Sujata Patel 
Michael Burawoy passed away in a hit-and-run accident at his home town Oakland late in the evening of February 3, 2025. Known for his kindness and compassion, his charisma and magnetic appeal, passion and commitment, his students and his colleagues across the world are mourning his sudden and untimely death.
Though located at Berkeley in the US, where he taught sociology for 47 years, he was one of the most recognised global sociologists. He was a well-known Marxist scholar with path-breaking work on labour, founded on deep ethnographic immersion in factory sites in different parts of the world. In recent years, he was known for promoting a new agenda for sociology. Sociology for him was an engaged social science that assessed and evaluated inequalities, marginalisation and exclusions. Burawoy used his intellectual energy to demand that we, as sociologists, connect with society’s deprived and its rejects to reframe and rethink the field and its practices, and thereby query not only the discipline but also the embedded power structuring society.
Burawoy wanted sociology to turn itself around – from merely providing facts and abstractions, and discussing ideas and theories within academia’s self-defined cloisters of excellence – to enmesh itself within the lives of those who work, labour and struggle to survive. For him, sociology was not only a scientific project but also a political project. As a scientific discipline, the goal of sociology is to provide analytical and empirical analyses of the world. As a political project, the aim is to challenge the orthodoxies organising society and critique the rhetoric of power and authority.
Burawoy initiated the debate about sociology’s relevance by asking two fundamental questions: what is knowledge for, and for whom is it designed. On this basis he suggested that we can divide the field of sociology into four parts: professional sociology (scholars who restrict themselves to the mainstream institutionalised professional knowledge and its concerns); policy sociology (scholars who aid public and private institutions to craft policies); reflexive sociology (scholars who critically dissect and reformulate the field’s concepts and theories); and public sociology (scholars who connect to the various publics outside the academy in order to change their conditions of living and make them agents of their own change).
While intervening in the field as a reflexive sociologist, he also identified as a public sociologist. As a reflexive sociologist his scholarship is available in peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and books. These promoted the scientificity of his project, as well his hope that his interventions would help to move professional sociology towards public sociology as well.
As a public sociologist, he wrote short notes and small reflexive pieces (and increasingly, lectures on YouTube) as popular interventions on the conflicts in the world that we live in. He made the classroom the site for expanding this project, while also participating in protests and demonstrations, in strikes and lockouts, in dissenting campaigns and rallies, and in social movements. In addition, he took up leadership roles in sociological associations and was the president of the American (2003-2005) and later of the International Sociological Association (2010-2014). Global Dialogue, the magazine of the International Sociological Association available in more than 12 languages, was his project to bring sociology to diverse reading publics and in turn bring their concerns to sociology.
For Indian sociologists, Burawoy’s work is relevant at two levels. Mainstream Indian sociology is still steeped in social anthropological methodologies and techniques, and teaches students to use ethnography and fieldwork to do research. However, this method is particularistic and makes it non-generalisable – that is the case can only make a judgement of that particular case. Ethnography was also Burawoy’s building block for his research. However, he converted this classic late 19th-century fieldwork method into a sociological methodology that eschewed the particular and the local, and promoted an assessment of the micro as being located within the meso and the macro. He called this the extended case-study method which brings theory to bear to the particular case and makes it ask complex macro-level questions that need to be examined, making the world the site for doing fieldwork. He also argued that there should be intersubjective conversations between the sociologist and those who are being studied, creating the conditions for an exchange of knowledge and perspectives and thus making sociology participative in the fullest meaning of this word whilst simultaneously eschewing objectification and instrumentalisation of the groups being studied.
The second point of significance for Indian sociologists is Burawoy’s assertion that the project of public sociology is a global project because without changing the scaffoldings that structure the discipline globally, sociology cannot remake itself. This contention was based on an understanding of the discipline’s history – of its institutionalisation in the late 19th century as part of a long-term colonial project. Thus, if the local, regional and national is important, it has to be placed within the larger political economy of global capitalist processes.
In the current times defined by regional conflicts, rightist populisms and wars, together with a revival of aggressive imperialism, Burawoy’s ideas, thoughts and intellectual interventions will be sorely missed.
Sujata Patel is former President of the Indian Sociological Society and former Vice President of the International Sociological Association.