It’s not easy to find words to say about Michael Burawoy, his passing is still so near, and others who knew him better have already spoken eloquently. We will be remembering him and debating his work for a long time. Let me thank the BJS editors for providing us an occasion for that remembrance in this special issue. 

I first met Michael when I arrived in Berkeley in 1988, I was part of the cohorts who entered the sociology Ph.D. program from the late 80s to the mid-90s. By that time, he had weathered his tenure battle and established a reputation as a dynamic teacher, but I was far from certain that I would work with him, or he with me. I was not an ethnographer, and I was more interested in urban and historical sociology, having worked for a few years for a community organization in Boston before graduate school. I had studied Marxism in college and knew of his research, though, and when I got a chance to join the group of teaching assistants for his legendary two-semester undergraduate course on Marxism and sociological theory, I jumped.

Being in the group was an education in itself, you truly felt like part of a collaborative process. In his lectures, Michael would be riffing like a jazz musician, improvising on his themes in interaction with the class, while we played rhythm in our sections, breaking down the readings and prepping students to participate. You could see his delight when a question or response surprised him, and he welcomed it, like he hadn’t thought about it like that before. He could explain complex and abstract theories so that students could visualize them, and who could forget his diagrams of ideas in boxes with lines connecting them, drawn in chalk on a blackboard in those days, or his use of 2 x 2 tables as heuristic device (a method he so often used in his own theoretical work), juxtaposing concepts and putting Marx in imaginary debate with Durkheim, Weber vs. Lenin, Gramsci vs. Foucault, and other combinations that changed every year he taught the course.

As a graduate teacher, Michael had an eye for recognizing the value of students’ ideas, even if at first, you didn’t always see it yourself. Late one afternoon, I was reading alone in the TA’s office when he walked in to see what’s up. He asked me what I wanted to do for my research, and I told him I was interested in Oakland, well-known as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. I had started to dig into the local history, I said, and I discovered there had been a general strike in the city led by the American Federation of Labor unions in 1946. And as I dug into the background for that, I found that the Ku Klux Klan had been powerful in Oakland in the 1920s. Funny thing, I just mused, three radically different movements in one city, that cut across each other in the course of one person’s lifetime. “Oh, that’s really good,” he said, “that’s a dissertation!” 

Fellow students have told me of similar experiences they had. When he thought you were onto something, his enthusiasm was infectious. “That’s grrreat!” he would say, like Tony the Tiger in the old cereal ads on television. Yet, he could be a demanding interlocutor. I spent years arguing with him about American social movement theory, which I felt I had to use to compare three cases of mobilization in Oakland. Michael would have none of it. It was only later, when I rewrote the dissertation as a book, that I fully understood the real object was the city, and the puzzle was the discontinuity between the movements within it. As an ethnographer, Michael developed the extended case method to rescue his approach from inductivism, ground it in its historical and spatial context, and make it both cognizant of theory and able to advance it through empirical critique. Its relevance, however, should be obvious for all qualitative, case-oriented studies, including historical and comparative sociology: it shows us how to use theory to see cases as junctures of forces or contradictory trends, and to use the analytic leverage of the case to reconstruct theory and historical interpretation.

Even if we didn’t always agree, I admired Michael’s intellectual restlessness, his willingness to challenge himself and his own thinking. Never complacent,  he was always looking several steps ahead, pursuing his scholarly journey as ever unfinished. He could be intensely competitive, anticipating his critics in order to re-frame the debate on his own terms, not to defend himself but to advance the field in fruitful ways, moving from Marx to Gramsci to Lakatos to Polanyi and more recently Du Bois. He reveled in counter-intuitive moves, yet often with genuine humility and an impish grin. Who could have imagined this outsider becoming the chair of the Berkeley department, much less president of the ASA and the ISA? Around the time he was elected ASA president, he described to an interviewer his fish-out-of-water reactions to his industrial shop floor experiences. “It’s good to be humiliated from time to time,” he said, “Getting to know the underside of domination is the first step to change…perhaps all academics should have to do this sort of work” (Byles 2003). 

I came to see Michael as an archetypal émigré intellectual, an itinerant and intrepid spirit who had already traveled across continents before he got to Berkeley. During my time there, he regularly took leave to work in a steel mill in Hungary or a furniture factory near the Russian Arctic Circle. The East Bay was his refuge; he loved the community of his students in Berkeley, living for decades in a modest middle-class apartment above Lake Merritt in Oakland, riding his bicycle to work. Yet he never surrendered his Englishness, his avid fandom for Man United, or his favored idioms. I have no doubt that more than one of his graduate students has felt compelled to ask who Bob is or why he is their uncle. 

In the last few decades, he preached the gospel of public sociology, arguing for the special role of practitioners in our discipline to defend civil society against the predations of the market and the state. Whether one sees the impact of sociologists as an independent vanguard and political class, or attached to larger collective actors or movements, or in the role of bearing witness, in the U.S. we are now all immersed in public sociology whether we like it or not. We face grave and direct threats to the university, academic freedom, and democracy in our country. As Americans, we are not used to such challenges, though they are familiar to scholars in many parts of the world. At this moment, we need Michael more than ever, and he is sorely missed. 

There is, of course, so much more to say. I can’t begin to claim that these few fragments capture who Michael really was, or what he meant for so many people. I only hope they can add to a fuller picture of him, like the way a simple detail can add to a good ethnography or historical narrative. So, Michael, there you have it. Bob’s your uncle. 

References

Byles, Jeff. 2003. “Tales of the Kefir Furnaceman: Michael Burawoy,” ASA Footnotes, 31/7, September-October, p. 1.