Sociology as a Vocation and a Collective Enterprise: Remembering Michael Burawoy

Michael Burawoy has been one of the most influential contemporary sociologists. The author of a scholarly output developed over fifty years, Burawoy innovated in ways of theorizing, field research methods, and tackling the most varied objects of study: forms of consensus in labor processes, class and race relations, major political-economic transitions, and finally modes of knowledge production. This essay is both a tribute to his great scientific testimony and an essential portrait of his sociological style, which conceives scientific work as an authentic Weberian public vocation, strongly linked to reflexivity and pluralism in the way of theorizing, capable of revising its paradigms thanks to comparative empirical research in time and space. A scientific and critical enterprise that is capable of being global, enriched by a diversity of contexts and by dialogue with critiques, a sociology that, in order to account for the complexity of the real, has proposed itself on many occasions as a collective work.