Michael Burawoy – författare

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.

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.

This collection exemplifies the resurgence of Marxist ideas in contemporary social research. Its purpose is neither to cover all the areas of Marxist research nor to survey alternative Marxist perspectives or schools. Rather the volume assembles nine examples of the most interesting work being done today by younger sociologists who are seriously pursuing the rich and provocative arguments to be found in the ongoing Marxist tradition. All contributions build upon or react to Marxist theoretical perspectives. They employ such diverse research techniques as participant observation, statistical analysis, interviewing, and the examination of archives of public documents. Among the topics covered:– the economic bases of state policies and their determination by social and political struggles;–  the politcal reshaping of international economic order;– industrial work in relation to other institutions (such as education, patriarchy, and citizenship);– the transformation of class structures in capitalist and state-socialist societies.Published as a supplement to American Journal of Sociology, these studies constitute essential reading both for those sociologists who see Marxism as a powerful framework for understanding capitalist societies and for those who may not be committed to working within the Marxist tradition but nevertheless want to see Marxist hypotheses fully researched and debated.

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

In this powerful volume, ten original ethnographies explore two important issues: the ways in which people confront the threats and disruptions of contemporary life, and the ways in which researchers can most effectively study the modern metropolis. With its twofold agenda, the volume emerges as a multi-layered dialogue between researcher and researched, participant and observer, educator and educated. These essays, produced in a refreshing collaborative effort by a senior scholar and ten graduate students, examine many facets of American urban life, among them new social movements that mobilize and work on behalf of people with AIDS and that fight against nuclear war; the decisive roles South East Asian women play in building new immigrant communities; and school programs for African-American children. Ethnography Unbound also explores the value of participant observation and the extended case method in social research, underlining how these methodological approaches deepen and enrich scholarship in the social sciences. The book poses theoretical and methodological questions in an open and lucid manner, prodding a rethinking of ethnographic research.Scholars and students alike will find it an essential text for the study of methodology and contemporary American life.

In this follow-up to the highly successful "Ethnography Unbound", Michael Burawoy and nine colleagues break the bounds of conventional sociology, to explore the mutual shaping of local struggles and global forces. In contrast to the lofty debates between radical theorists, these nine studies excavate the dynamics and histories of globalization by extending out from the concrete, everyday world. The authors were participant observers in diverse struggles over extending citizenship, medicalizing breast cancer, dumping toxic waste, privatizing nursing homes, the degradation of work, the withdrawal of welfare rights, and the elaboration of body politics. From their insider vantage points, they show how groups negotiate, circumvent, challenge, and even re-create the complex global web that entangles them. Traversing continents and extending over three years, this collaborative research developed its own distinctive method of 'grounded globalization' to grasp the evaporation of traditional workplaces, the dissolution of enclaved communities, and the fluidity of identities.Forged between the local and global, these compelling essays make a powerful case for ethnography's insight into global dynamics.

In this remarkable collection of essays, Michael Burawoy develops the extended case method by connecting his own experiences among workers of the world to the great transformations of the twentieth century - the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the reconstruction of U.S. capitalism, and the African transition to post-colonialism in Zambia. Burawoy's odyssey began in 1968 in the Zambian copper mines and proceeded to Chicago's South Side, where he worked as a machine operator and enjoyed a unique perspective on the stability of advanced capitalism.In the 1980s, this perspective was deepened by contrast with his work in diverse Hungarian factories. Surprised by the collapse of socialism in Hungary in 1989, he journeyed in 1991 to the Soviet Union, which by the end of the year had unexpectedly dissolved. He then spent the next decade studying how the working class survived the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet economy. These essays, presented with a perspective that has benefited from time and rich experience, offer ethnographers a theory and a method for developing novel understandings of epochal change.

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, and political science to reveal the complex relationships that still exist between the former socialist world and the world today. Through evocative ethnographic research and writing, they bring to light the unintended consequences of change and show how the "slates" of the past enter the present not as legacies—but as novel adaptations. Often what appear as "restorations" of patterns familiar from socialism are something quite different: direct responses to the new market initiatives. By showing the unexpected ways in which these new patterns are emerging, this book charts a new and important course for the study of post-socialist transition.

Most writing on the dramatic events in the former Soviet Union has been based on the assumption that Russia is engaged in a transition from "state socialism" to capitalism, and focuses on political and ideological debates formulated in these terms.This book questions whether Russia is in transition to capitalism and looks behind the political and ideological debates to focus on the development of the social relations of production, and on the class struggles to which these give rise. Simon Clarke introduces the book with an examination of the crisis of state socialism, in order to identify the dynamic of change in contemporary Russia. Michael Burawoy and Pavel Krotov develop a detailed case study of one Russian enterprise, which is followed by an analysis of the role of the trade unions in the Soviet system by Simon Clarke and Peter Fairbrother, on the basis of which they develop an analytical account of the development of the workers' movement in Russia since 1987. Simon Clarke concludes the book with a detailed examination of struggles around privatization.The common conclusion is that beneath the political turmoil the dominant class has renewed and restructured itself, but has not managed to overcome the challenge presented by the working class. The fragmentation and atomization of the working class remains a problem, but the struggle over the transformation of class relations is only just beginning.

In the wide ranging arguments about the fundamental tenets of Marxism nothing has had greater political significance than the theoretical questioning of the central role assigned to class struggle in the process of social transformation.The Politics of Production demonstrates, brilliantly, the pivotal importance of working class struggles through a rejection of both economistic conceptions of class and notions of the working class as innately revolutionary. This opens the way for an investigation of the political conditions in production that shape the character of working class action. Burawoy theorizes political regimes within production and the way they relate to state politics and then uses this framework to make a comparative analysis of factory regimes under capitalism and socialism.

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 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 graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline – it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.

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 graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline – it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.

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 manufacturing industry. In an introductory chapter Webster points out that most studies of the labour process have neglected worker resistance. He challenges Braverman depiction of mass production as a juggernaut which inherently imposes progressively tighter controls on workers, and points to two forms of worker resistance which have been important in the history of South Africa foundries.Discussing the first of these in Part I, he shows how resistance to deskilling on the part of white craft moulders gave rise to a distinctive racial hierarchy of control in the foundries. Using race as a last line of defence against machinofacture assault on their craft privileges, the white moulders effectively became supervisors of semi-skilled black labour;The collapse of this form of control was precipitated by the rise, in a South African foundry context, of the second form of resistance ; increasingly confident bargaining by black semi-skilled workers in the wake of mechanization and the emergence of independent black unions. This is the focus of Parts II and III of the book. The onset of popular struggle in the townships from 1976 onwards forced the state, through a process that began with the Wiehahn and Riekert commissions, to embark on an attempt to incorporate black unions in a deracialized industrial relations system. Webster analyzes the interplay between the transformation of the labour process and the crisis in the system of racial capitalism as a whole to show how worker organizations, in resisting the state incorporative strategy, have begun to develop a working class.

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

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 first comprehensive attempt at a critical engagement with Bourdieu's theory as a totality. Michael Burawoy constructs a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and his nemesis – Marxism – from which he silently borrowed so much. Starting with Marx, and proceeding through Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, de Beauvoir, and Mills, Burawoy takes up the challenge Bourdieu presents to Marxism, simultaneously developing a critique of Bourdieu and a reconstruction of Marxism. Karl Von Holdt, in turn, brings these conversations to South Africa, showing the relevance of Bourdieu's ideas to a country he never visited. Armed with Bourdieu, Von Holdt takes up some of the most pressing social and political issues of contemporary South Africa: the relation between symbolic and real violence, the place of intellectuals in public life, the intervention of gender in politics, the grappling with race, the critique of education, the importance of habitus, the history and future of class mobilisation, and the legacy of the liberation struggle. Conversations with Bourdieu pioneers a distinctive approach to doing social theory that is neither a combat sport nor an artificial synthesis, but a way of pushing theory to its limits through dialogue – dialogue between theorists and dialogue between theory and the world it represents. The book is distinctive too in pointing towards a new global sociology consciously rooted in a dialogue between the social realities and theoretical perspectives of North and South. The conversations were first presented as Mellon Lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2010