zambia from South African professors in the tradition of the Manchester School—was no longer up to the task. In 1998 he started another collaborative project whose goal was to elaborate the ways in which ethnography can be made useful for studying globalization from the ground up. This resulted in the book Global Ethnography (2000), which amazingly had two Hungarian chapters in it: Lynne Haney’s on welfare reform after the collapse of state socialism, and mine on the planned toxic waste incinerator in Garé. It was in this circle that Michael gained a third Hungarian nickname: Béla, after the Hungarian-Romanian coach Béla Károlyi, a hard and controversial task master who coached the 14-year old Nadia Comaneci to the first perfect score in Olympian gymnastics history. Michael was indeed a brilliant coach who knew how to keep us going but with an open mind and a big heart.

In the 2000s he also expanded his collaboration with scholars from the Global South and co-edited three volumes with global ethnographic case studies from all over the world (Facing and Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology, 2010). This was a direct and active call on Sociology to de-center the U.S. and the Global North, which effort culminated in his reinvigorating role in the International Sociological Association that he presided over from 2010-2014. He had already done more than anyone in U.S. Sociology to help theoretically rigorous qualitative methodology regain its legitimacy and prestige, and as President of the American Sociological Association (2002-2005) he used his power for rendering the discipline a tool for critical scholarly analysis, elaborating the foundations of public sociology (Public Sociology 2021) and advocating for and collaborating with students and scholars all over the world who wanted sociology to serve and answer to the public more vigorously. But to take scholars from outside U.S. academia seriously, to cite them, to work with them, that clearly that had to be modeled for future generations in very practical ways, as Michael did. As we, his former students, are reconvening to commemorate him, we realize with the great joy of discovery, that he had indeed created and nurtured several vibrant activist-scholar communities that now can carry on this legacy.

Most recently, Michael threw his seemingly boundless energy into conceptualizing the corporatization of universities and the new labor conditions of teaching. His collaboration with students in a 2024 special issue of Work and Occupations (a journal of the International Sociological Association) names this regime the ‘extractive university’.  Engaging with and supporting the labor of teaching assistants wasn’t a new undertaking for Michael. Whenever graduate student employees went on strike, he was out there with them on the picket line, chanting and carrying signs. I remember holding one of my advisor meetings with him there on the corner of Telegraph Avenue with the sea of strikers around us. As a Marxist he never failed to support workers, and as a labor sociologist, he knew that in changing economic conditions owners, managers and administrators extract value from intellectual and academic employees in new ways. It may not be the blue-collar workers of Chicago or Budapest, but labor activism is alive and deserves astute analysis and support from sociologists.

Michael was a towering intellect for whom one’s research was one’s contribution to making the world more just, for whom knowledge production serves the public and not our oppressive systems, including those of academia. But he never sacrificed scholarly rigor for the sake of ideology just like he never sacrificed human relationships for the sake of success.

Misi, Jackson, Béla we say goodbye.

Zsuzsa Gille