Michael Burawoy

Ethnography unbound : power and resistance in the modern metropolis

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.

Revisits: An outline of a theory of reflexive ethnography

This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit-rare in sociology but common in anthropology-when an ethnographer returns to the site of a previous study. Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed to differences in: (1) the relation of observer to participant, (2) theory brought to the field by the ethnographer, (3) internal processes within the field site itself or (4) forces external to the field site. Focused revisits tend to settle on one or another of these four explanations, giving rise to four types of focused revisits. Using examples, the limits of each type of focused revisit are explored with a view to developing a reflexive ethnography that combines all four approaches. The principles of the focused revisit are then extended to rolling, punctuated, heuristic, archeological, and valedictory revisits. In centering attention on ethnography-as-revisit sociologists directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study-a world that undergoes (real) historical change that can only be grasped using a (constructed) theoretical lens

For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi

The postcommunist age calls for a Sociological Marxism that gives pride of place to society alongside but distinct from state and economy. This Sociological Marxism can be traced to the writings of Gramsci and Polanyi. Hailing from different social worlds and following different Marxist traditions, both converged on a similar critique and transcendence of Classical Marxism. For Gramsci advanced capitalism is marked by the expansion of civil society, which, with the state, acts to stabilize class relations and provide a terrain for challenging capitalism. For Polanyi expansion of the market threatens society, which reacts by (re)constituting itself as active society, thereby harboring the embryo of a democratic socialism. This article appropriates “society” as a Marxist concept and deploys it to interpret the rise and fall of communist orders, the shift from politics of class to politics of recognition, the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism, and the development of an emergent transnationalism.

Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas, and Possibilities

The growing interest in public sociologies marks an increasing gap between the ethos of sociologists and social, political, and economic tendencies in the wider society. Public sociology aims to enrich public debate about moral and political issues by infusing them with sociological theory and research. It has to be distinguished from policy, professional, and critical sociologies. Together these four interdependent sociologies enter into relations of domination and subordination, forming a disciplinary division of labor that varies among academic institutions as well as over time, both within and between nations. Applying the same disciplinary matrix to the other social sciences suggests that sociologys specific contribution lies in its relation to civil society, and, thus, in its defense of human interests against the encroachment of states and markets.

Between the Labor Process and the State: The Changing Face of Factory Regimes Under Advanced Capitalism

The paper develops the concept of politics of production through a double critique: first, of recent literature on the organization of work for ignoring the political and ideological regimes in production; and second, of recent theories of the state for failing to root its interventions in the requirements of capitalist development. The paper distinguishes three types of production politics: despotic, hegemonic, and hegemonic despotic. The focus is on national variations of hegemonic regimes. The empirical basis of the analysis is a comparison of two workshops, one in Manchester, England, and the other in Chicago, with similar work organizations and situated in similar market contexts. State supportfor those not employed and state regulation of factory regimes explain the distinctive production politics not only in Britain and the United States but also in Japan and Sweden. The different national configurations of state intervention are themselves framed by the combined and uneven development of capitalism on a world scale. Finally, consideration is given to the character of the contemporary period, in which there emerges a new form of production politics-hegemonic despotism-founded on the mobility of capital.

The Critical Turn to Public Sociology

Revisiting “radical sociology” of the 1970s one cannot but be struck by its unrepentant academic character, both in its analytic style and its substantive remoteness. It mirrored the world it sought to conquer. For all its radicalism its immediate object was the transformation of sociology not of society. Like those Young Hegelians of whom Marx and Engels spoke so contemptuously we were fighting phrases with phrases, making revolutions with words. Our theoretical obsessions came not from the lived experience or common sense of subaltern classes, but from the contradictions and anomalies of our abstract research programs. The audiences for our reinventions of Marxism, and our earnest diatribes against bourgeois sociology were not agents of history – workers, peasants, minorities – but a narrow body of intellectuals, largely cut off from the world they claimed to represent. The grand exception was feminism of which Catharine MacKinnon (1989: 83) wrote that it was the “first theory to emerge from those whose interests it affirms,” although it too could enter flights of abstract theorizing, even as it demanded connection with experience.

Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia

While much has been written on the unprecedented degeneration of the Russian economy, how people survive or do not survive remains a mystery. A close 5-year tracking of workers from a liquidated furniture enterprise in Northern Russia reveals two types of survival strategy: defensive and entrepreneurial. Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive domestic economy in the face of the collapse of industry and agriculture while entrepreneurial strategies reach into the more dynamic sector of trade and service. In both cases families that manage to spread risks among multiple strategies rather than rely on singular ones do better under Russias precipitous economic involution. By examining the deployment of inherited assets - material, social, skill and citizenship - we see how permutations of Soviet economic strategies are reenacted to survive in the post-Soviet world. Thus, as industry and agriculture have disintegrated, the fulcrum of production and redistribution has moved from factory to household, elevating womens previous role as organizer and executor of the domestic economy. At the same time that men become more marginalized in working class families they have become more dominant within the New Russian Bourgeoisie and the political descendants of the old nomenclatura. Here women are expelled from public decision-making into subordinate, often decorative positions within the household.

The state and economic involution: Russia through a China lens

Abstract Why has the Russian economy declined at the rate the Chinese economy has grown? In China the party-state has made possible the decentralization of property relations and the hardening of budget constraints whereas in Russia the disintegration of the party-state has led to privatization and soft budget constraints. Whereas the former combination entailed accumulation, the latter combination entailed “involution,” that is, an economy that eats away at its own foundations by funnelling resources from production to exchange. Russias involution has proceeded in a combined mode, that is, through a series of phases in which government policies try to rectify the unintended consequences of previous policies. Involution is also uneven as different industries adopt different strategies. Some rapidly exited from the old order and then disintegrated while others voiced their demands to the state and declined more slowly.

Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labor Process: Braverman and Beyond

IT is one of the interesting paradoxes in the history of Marxism, that Marx’s analysis of the labor process, as formulated in Capital, has remained largely unchallenged and undeveloped. Whereas there have been debates over the reproduction schema in volume two of Capital and over the falling rate of profit of volume three, Marxists have taken volume one for granted. Harry Braverman, whose Labor and monopoly Capital reflects and now instigates a resurgence of interest in Marxist theories of the labor process, writes: &dquo;... the extraordinary fact is that Marxists have added little to his body of work in this respect. Neither the changes in productive processes throughout this century of capitalism and monopoly capitalism, nor the changes in the occupational structure of the working population have been subjected to

Neoclassical Sociology: From the End of Communism to the End of Classes1

American sociology marked the triumphalism of the immediate postwar period with its emblematic “end of ideology” thesis. Class struggle for an alternative socialist order was ruled an anachronism because capitalism and liberal democracy could effectively deliver expanded freedoms and improved living standards. America was as good as it gets while “communism” was the despised, totalitarian “other.” Protagonists of the “the end of ideology”—the most famous being Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, and Philip Selznick—had themselves started out as unrepentant socialists in the 1930s. Their drift toward complacency, culminating in 1950s “functionalism,” was itself overtaken by the successor radicalism of the 1960s, a radicalism that pointed to the seamy side of U.S. capitalism and the limits of its “democracy.” This revolt against the end of ideology and its concomitant “anticommunism” inspired such commentators as Ivan Szelenyi and David Stark in the 1970s and 1980s to develop alternative class critiques of actually existing “communism.” They reconceptualized communism in more positive terms as “state socialism,” pointing to its potentialities as well as its limits. Szelenyi came to his (new) class analysis of state socialism by joining critical sociology drawn from the West to the critical theory of the Budapest school, while Stark’s interest