Michael Burawoy

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Michael Burawoy is a Marxist sociologist, best known as author of Manufacturing Consent (a famous study on work and organizations) and as a leading proponent of public sociology. Burawoy was also president of the American Sociological Association in 2004 and is presently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006-2010, he is vice-president for the Committee of National Associations of the International Sociological Association.

He has studied industrial workplaces in Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia. His method of choice is usually participant observation, more specifically ethnography. (see his work on: Ethnography unbound: power and resistance in the modern metropolis, 1991 and Global Ethnography: forces, connections and imaginations in a postmodern world, 2000). Based on his studies of the workplace he has looked into the nature of postcolonialism, the organization of state socialism and the problems in the switch from socialism to capitalism.

More recently he has moved away from observing factories to looking at his own place of work- the university- to consider the way sociology is taught to students and how it is 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. In this he divides sociology into four separate yet overlapping categories. Public Sociology, policy sociology (which have an extra-academic audience), professional sociology (sharing its use in providing instrumental knowledge with policy sociology), and lastly critical sociology which like public sociology produces reflexive knowledge but that which is only available to an academic audience, like professional sociology.

[edit] References

Burawoy, Michael, 2005, "2004 American Sociological Association Presidential address: For public sociology," The British Journal of Sociology , Volume 56, Issue 2. pp. 260-290