Michael Burawoy has helped to reshape the theory and practice of sociology across the Western world. Public Sociology is his most thoroughgoing attempt to explore what a truly committed, engaged sociology should look like in the twenty-first century.
Burawoy looks back on the defining moments of his intellectual journey, exploring his pivotal early experiences as a researcher, such as his fieldwork in a Zambian copper mine and a Chicago factory. He recounts his time as a graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline - it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.
Table of Contents
List of TablesPreface
Introduction - The Promise of Sociology
Part One: Theory and Practice
1. Theory: Utopia and Anti-Utopia
2. Practice: The (Di)vision of Sociological Labor
Part Two: Policy Sociology
3. The Language Question in University Education
4. Job Evaluation in a Racial Order
Part Three: Public Sociology
5. The Color of Class
6. Student Rebellion
Part Four: Critical Sociology
7. Race, Class and Colonialism
8. Migrant Labor and the State
9. Manufacturing Consent
10. Racial Capitalism
Part Five: Professional Sociology
11. Advancing a Research Program
12. Painting Socialism
13. The Great Involution
Part Six: Real Utopias
14. Third-Wave Marketization
15. Whither the Public University?
16. Living Theory
Conclusion: Biography Meets History
Notes
References
Index
