CLaSP invites you to a conversation titled ‘Living theory’: Remembering Burawoy in the memory of Michael Burawoy.

Speakers: Chris McLachlan (QMUL), Liam Campling (QMUL) and Shray Mehta (Northumbria University).

Michael Burawoy was tragically killed in a hit and run near his home in Oakland, California, USA on 3rd February 2025. His death shocked the academy, and the world over. He was a leading international sociologist in the Marxist tradition, though his work extended to many adjacent disciplines including industrial relations, political economy and global development. The influence of his contributions to these fields of study are timeless, the relevance of which have endured and cannot be understated: his death is a great loss.  

CLaSP is hosting this event to honour the work of Michael Burawoy. For CLaSP, Burawoy has been influential in developing research projects around labour regimes, worker power, class and the ethnographic method. His work was also essentially international in its character, with his studies on labour regimes spanning an analysis of workplaces in the United States, Hungary, Russia and Zambia. These analyses were not only limited to theoretical advancement, but drew on his own experiences as a worker at such factories through his extended case method. In particular, his landmark works of Manufacturing Consent and The Politics of Production were critical to his broader research programme that centred the micro-processes of the workplace as the mechanism through which surplus value was ‘secured and obscured’ under capitalism. For Burawoy, it was these relations in production, rather than of production, that conditioned workers’ subjective experiences of the labour process. Burawoy was also notable for his Public Sociology (heading the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association), compelling sociologists and academics more broadly to engage in wider dialogues around social justice and global inequality: his committment to sociology as a moral and political project always sought to extend solidarity to those most affected by exploitation. 

This event kicks off with three speakers discussing the influence of Burawoy in their own work, before moving to a wider discussion on his ongoing legacy.

Speaker bios: Chris McLachlan is Senior Lecturer in HRM at the School of Business and Management at QMUL, Liam Campling is Professor of International Business and Development at the School of Business and Management at QMUL, and Shray Mehta is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, Faculty of Society and Culture at Northumbria University.