Burawoy joined the Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley in 1976 as an assistant professor.[10]
He served as Chair of the Department of Sociology for 1996-98, and 2000-02.[7]
Aside from Burawoy's sociological study of the industrial workplace in Zambia, Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in
Chicago,
Hungary, and post-Soviet
Russia.[10] His method of choice is usually
participant observation, more specifically
ethnography.[17] He has further expanded the
extended case method.[10] For his book The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism (1992) he worked as a furnace operator in a Hungarian steel plant.[13] Based on his studies of the workplace he has looked into the nature of
postcolonialism, the organization of
state socialism, and the problems in the transition from
socialism.[10]
In more recent times, Burawoy has moved away from observing factories to looking at his own place of work—the university—to consider the way sociology is taught to students and how it is put into the public domain. His work on
public sociology is most prominently shown in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 2004, where he divides sociology into four separate (yet overlapping) categories: public sociology,
policy sociology (which has an extra-academic audience), professional sociology (which addresses an academic audience familiar with theoretical and methodological frameworks common to the discipline of sociology), and lastly
critical sociology which, like public sociology, produces reflexive knowledge but which is only available to an academic audience, like professional sociology.[14]
Selected works
Books
Author (or co-author)
The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972
The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism. London: Verso, 1985
The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (With
János Lukács)
The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition (University of California Press), 2009
Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu (Duke University Press), 2019
Collaborative and edited books
Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class and States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Supplement to the American Journal of Sociology. Edited with
Theda Skocpol, 1983
Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 (With ten coauthors)
Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the PostSocialist World. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Edited with
Katherine Verdery, 1998
От Деревянного Парижа к Панельной Орбите: Модель жилищных классов Сыктывкара. (From Timbered Paris to Concrete Orbita: The Structure of Housing Classes in Syktyvkar). Syktyvkar: Institute of Regional Social Research of Komi, 1999 (With
Pavel Krotov and
Tatyana Lytkina)
Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 (With nine coauthors)
Articles
"Dwelling in Capitalism, Traveling Through Socialism", pp. 21–44 in Baldoz et al. (editors), The Critical Study of Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press.)
"The Critical Turn to Public Sociology", pp. 309–322 in
Rhonda Levine (ed.), Enriching the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline, New York, 2004
"Antinomian Marxist", pp. 48–71 in Alan Sica and Stephen Turner (eds.), The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2005
"Provincializing the Social Sciences", pp. 508–525 in George Steinmetz (editor), The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others (Durhman, NC: Duke University Press), 2005
"Private Troubles and Public Issues", pp. 125–133 in
Andrew Barlow (editor), Collaborations for Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), 2007
^Milkman, Ruth (31 August 1981). The Reproduction of Job Segregation by Sex: A Study of the Changing Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto and Electrical Manufacturing Industries in the 1940s (PhD thesis). University of California-Berkeley.
OCLC223010952.
ProQuest303132873.
^Sherman, Rachel Ellen (August 2003). Class Acts: Producing and Consuming Luxury Service in Hotels (PhD thesis). University of California-Berkeley.
OCLC57586295.
ProQuest305343424.
^"ISA Presidents". International Sociological Association. Retrieved 25 July 2012.
^See his collaborative work on: Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).