Public Sociology. Michael Burawoy

Public Sociology - Michael Burawoy


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– freedom, reason, equality, solidarity. Different sociologists hold different values, but some value or set of values is necessary to stabilize our exploration of the world of which we are a part. This guided exploration, this science, seeks out the forces that obstruct the realization of what we value – forces that are hidden but, all the more certainly, govern our world. If everything were transparent to the actor, then there would be no science. We are in search of the invisible so as to make it visible – and thus more mutable – to ourselves and to others.

      It is not enough to defend values in the abstract. A sociological approach to values is to discover them as embedded in institutions – institutions that incubate values as utopian imaginations that prefigure an alternative world. They might be the workplace free of alienation, the family free of domination, education free of inequality. The external forces we explore are the anti-utopian limits on the realization of those utopias. But these limits are not immoveable. As Max Weber writes in the epigraph to this book – the realization of the possible is through the pursuit of the impossible. Or to put it slightly differently, the pursuit of the impossible shifts the limits of the possible. To expand them we have to identify them and understand them. If we are not careful, however, the pursuit of the impossible can restrict as well expand those limits. Here lies the tragic moment of sociology – the way it maps the unintended consequences of utopian strivings. Without attention to the anti-utopian science, utopian strivings can, indeed, turn into dystopian nightmares.

      The classics are also the founders of sociology because they had to carve out the distinctiveness of sociology as against other disciplines – psychology, economics, philosophy, history, and even theology – while at the same time drawing on them. Over the last century (and this is the subject of the second chapter), sociology has advanced as an academic discipline with its own division of labor, often trying to shed those founders either because they are obstacles to the progress of “value-free” science or because they are mired in the prejudices of their time. The classics are classics, however, because they transcend their time: they speak to the crises we face and are rooted in values we embrace. Their time is still our time.

      Part Three, therefore, recognizes the limits to social change, leading me to public sociology and the hope that stimulating public debate and the exercise of collective rationality could shift those limits. Thus, television and print media disseminated the results of our study of the persistence of the color bar in the Zambian copper mines. Yet dissemination was not enough. Even though the study engendered public debate, the multinational corporation was able to deploy the results in its own interests. Casting one’s findings into the public sphere that is populated by powerful actors can have unexpected and unintended consequences – often unfavorable consequences. Thus, I turned from this traditional, mediated public sociology, to what I call an organic public sociology – an intimate, organic connection between sociologists and their constituency. I worked with students at the University of Zambia to collectively contest government policies. But this, too, was diverted into a losing political battle. In another continent – Latin America – these interventions might be called participant action research, which had its own fateful consequences, including the disappearance of sociology.

      History took an unexpected turn. In 1989, while I was working away in the Lenin Steel Works (LKM), then the biggest and oldest steel mill in Hungary, state socialism crumbled. The democratic socialism I had envisioned from within the furnaces of LKM was never a serious contender; instead state socialism gave way to a destructive capitalism. That transition was not what I had come to Hungary to study. So I migrated to the still-standing high command of state socialism, to become a worker in the Soviet Union. But not for long. It was 1991 and the Soviet Union was itself in flux, about to sink into an extortionate merchant capitalism. From their lofty perch the Western


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