Michael Burawoy

Michael Burawoy is a British-American sociologist known for his ethnographic studies of factory work and for his advocacy of public sociology. In Manufacturing Consent (1979), based on his own employment inside a Chicago machine shop, he examined how workers come to actively participate in and even enjoy the games and routines of the labor process on the shop floor, arguing that this participation helps manufacture consent to capitalist production relations in ways that coercion alone cannot explain. As president of the American Sociological Association, Burawoy became a leading advocate for public sociology, urging the discipline to engage directly with publics and social movements outside the academy alongside its professional, critical, and policy roles, a position that shaped an ongoing debate within the discipline about the proper relationship between sociological knowledge and public life.