By Monica Friedlander
Berkeley sociology professor Michael Burawoy, a leading proponent of public sociology, renowned author, and a participant observer of industrial workplaces in countries around the world, has been elected president of the International Sociological Association (ISA), a professional organization with members in 167 countries. Burawoy believes that his discipline needs to engage audiences that transcend the academic world to encourage debates in the public, social and political domains.
“It is a great honor to be elected President of the International Sociological Association,” Burawoy says. “We are living in an age when markets and states are creating ever more havoc in our world, so that sociology, rooted as it is in the standpoint of civil society, is an important bastion of resistance. My aim is to take up the challenge of strengthening the global role of sociology. With its global connections, Berkeley is especially well placed to participate in meeting this challenge.”
Burawoy is a past president of the American Sociological Association and, since 2006, has served as vice-president of the ISA’s Committee of National Associations. He is known for having personally observed industrial workplaces in such different societies as Russia, Zambia, the United States, and Hungary.
“This is a wonderful distinction, not only for Michael Buroway, but for his department and for the campus as a whole,” said Carla Hesse, dean of the Social Sciences Division. “Professionally, his election is significant worldwide as it signals that the intellectual direction of the largest professional association in sociology will be guided by the kind of leadership Buroway has offered the discipline, and especially the field of global sociology, over the past decades. We are immensely privileged to have him on our faculty.”
In his election speech to the ISA, Burawoy said that his goal in his new leadership capacity is to use sociology as a defense against crises of the 21st century, such as ascendant privatization and maketization, and to forge an active global sociological community. He also plans to make more creative use of the electronic media to promote the agenda of the ISA and build a more inclusive and interactive membership.
Born in England, Burawoy graduated in 1968 from the University of Cambridge with a degree in mathematics before pursuing post-graduate studies in Zambia. He earned his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, the result of Burawoy's ethnographic research and analysis of Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process, became the basis of his most famous book, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism.
For an academic, Burawoy chose a most unorthodox path to his research. “The dream of my life was to get a job in a steel mill in a socialist country,” he once said. “I think I’m the only person in the world who’s had that dream.” In 1985 he fulfilled his dream when he worked in Hungary’s Lenin Steel Works. Prior to that he had worked for 10 months as a machine operator in a South Chicago engine shop and as a personnel officer in Zambian copper mines.
More recently Burawoy has shifted his professional focus to the academic workplace, exploring ways in which sociology is taught and applied to the public domain. In his acclaimed presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 2004 he divided sociology into four separate categories: public sociology, policy sociology, professional sociology, and critical sociology.
His overarching goal now, as president of the ISA, is to “bridge the many geopolitical divides and build a global community of sociologists,” Burawoy said in his recent speech to the association. “Sociology — the best sociology — matters, not just for us but for others, too. The world needs sociology, a global sociology attentive to global issues.”
