The “bloody brilliant” sociologist’s unfinalized heresy

Resolving Michael Burawoy’s tensions to reconstruct the social sciences

Abstract

Through workplace ethnographies on three continents, as well as methodological and theoretical interventions, Burawoy transformed the social sciences. In his last years, he wrote extensively on race and colonialism. He also encouraged his students to apply the lessons of his earlier work to labor in education. These strands of his scholarship sat uneasily alongside one another, and he did not develop an explicit framework to resolve the apparent contradictions between, and within, them. The unfinalized tensions in Burawoy’s late work lay the groundwork for a reconstructed scientific practice.

https://doi.org/10.21747/08723419/soc53a1