Michael Burawoy (1947-2025): A scholar committed to taking sociology to the public

When Michael Burawoy was doing his doctorate at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, he spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory, attempting to understand why workers work as hard as they do and why they routinely consent to their own exploitation, even with knowledge of this fact.

The book that resulted from his doctoral dissertation, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1979), became a basic text in industrial and labour studies. He later worked as a furnaceman at the Lenin Steel Works in Hungary and also in a rubber factory in Russia.

The Marxist sociologist, who wrote incisively about the way in which capital-labour relations played out in practice in industrial workplaces from a wide range of global contexts, was killed in a hit-and-run incident in Oakland in the US on February 4.

With his passing, the world of industrial and labour studies has lost a towering thinker, an empathetic teacher and someone who was firmly committed to the politics of resistance in the academic world as well as outside. Most recently, he was actively involved with the student protests against the genocide in Gaza at UC Berkeley, from where he retired in after an illustrious career...

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