Michael Burawoy

Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism

Manufacturing Consent

Gay Seidman

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 preoccupations with analytical Marxism and the transformation of capitalist societies. The result is a beautiful book that glows with intelligence, optimism, and love." FRANCES FOX PIVEN - "Erik Wright succumbed to cancer while he was advancing a decades-long project of envisioning real utopias-designs for a workable socialism. The essays in this superb volume recount this monumental undertaking and also advance it in significant ways." VIVEK CHIBBER - "Erik Olin Wright devoted his brilliant mind to the challenging task of rethinking and reimagining socialism after the fall of the Soviet Union and China's turn towards full-blown capitalism. In this tribute to his work, progressive intellectuals and activists bring forward and deepen Wright's trail-blazing Real Utopias Project amidst the current deep crisis of capitalism." WALDEN BELLO - "These rich and compelling essays testify to the power and actuality of Erik Olin Wright's thought, as well as to his dialogism, mentorship, and influence. A terrific read and a fitting tribute to a brilliant scholar and beloved comrade." NANCY FRASER

Between Class Analysis and Real Utopias

Engaging Erik Olin Wright

A collection of essays exploring emancipatory social science, inspired by the work of pioneering sociologist Erik Olin Wright Erik Olin Wright was one of the most brilliant and world renowned social scientists of our era. He left us in 2019 with an unfinished project - the articulation of class and utopia. Wright's sociological Marxism embarked from an original class analysis, with its trade-mark contradictory class locations, that empirically mapped class structures across the globe. In response to the collapse of communism and the rise of neoliberalism, Wright turned to the premise of class analysis, that is the possibility of socialism. Forsaking Marxism's allergy to utopian thinking, Wright searched the planet for institutions that might sow the seeds of socialism – such as cooperatives, participatory budgeting, basic income grants – institutions that might dissolve racial, gender, and class inequalities by eroding capitalism. His last book How to be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, published posthumously in over a dozen languages has become a manifesto for a new world, bringing together and inspiring social movement activists. The essays in this volume pay tribute to his generative theory, his crystalline teaching and his personal warmth. The authors – all close colleagues or former students – wrestle with the relationship between his two expanding research programs, class analysis and real utopias. They burn the candle from either end, all galvanized by Wright's genius and vision to reinvent Marxism.

Christopher J. Schneider

Ariane Hanemaayer

In 2004, Michael Burawoy challenged sociologists to move beyond the ivory tower and into the realm of activism, to engage in public discourses about what society could or should be. His call to arms sparked debate among sociologists. Which side would sociologists take? Would "public sociology" speak for all sociologists? In this volume, leading Canadian experts continue the debate by discussing their discipline's mission and practice and the role that ethics plays in research, theory, and teaching. In doing so, they offer insights as to where their discipline is heading and why it matters to people inside and outside the university.

Ethics and Engagement

The Public Sociology Debate

Simon Clarke

Peter Fairbrother

Pavel Krotov

Questioning the common belief that Russia is in transition to capitalism, this book looks behind the political and ideological debates to focus on the development of the real lives of the workers. It includes an analysis of the role of trade unions in the former Soviet system.

Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia

What about the Workers?

János Lukács

Communism, once heralded as the "radiant future" of all humanity, has now become part of Eastern Europe's past. What does the record say about the legacy of communism as an organizational system? Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs consider this question from the standpoint of the Hungarian working class. Between 1983 and 1990 the authors carried out intensive studies in two core Hungarian industries, machine building and steel production, to produce the first extended participant-observation study of work and politics in state socialism. "A fascinating and engagingly written eyewitness report on proletarian life in the waning years of goulash communism. . . . A richly rewarding book, one that should interest political scientists in a variety of subfields, from area specialists and comparativists to political economists, as well as those interested in Marxist and post-Marxist theory."—Elizabeth Kiss, American Political Science Review "A very rich book. . . . It does not merely offer another theory of transition, but also presents a clear interpretive scheme, combined with sociological theory and vivid ethnographic description."—Ireneusz Bialecki, Contemporary Sociology "Its informed skepticism of post-Communist liberal euphoria, its concern for workers, and its fine ethnographic details make this work valuable."—"àkos Róna-Tas, American Journal of Sociology

Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism

The Radiant Past

Douglas L. Anderton

Naomi Gerstel

Dan Clawson

Joya Misra

Robert Zussman

Randall Stokes

Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-first Century

Public Sociology

"At last world.com meets ethnography.eudora. This book shows how ethnography can have a global reach and a global relevance, its humanistic and direct methods actually made more not less relevant by recent developments in global culture and economy. Globalisation is not a singular, unilinear process, fatalistically unfolding towards inevitable ends: it entails gaps, contradictions, counter-tendencies, and marked unevenness. And just as capital flows more freely around the globe, so do human ideas and imaginings, glimpses of other possible futures. These elements all interact in really existing sites, situations and localities, not in outer space or near-earth orbit. Unprefigurably, they are taken up into all kinds of local meanings-makings by active humans struggling and creating with conditions on the ground, so producing new kinds of meanings and identities, themselves up for export on the world market. This book, conceptually rich, empirically concrete, shows how global neo-liberalism spawns a grounded globalisation, ethnographically observable, out of which is emerging the mosaic of a new kind of global civil society. As this book so richly shows, tracing the lineaments of these possibilities and changes is the special province of ethnography."—Paul Willis, author of Learning to Labor and editor of the journal Ethnography "The authors of Global Ethnography bring globalization 'down to earth' and show us how it impacts the everyday lives of Kerala nurses, U.S. homeless recyclers, Irish software programmers, Hungarian welfare recipients, Brazilian feminists, and a host of other protagonists in a global postmodern world. This is superb ethnography -- refreshing and vivid descriptions grounded in historical and social contexts with important theoretical implications."—Louise Lamphere, President of the American Anthropological Association "The global inhabits and constitutes specific structuration of the political, economic, cultural, and subjective. How to study this is a challenge. Global Ethnography makes an enormous contribution to this effort."—Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and Its Discontents "This fascinating volume will quickly find its place in fieldwork courses, but it should also be read by transnationalists and students of the political economy, economic sociologists, methodologists of all stripes--and doubting macrosociologists."—Herbert J. Gans, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University "Not only matches the originality and quality of Ethnography Unbound, but raises the ante by literally expanding the methodological and analytical repertory of ethnographic sociology to address the theoretical and logistical challenges of a globalized discipline and social world."—Judith Stacey, author of In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age "In the best traditions of radical Berkeley scholarship, Burawoy's collective recaptures the ground(s) of an engaged sociology embedded in the culturalpolitics of the global without losing the ethnographer's magic—the local touch."—Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of Death without Weeping

Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World

Global Ethnography

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 the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.

Alice Burton

Ann Arnett Ferguson

Kathryn J. Fox

"Establishes a new landmark in the study of everyday life in the modern metropolis. This book brilliantly integrates systematic theory and participant observation data. Forms of domination and resistance are poignantly captured in different social settings, and admirably related to economic and political forces. The volume will do more to enhance ethnographic research than any previous study in sociology."—William Julius Wilson, University of Chicago "What is unleashed in Ethnography Unbound is the theoretical and critical potential of exemplary urban fieldwork and pedagogy. This book by Michael Burawoy and his talented students sets an inspirational standard to emulate in the classroom and in the 'field'."—Judith Stacey, author of Brave New Families "Bravo! A book that explodes the barriers that prevent us from seeing, simultaneously, both the social world and our role in its making. The dichotomies of teacher/student, researcher/researched, and theory/data are subjected to a penetrating and refreshing scrutiny in this unique project."—Rick Fantasia, author of Cultures of Solidarity "Burawoy and his colleagues have rediscovered the ancient truth that participant observation is well-suited to understanding the larger society as well as microsocial life. Moreover, they have made that rediscovery superbly. The essays are of high quality and I hope that the book will increase yet further the current interest in participant observation and ethnography."—Herbert J. Gans, author of People, Plans and Policies

Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis

Ethnography Unbound

Katherine Verdery

This collection of ethnographies offers a picture of change in Russia and Eastern Europe. The authors challenge the idea that we can understand this transformation by the predictable models, whether capitalism, post-socialism, modernity, or postmodernity.

Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World

Uncertain Transition

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 divergences between Bourdieu and the work of preeminent Marxist thinkers. Among many topics, Burawoy examines Bourdieu's appropriation and silencing of Beauvoir and her theory of masculine domination; the commonalities as well as differences in Bourdieu's and Fanon's thought on colonialism and revolution; the extent to which Gramsci's theory of hegemony aligns with Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence; and both how Freire and Bourdieu understood education as the site of oppression. In showing how Bourdieu has more in common with these thinkers than Bourdieu himself cared to admit, Burawoy offers a critical assessment of Bourdieu's work that illuminates its paradoxes and reaffirms its significance for the twenty-first century.

Michael Burawoy

Books

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