In this follow-up to the highly successful _Ethnography Unbound,_ Michael Burawoy and nine colleagues break the bounds of conventional sociology, to explore the mutual shaping of local struggles and global forces. In contrast to the lofty debates between radical theorists, these nine studies excavate the dynamics and histories of globalization by extending out from the concrete, everyday world. The authors were participant observers in diverse struggles over extending citizenship, medicalizing breast cancer, dumping toxic waste, privatizing nursing homes, the degradation of (...) work, the withdrawal of welfare rights, and the elaboration of body politics. From their insider vantage points, they show how groups negotiate, circumvent, challenge, and even re-create the complex global web that entangles them. Traversing continents and extending over three years, this collaborative research developed its own distinctive method of "grounded globalization" to grasp the evaporation of traditional workplaces, the dissolution of enclaved communities, and the fluidity of identities. Forged between the local and global, these compelling essays make a powerful case for ethnography's insight into global dynamics. (shrink)

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 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. (shrink)

Intended to capture the entangled history of Marxism, Alvin Gouldner’s two Marxisms also frame the intellectual biography of Erik Olin Wright. In the 1970s Wright’s Scientific and Critical Marxisms were joined, but later they came apart as each developed its own autonomous trajectory. Erik’s Scientific Marxism was the program of class analysis that first brought him international fame. Begun in graduate school, it tailed off in the last two decades of his life, when it played second fiddle to the Critical (...) Marxism of the Real Utopias Project that Erik began in the early 1990s. (shrink)

This text was originally published in Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar, Marxisms in the 21st. Century, Johannesburg, South Africa, Wits University Press, 2013, p. 34-52. We would like to thank Michael Burawoy for allowing us to publish it on RHUTHMOS. What should we do with Marxism ? For most the answer is simple. Bury it ! Mainstream social science has long since bid farewell to Marxism. Talcott Parsons (1967 : 135) dismissed Marxism as a theory whose significance was entirely (...) (...) - Économie et Marxisme – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Matthew Desmond’s “Relational ethnography,” is a manifesto for a relational turn in ethnography, liberating it from the “substantialism” of bounded places, processed people and group culture. Substantialism, however, proves to be a largely mythical category that obscures two types of relational ethnography: Desmond’s empiricist transactional ethnography and an alternative, theoretically driven structural ethnography. Drawing on Desmond’s own ethnographies, On the Fireline and Evicted, I explore the limitations of his transactional ethnography—a “spontaneous sociology” that rejects the theoretical engagement and comparative logic. (...) I elaborate and illustrate structural ethnography, drawing out the implications for public and policy sociology. (shrink)

This paper was presented to the Scientific Council of Attac, Paris, September 18, 2014. It derives immediately from a talk of the same title given at the Forum of the International Sociological Association in Buenos Aires, August 1, 2012. Many of the ideas in this paper were developed in dialogue with graduate students in the sociology department at Berkeley – Marcel Paret, Adam Reich, Mike Levien, Julia Chuang, Herbert Docena, Andrew Jaeger, Zach Levenson, Gabe Hetland and Alex Barnard. - Économie (...) et Marxisme – Nouvel article. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic domination as based on misrecognition and compare it with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony based on consent. Drawing on research in workplaces in the US and Hungary I show how both theories are flawed. Gramsci does not appreciate the importance of mystification as a foundation for stable hegemony in advanced capitalism while Bourdieu’s notion of misrecognition, based on the notion of habitus, is too deep to comprehend the fragility of state socialist regimes. (...) Comparative analysis, I argue, calls for a framework of domination that depends on a conception of homo ludens rather than homo habitus. (shrink)

Article de Michael Burawoy « The Future of Sociology » publié dans Brym R. (ed.), New Society, 7th Edition, Scarborough, Nelson Education, 2014, traduit par Carolyne Grimard et Marc-Henry Soulet. Cette traduction a déjà paru dans SociologieS, accompagnée d'une introduction par Marc-Henry Soulet accessible ici. Nous remercions Michael Burawoy et la revue SociologieS de nous avoir autorisé à la reproduire ici. La marchandisation du monde Une vague de marchandisation déferle sur le monde. Des (...) - Sociologie – Nouvel article.

Prologue: Encountering Bourdieu -- Sociology is a combat sport: from Parsons to Bourdieu -- The poverty of philosophy: Marx meets Bourdieu -- Cultural domination: Gramsci meets Bourdieu -- Colonialism and revolution: Fanon meets Bourdieu -- Pedagogy of the oppressed: Freire meets Bourdieu -- The antinomies of feminism: Beauvoir meets Bourdieu -- The sociological imagination: Mills meets Bourdieu -- The twofold truth of labor: Burawoy meets Bourdieu -- The weight of the world: Bourdieu meets Bourdieu -- Conclusion: the limits of symbolic (...) violence. (shrink)