Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation?Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of th...

In Symbolic Violence Michael Burawoy brings Pierre Bourdieu into an extended debate with Marxism—a tradition Bourdieu ostensibly avoided. While Bourdieu's expansive body of work stands as a critique of Marx's inadequate account of cultural domination, Burawoy shows how Bourdieu's eschewal and rejection of Marxism led him to miss out on a number of productive theoretical engagements. In eleven “conversations,” Burawoy outlines the intellectual and biographical parallels and diverge...

Michael Burawoy has helped to reshape the theory and practice of sociology across the Western world. Public Sociology is his most thoroughgoing attempt to explore what a truly committed, engaged sociology should look like in the twenty-first century.Burawoy looks back on the defining moments of his intellectual journey, exploring his pivotal early experiences as a researcher, such as his fieldwork in a Zambian copper mine and a Chicago factory. He recounts his time as a gr...

When the renowned social scientist Erik Olin Wright passed away in 2019 at the height of his intellectual powers, he left behind an unfinished project intended to forge a connection between class analysis and real utopias. In taking up this project, the essays in this volume pay tribute to his generative theory, crystalline thinking, inspirational teaching, and personal generosity.- "Friends of the late Erik Olin Wright celebrate his life and work with essays about his lifelong pre...

First published by Ravan Press in 1985, Cast in a Racial Mould was a pioneering book. It is now republished by Wits University Press with a new foreword by Michael Burawoy and with support from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.Entering what Marx called the hidden abode of capitalism; the labour process; this book analyzes the nature of work and worker resistance in the metal industry which lies at the core of South Africa manuf...

The ethnographies collected here offer a surprising and compelling picture of change in Russia and Eastern Europe found in no other book to date. Looking at the everyday processes by which individuals and groups forge new lives, the authors challenge the idea that we can understand this transformation by the predictable models-whether capitalism, post-socialism, modernity, or postmodernity.The collection brings together a wide-ranging group of authors from sociology, anthropology, ...

At an earlier time, sociologists C. Wright Mills, W. E. Du Bois, and Jane Addams loudly protested injustices and inequities in American society, provided critiques and analyses of systems of oppression, and challenged sociologists to be responsible critics and constructive commentators. These giants of American sociology would have applauded the 2004 meetings of the American Sociological Association. The theme of the meetings, Public Sociology, presided over by President Michael Burawoy, s...

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is the most influential sociologist of our time. His works take in education, culture, sport, literature, painting, class, philosophy, religion, law, media, intellectuals, methodology, photography, universities, colonialism, kinship, schooling and politics. Not much remains outside Bourdieu’s sociological eye. His works are widely read across disciplines and he was one of the most prominent public intellectuals in France. Conversations with Bourdieu presents the...

Public sociology—an approach to sociology that aims to communicate with and actively engage wider audiences—has been one of the most widely discussed topics in the discipline in recent years. The Handbook of Public Sociology presents a comprehensive look at every facet of public sociology in theory and practice. It pays particular attention to how public sociology can complement more traditional types of sociological practice to advance both the analytical power of the discipline and its a...

Die Rufe nach einer ‚öffentlichen Soziologie‘ werden jüngst lauter. Sollte die Soziologie sich für die Verbreitung ihres Wissens und die Zivilgesellschaft engagieren? Oder sind gerade Zurückhaltung und wissenschaftliche Autonomie von Nutzen für die Gesellschaft?Die Arbeit von Richard A. Brand eröffnet einerseits lebendige Einblicke in die Praxis öffentlicher Soziologie: Im November 2018 versammelten sich über 100 Personen im Theaterhaus Jena beim sogenannten ‚DialogForum‘. Diese ve...