TYPE
Review
14 February 2024
10.3389/fsoc.2024.1337742
PUBLISHED
DOI
OPEN ACCESS
A bibliometric review study of
Michael Burawoy
EDITED BY
Todd L. Matthews,
Sacred Heart University, United States
Aditya Raj * and Anushka Sinha
REVIEWED BY
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Patna, India
David Craig Griffith,
East Carolina University, United States
Josef Ginnerskov,
Uppsala University, Sweden
*CORRESPONDENCE
Aditya Raj
aditya.raj@iitp.ac.in
RECEIVED 13
November 2023
January 2024
PUBLISHED 14 February 2024
ACCEPTED 18
CITATION
Raj A and Sinha A (2024) A bibliometric review
study of Michael Burawoy.
Front. Sociol. 9:1337742.
doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1337742
COPYRIGHT
© 2024 Raj and Sinha. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License
(CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction
in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) and the copyright owner(s)
are credited and that the original publication
in this journal is cited, in accordance with
accepted academic practice. No use,
distribution or reproduction is permitted
which does not comply with these terms.
This review article utilizes the technique of citation-based bibliometric analysis
to provide a comprehensive understanding of the scholarly contributions
made by sociologist Michael Burawoy. The most influential academic articles
published by Burawoy were retrieved for analyses. Following this, scholars,
journals and institutions that he most frequently collaborated with were
traced. Further, country-wise analysis of his scholarship was carried out. Lastly,
content analyses of retrieved articles identified prominent thematic domains in
sociology to which Burawoy contributed, while temporal analyses helped to
identify some emerging research hotspots. Findings reveal that historical and
cultural context of Burawoy’s research mostly remained confined to the U.S.A.,
however, he significantly contributed towards the foundation of sociology in the
Global South and studied the ensuing global power imbalances. Contemporary
sociological thought remains indebted to Burawoy for his comparative study
of industrial relations in the 21st century, and recently, his elaboration upon the
need for public sociology has taken the discipline in new intellectual directions
that appeals to a broader sociological community.
KEYWORDS
bibliometric review, Michael Burawoy, systematic review, public sociology, Global
South
1 Introduction
Bibliometric analyses is the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books
and other media of communication (Pritchard and Wittig, 1981). Owing to the proliferation
of open access databases and availability of free software for analyses, it has become the central
means for evaluating scholarly publications and their producers. Although bibliometric studies
have been primarily used in natural sciences, recently it has also been used in the broad
category of social sciences, especially in disciplines like linguistics (Sun et al., 2021), economics
(Samudra, 2023), psychology (Dong et al., 2022), and publication media (Petrovich, 2022).
This paper aims to extend this method to the discipline of sociology further by putting the
work of American social theorist and ethnographer Michael Burawoy to bibliometric analyses.
The academic discipline of sociology has addressed issues of labor, racial justice, globalization
and the development of democracy for a long period of time. One salient source of such
scholarship is the extensive work of Burawoy. He developed a strong interest in sociology
during his undergraduate studies in Cambridge, which was taken up more extensively during
his post-graduation at the University of Zambia. After studying the impact of imperialism on
independent Africa, he moved to the United States and enrolled as a doctoral student at the
University of Chicago. Following his Ph.D., Burawoy went on to become Chair of the
department and has also been the president of the American Sociological Association (2004–
2006) as well as the International Sociological Association (2010–2014). Influenced by both
the Chicago and Manchester schools of sociology, Burawoy noted the shift in Chicago working
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classes from neighborhood associations to industry based trade
unions in the 1920s and 30s (Burawoy, 1982). Later, he explored the
shift from despotic to hegemonic control in post-World War II
industrial relations and delved into globalization, examining the
interplay between global imperialism and the global post-modern
(Burawoy et al., 2000a). He has been the recipient of many accolades,
including the lifetime achievement award from the American
Sociological Association.
researchers in sociology to gain better perspective around Burawoy’s
legacy. As such, the bibliometric approach employed in this paper has
aimed to empirically analyze Burawoy’s most influential research
articles, along with the authors and journals he has most frequently
collaborated with. It has also tracked the dissemination of Burawoy’s
scholarship by looking at the country-wise reception of his work.
Further, keywords used frequently by Burawoy in research articles
have been identified and content-analysis of term co-occurrence
across retrieved articles has been done to provide a broad classification
of his most prominent ideas. Thereafter, thematic clusters have been
identified, and finally, temporal growth of research themes in the
given time period has also been tracked.
2 Formulation of the research
problem
While Burawoy’s contributions to sociology cannot be denied, it
is also true that all quarters of the discipline may not necessarily
consider his name when developing a register of prestigious
sociologists in the last few decades (Korom, 2020). The direct
motivation in this paper for selecting Burawoy for bibliometric
analyses was therefore not based on Burawoy’s ubiquitous status as a
canonical sociologist of contemporary times. Rather, it was the view
that his scholarship has produced debates within the discipline, which
continue to find place in indexed publications of influential journals
like American Sociological Review (Burawoy, 2005a) and British
Journal of Sociology (Burawoy, 2005b), among others. This point can
be illustrated further through his arguments in favor of public
sociology, which resonated with many sociologists (Bridger and Alter,
2010; Pathak, 2022), and yet, countless others have been critical of its
formulation (Ericson, 2005; Holmwood, 2007). The contentions
around Burawoy’s scholarship, for instance, can be seen in the
polemical response of Polish sociologist Sztompka, which reflects
broader discussions the two scholars had regarding the application of
sociological knowledge to various contexts (Sztompka and Burawoy,
2011). Sztompka argued that Burawoy’s framework of public sociology
may be well-intentioned and acceptable at the discursive level, but
remains deficient in methodological rigor. He wrote that Burawoy’s
aspiration for an egalitarian, global sociology may have been
misplaced since the very origins of the discipline could be traced to
the domain of science, the nature of which is elitist (Sztompka and
Burawoy, 2011). These intellectual puzzles and contradictions inherent
in Burawoy’s work might therefore be demystified through a fuller
assessment of its structure, influence and visibility. The following aims
guided the bibliometric analyses:
3 Materials and methods
In this study, the Elsevier governed database Scopus was accessed
through institutional credentials of the researchers. There are several
strategic advantages to selecting this database. Scopus has a more
expansive archive compared to Web of Science (WoS) and can boast
of comprising over 23,000 indexed documents (Pranckute, 2021).
Scopus allows for the easy exportation of data to multiple software.
Other databases or publication platforms such as Sage Publications
database had to be excluded from this study because they were not
compatible for exportation to the computer software. Further, the
search process at Scopus is two-fold, a basic search followed by an
advanced search which allows researchers to frame long and complex
string of queries with ease. The Scopus database also allows the
researcher to look up terms in multiple fields such as title, abstract,
keywords, name of the author etc.
The search in this study was conducted by simply including the
word “Burawoy” in the author field. Quotation marks were used for
ease of interpretation by the database. 178 total documents were
retrieved from this initial search after which the documents were
filtered based on (a) full name of the author, (b) language, and (c) type
of document. Documents authored by anyone other than “Burawoy,
M” were excluded from the study at the first stage. Out of the
remaining 105 documents, any document that was written in
languages other than English was excluded at the second stage. English
was chosen because of its international coverage and also because the
researchers had the required level of linguistic competency in it. Out
of the remaining ninety-five documents, all documents other than
full-length research articles were excluded from the search. This was
done to create homogeneity in the type of document reviewed and to
filter out grey literature such as research blogs, interviews and other
modes of informal scholarly communication. Finally, a set of fortyeight research articles were retrieved for full-text review and exported
to the computer software for bibliometric analysis. Exported data
included growth of publications, languages, countries, journals,
citations, funding agencies etc. To analyze the research trends and
content analyses, two tools were utilized- (1) Biblioshiny 2.0, which is
a graphical web interface from Bibliometrix that runs in the
environment of RStudio and (2) VOSviewer 1.16.16, a network
visualization tool. Specifically, Scopus database and Biblioshiny 2.0
was used for three-field plot analyses of sources, authors and
keywords, country-wise scientific production of the author, and the
most cited document of the author. VOSviewer was used for term
co-occurrence analyses for thematic clustering and temporal evolution
of themes in retrieved literature.
1. To visualize the network of productive journals and scholars
who have published with Michael Burawoy.
2. To reveal the countries which have been globally most
influenced by Michael Burawoy’s scholarship and his most
significant publications.
3. To map thematically related publications by Michael Burawoy
and identify the prominent research clusters.
4. To trace the emerging paths in publications made by Michael
Burawoy between 1978 and 2022.
To tackle this objective, a bibliometric approach has been taken.
Specifically, full-length, published, peer-reviewed journal articles
authored by Burawoy in the English language, between the timeperiod of 1978 to 2022 has been retrieved from the Elsevier governed
electronic database Scopus and analysed. Bibliometric analysis has
been used to understand research trends, and this approach can help
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4 Results and discussion based on
bibliometric analyses
seminars, which was later published as an academic paper
(Behbehanian and Burawoy, 2012), brought sociologists from across
the globe into conversation with each other regarding ways to take the
discipline beyond the academy and to the public. Identifying the
journals and co-authors with whom Burawoy has published most
frequently and locating the dominant keywords may serve as a useful
resource for future researchers who may be looking for reference
material for applying and extending Michael Burawoy’s scholarship to
varied contexts.
Following are the results of three-field plot analyses of sources,
authors and keywords, the country-wise scientific production of the
author, and the most cited document of the author. These three
indicators initially draw a clear picture of the scholarly impact of
Burawoy’s published work on the academic community across
the globe.
4.1 Three field plot of sources, authors, and
keywords
4.2 Country-wise journal publications
Based on the search conducted on data retrieved from Scopus
(Table 1), country-wise origin of journals in which Burawoy has
published from 1978 to 2022 has been reflected. Nineteen publications
have been recorded by Burawoy in the United States of America,
seventeen publications have been produced in United Kingdom, and
four publications are to be found in South African region. Further, four
publications in Netherlands and one publication each in Canada,
Germany, Portugal, and Brazil has been recorded. This is interesting
because at first glance, country-wise distribution of Burawoy’s
scholarship depicts that there is a high concentration of research in the
U.S.A, and U.K. However, it also reflects that due to Burawoy’s postgraduate education in Zambia and subsequent fieldwork on race and
class relations in South Africa, the author has a deep and abiding
commitment to the development of sociology in the region. These
findings indicate the global turn in Burawoy’s scholarship, tracing how
he studied the flow of U.S industrial capital from its epicenter to diverse
national terrains, including but not limited to South Africa. In the
context of India, for example, Burawoy (2013) early research on
medium of instruction for university education in the country led to
From the visualization in Figure 1, we can note that Current
Sociology, Politics and Society, American Sociological Review and
Theory and Society emerged as the journals that Burawoy has the most
number of citations in, while topics such as Public Sociology,
Capitalism, and Globalization dominates the research trend.
Thereafter, sociologist Pavel Krotov from the University of WisconsinMadison and Professor Laleh Behbehanian of University of California,
Berkely, emerged as his top collaborators. This result is not surprising
given Burawoy’s long-standing professional association with the
American Sociological Association, which publishes both the journals
Current Sociology and American Sociological Review. It also shows
Burawoy’s early fellowship with Russian sociologist Krotov, who
collaborated with him for developing a case study of the debates
surrounding Russian trade unions at the time of their transition from
state socialism to capitalism (Burawoy and Krotov, 1992). Further, it
is reflective of his prominent alliance later with Behbehanian, with
whom he constructed an experimental program at University of
California, Berkely, titled Global Sociology, Live! The series of
FIGURE 1
Three-field plot showing the top twenty journals that Michael Burawoy has collaborated with (SO), along with the names of his collaborators (AU) and
the corresponding topics that have dominated research trends (DE). Source: Generated by authors from Biblioshiny.
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collaborations with sociologists who continue to take his work forward
by applying his ideas to socio-political issues such as the migrant
workers crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic (Pathak, 2020).
sensitisation, immersion and induction, and theoretical elaboration.
Following this, the second document which has been cited 1,310 times
is Burawoy’s presidential speech at the American Sociological
Association. This was soon published in the journal American
Sociological Review where he talked about public sociology being a
dialogic reaction between the sociologist and other chosen public(s).
Pursuing this line of inquiry further, Burawoy (2005a) reflected on
how the discipline can and must break out of the ivory tower to reach
the non-academic masses.
4.3 Most cited document globally
Figure 2 discusses the top two documents that have been cited the
highest number of times by Burawoy. At the top, with 1,408 citations
is the paper “The Extended Case Method” (ECM) published in the
journal Social Theory in 1998. The ECM is a qualitative research
method that was originally developed by British socio-cultural
anthropologists and later reformulated by Burawoy (1998). It is based
on the idea that social actors are not passive recipients of external
forces but they actively construct their social reality. According to
Burawoy (1998), ECM has three distinct phases-theoretical
5 Results and discussion based on
thematic clustering and temporal
analyses
Retrieved literature was imported to the VOSviewer 1.16.16
software for text mapping and the results have been presented in the
following section. Two types of visualizations were carried out with
the help of the software. Firstly, network visualization was done on the
basis of term co-occurrence to identify the dominant topics that
Burawoy has researched on and to depict the relationship between
these topics. Secondly, overlay visualization was carried out to provide
a timeline of research topic evolution and flag off topics that have been
significant to Burawoy in the recent times.
TABLE 1 Country-wise origin of the journals where Michael Burawoy has
published between 1978 and 2022.
Sl no.
Country
Number of
publications
1.
United States of America
19
2.
United Kingdom
17
3.
South Africa
4
4.
Netherlands
4
5.
Canada
1
6.
Germany
1
7.
Portugal
1
8.
Brazil
1
5.1 Thematic clustering and analyses
To illustrate the research themes, term co-occurrence for 172
terms was analysed by setting the co-occurrence threshold of
terms at two. After this, sixty-three terms or items were brought
into visualization. In Figure 3 the size of nodes represent the
co-occurences of terms or items. The terms “capitalism”,
Generated by authors from Scopus.
FIGURE 2
Documents published by Michael Burawoy that are cited most frequently by the academic community. Source: Generated by authors from Biblioshiny.
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5.1.1 Cluster 1: methodological considerations in
sociology
“ethnography”, “public”, and “South Africa” had the strongest
strength. Generally speaking, the distance between two terms or
items represent the relative strength of the link between those two
terms or items and thus indicate topic similarity. Following this,
the links between the selected terms or items was established and
signified through a positive numerical value. The higher the
numerical value, the stronger the link between terms or items.
From Figure 3 it can be deduced that 227 links were established
between terms or items. Further, terms or items were categorized
into different thematic clusters based on the strength of their links
to one another and if terms or items were a part of the same
cluster they reflected identical research topics. In Figure 3 each
cluster has a different number of terms or items and is displayed
by a different color. By further analyzing the largest nodes from
each cluster, it is possible to attach thematic labels to the diverse
concentrations of Burawoy’s scholarship. The terms or items in
Cluster 1(Red) were pertaining to research on the topic of
ethnography and related methodological considerations in
sociology, specifically the extended case method. As for Cluster 2
(Green), the terms reflected Burawoy’s academic interest in the
development of sociology in Global South regions such as
South Africa, Russia and China. In Cluster 3 (Blue), the terms
were indicative of Burawoy’s Marxist critique of third-wave
marketization post the 1980s and his eventual articulation of the
need for public discourse in sociology that engaged subjugated
subaltern groups. Lastly, in Cluster 4 (Yellow) terms were relating
to the classification of four types of sociology propounded by
Burawoy and the need for public sociology in particular. Based on
co-term analyses, Table 2 provides a more detailed description of
the thematic clusters. Based on the four major clusters that have
emerged from term co-occurrence analyses (Figure 3), it is
possible to identify existing and emerging themes within
Burawoy’s scholarship at a glance (Table 2). Each of these themes
have been elaborated upon further in this section of the paper.
In the first cluster, based on co-occurrence of terms such as
“ethnography”, “extended case method”, “reflexivity” etc. a common
linkage can be outlined with respect to Burawoy’s contribution
towards methodological novelty in sociology. His most prominent
contribution in this regard is the Extended Case Method (ECM). It
must be noted here that even before Burawoy’s scholarship sought to
breathe new life into the ECM, it had been an influential approach in
socio-cultural anthropology for decades (Evens and Handelman,
2005; Kempny, 2005). Specifically, the ECM helped anthropologists
from Oxford, Cambridge, and Manchester including Evans-Pritchard
(1937), Fortes (1949), Gluckman (1955), and Turner et al. (2017) to
write evocative details of social life in central and southern Africa.
Taking this intellectual tradition forward, Burawoy applied the ECM
to critically think through existing theories and assumptions as well
as challenge them. South African-British anthropologist Max
Gluckman had distinguished Extended Case Method from two more
constrained applications of the case study, both of which had a
propensity to advance structuralism’s interest in social morphology,
i.e., apt illustration and the analysis of social situations. The former
refers to the description of a straightforward event or action in such a
way as to serve as a persuasive graphic representation of some general
normative principle, and the latter signifies the analysis of complex
micro-social events to reveal structural characteristics at the macro
level (Gluckman, 1955). The extended case technique, in contrast,
entails interpreting the connection of structural regularities and the
actual unique behavior of people. Another senior sociologist, Van
Velsen, also advocated for the use of the case studies beyond their
specific context to examine broader social phenomena. He preferred
the term “situational analyses” (Van Velsen, 1967, p. 145) where
researchers paid attention to the choices individuals made between
alternative norms. Furthermore, according to him, the method’s
ability to shed light on the intricate connection between a social world
FIGURE 3
Color-coded thematic clustering of Burawoy’s scholarship based on term co-occurrence in articles. Source: Generated by authors from VOSviewer.
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TABLE 2 List of terms in each thematic cluster based on the diverse concentrations of Michael Burawoy’s scholarship.
Sl no.
Number of
terms
1
22
Color
Terms
Red
Bourdieu, class consciousness, comparative analysis, ethnographic research, ethnography, extended case method,
Gramsci, hegemony, historical change, Hungary, labor process, positive science, post colonialism, reflexive
ethnography, reflexive science, state socialism, structural ethnography, substantialism, symbolic domination, USA,
Zambia
2
15
Green
California, capital, China, critical sociology, gobal South, global turn, Harold Wolpe, labor movement, liberation
movement, party state, Russia, Russian economy, South Africa, South African sociology, violence
3
15
Blue
Capitalism, case study, class, common sense, economic transition, global sociology, market society, marketization,
moral commitment, political practice, public discourse, socialism, subaltern group, third wave marketization,
unequal world
4
11
Yellow
Academic field, global field, multiple public, multiple way, pathological form, policy, political field, public, public
sociology, sociological ethos, sociological labor
Generated by authors through VOSviewer.
of “norms in conflict” and people’s decisions and strategies is what
finally makes it worthwhile (Van Velsen, 1967, p. 146). Van Velsen
further asserts that scholars may be able to better understand the issue
of defining the proper unit of study by extending case studies over a
large geographical area.
However, it was their student, Burawoy who further argued that
each of these contexts are grounded in the assumption that social
phenomena are complex and understanding them requires in-depth
exploration (Burawoy, 1998). Burawoy also notes that one of the key
features of Extended Case Method is its emphasis on reflexivity.
Reflexivity, put simply, entails that researchers are able to reflect on
their own positionality and how it shapes their interpretation of the
cases that they are studying. Such an outlook helps researchers to
avoid reproducing existing power relations and dominant narratives
within research. According to Burawoy fostering reflexivity allows
researchers to also be more attentive to the nuances and complexities
of a phenomenon which is integral to developing new insights. Due
to the role of reflexivity, the ECM emerges as a particularly valuable
tool for imagining new theoretical insights and refining existing
frameworks of research. Within his own career, Burawoy deployed the
extended case method in examining the transient nature of racerelations in Zambia. Burawoy took inspiration from Manchester
School of Social Anthropology in his career and as a disciple of the
school, much of his early work on Zambian copper mines was
influenced by what he called “Manchester Marxism” (Burawoy et al.,
2000a). Burawoy (1972) drew from the works of Gluckman (1955) for
his own treatise on the Zambian Copperbelt. Firstly, he conducted a
participant observation based study of Zambian copper industry
extended over space and time, then he tried to link the microprocesses he discovered with macro-forces of the colony and the postcolony. Forty years after this study was conducted, Burawoy also
conducted an “ethnographic revisit” where he critiqued his own standpoint as a researcher and reconceptualized notions such as “local” and
“global” in the wake of the neo-liberal turn. While Burawoy’s
contribution led to several studies applying this method to a
phenomenon, it must be kept in mind that the execution of such a
method maybe time-consuming and resource-intensive. Conducting
multiple in-depth case studies and relating it to broader social
phenomenon may be a demanding process that is not suitable for
researchers with time and resource constraints. Further due to the
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inherent requirement for in-depth exploration of particular cases, this
method maybe limited in its scope for generalizability.
5.1.2 Cluster 2: sociology in the Global South
Based on the co-occurrence of terms such as “Russia”, “Russian
economy”; “South Africa” and “South African sociology”, the next
theme in Burawoy’s scholarship focuses on topics related to the Global
South turn in sociology as well as the Russian and South African labor
movements. Burawoy’s interest in Russia is a six-year long project
where he, along with his collaborator Krotov, studied the employees
of a liquidated furniture enterprise to understand how people survived
in the face of unprecedented degeneration of the economy in the late
1990s. In their paper on capitalist modes of production in Russia
following the fall of the Soviet Union, Burawoy et al. (2000b) notes
that there was a breakdown of the formal economy and workers were
forced to adopt one of two survival strategies (1) defensive survival
and (2) entrepreneurial survival. In the former, with the loss of jobs
and wages, household units sought to rely even more heavily on the
traditional Soviet routine of doing business whereas in the latter,
experimental ways of doing business and petty commodity production
were explored by the workers. This Russian peculiarity has been
labelled as a kind of “involution” by Burawoy et al. (2000b) and
he further explored the gendered nature of this transition within the
socio-economic landscape through several case-studies. He argued
that the adoption of these two types of strategies has led to a distinct
male dominated pole of wealth generated through the free flow of
commodities. Similarly, there has also been a proliferation of a vast
underworld of women workers who were forced to subsistence level
income based on household industries and kinship networks.
Burawoy’s interest in the Global South was further sustained
through his ethnographic project in South Africa, where he examined
the interweaving of racist and capitalist behaviors by the colonial state
in their treatment of workers in a mining company. In his book
Manufacturing Consent: Changes in The Labor Process Under Monopoly
Capitalism (Burawoy, 1982), Burawoy parsed through the
authoritarian policies of a copper mining company in South Africa
which appeared to promote black miners in the factory but also
avoided any circumstances where a white miner would have to be the
subordinate of a black worker and take orders from them. These
academic forays into the dynamics of colonial capitalism in the Global
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South eventually led Burawoy to his study of national regimes of
sociology. Specifically, he took note of the Euro-America-centric
development of the discipline and the international skew in the
division of sociological labor (Burawoy, 2004). Burawoy analysed the
pedagogic interventions made within the discipline of sociology in
several prominent countries of the Global South like China, Taiwan,
Brazil, and Palestine, apart from South Africa, and categorized them
into four broad schemes: professional sociology, critical sociology,
policy sociology and public sociology. In his later publications, he gave
us a clearer picture of what each of these schemes entailed. Burawoy
also noted that in the event of such countries contesting Western
hegemony in existing scholarship through their polemical writing, the
universities of the West often displayed the tendency to subsume such
critique by felicitating the critics with laurels and thereby flattening its
impact. Eventually, such asymmetries of power, he argued, even
percolated into the organization of not just universities but other
prominent academic bodies and often hindered the formation of a
truly transnational civil society.
on measures taken by the state to mitigate the harmful effects of the
market, as policy sociologists tend to do, or steer clear of such debates
as professional sociologists have done. They may also be critical of this
marriage between the state and the market. However, according to
Burawoy, none of these three choices are advisable since they are
ineffective and often incomprehensible. Third-wave marketization in
India and the Global South as a whole, characterized by the
commodification of labor, money, and land, requires sociologists to
seriously think about the discipline’s future and undertake direct
public-oriented interventions that can ably support their high-minded
critiques of socio-economic crises. This call for expanding the public
sphere, especially in the face of rampant exclusion of subaltern groups
has been readily taken forward by scholars in India. While most
Indian sociologists largely agreed with Burawoy’s observation, some
have engaged with his analyses further to highlight that it would
be hasty to take these observations and directly apply to the Indian
context without modification (Baviskar, 2008). They argue that in
countries of the Global South, if the organization of social movements
is not led by the local people, they are often anyway perceived as
fraudulent by international media and social justice institutions. In
such a situation, analytical categories such as the local, the national
and the global get enmeshed with one another and are co-constructed
(Baviskar, 2008). Nevertheless, public sociology found enormous
purchase in India, where governments, state institutions, and other
power-holders within the social system frequently fail in their duty to
introduce transformative change.
5.1.3 Cluster 3: the onset of third wave
marketization
Based on co-term analyses in the third cluster, it can be deduced
that Burawoy’s industrial sojourns led him to various intriguing
settings, from the copper miners of Zambia to the steel plantation
workers of Chicago, and he developed that into a class-conscious takedown of the party state and its inability to deliver on their promise of
socialism. Terms such as “economic transition”, “market society”,
“political practice”, and “marketization” appearing in this cluster
indicate his engagement with the turns and twists of capitalist
accumulation under neo-liberalism. Most notably in this regard,
he engaged with Polanyi (1944) treatise on market society and sought
to recalibrate it. Burawoy argued that marketization is not a linear
process that follows a singular arc but takes place in waves. The first
wave of marketization began in the mid-nineteenth century and
resulted in large-scale counter-movements from the working-class
which were eventually thwarted in the face of World War I. This
period is co-terminus with the advent of political-economy as a
concept through the criticism of Marx and Engels. This was followed
by the second wave of marketization that took place after the First
World War and ended with the state regulation of the 1930s. This
period saw the development of Stalinism, Fascism and the New Deal.
Finally, Burawoy (2005a) noted that a third and final wave of
marketization had begun from the 1970s onwards. Apart from the
commodification of money and land, which was somewhat the case
for the first wave of marketization as well, there was another big
challenge for this wave. The third wave witnessed the commodification
and looting of natural resources such as wind, water, air and land
which created huge amounts of waste and left large swaths of
population in the Global South destitute (Burawoy, 2005a).
In his analyses of the impact of third-wave marketization on
regions in the Global South, Burawoy also turned his attention
towards India in his piece titled The Future of Sociology (Burawoy,
2007). He signaled that as part of the marketization process, profitseeking classes in the country collaborated with the regulatory nationstate to produce large-scale commodification of all human-made and
natural resources. The only foil to this onslaught, Burawoy adds, is the
formation of social movements and the collective will of the public.
For the sociologist, this scenario presents four options, they can rely
Frontiers in Sociology
5.1.4 Cluster 4: need for public sociology
The last cluster includes terms such as “multiple publics”, “public
sociology”, and “sociological ethos”. It reflects the latest concentration
in Burawoy’s scholarship which locates four different types of
sociology and especially calls attention to the development of public
sociology. It shows that Burawoy, along with his collaborator Laleh
Behbahanian, highlighted that public sociology could be developed in
three significant ways (1) by identifying and eliminating those forces
which hinder the construction of a global civil society, such as global
capital or states, (2) by working with the existing global civil societies
which are still in their embryonic stage and require further
examination, perpetuation and dissemination, and (3) by explicitly
and actively partaking in the creation of a global civil society. In that
sense, building this global civil society would first require us to explore
the basic tenets of public sociology. In his presidential address to the
American Sociological Association in 2004 the term public sociology
gained prominence and during his long stint as a Professor of
Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Burawoy, looked
at some of the themes that public sociology could explore in detail. At
the time of delivering his presidential address, Burawoy’s observations
felt like a watershed moment in the development of sociology, which
until then was only interested in making cognitive validity claims
through normative theory building. He made a call to transgress
vocational boundaries and conduct public sociology through the
enthusiastic efforts of a deterritorial civil society. According to
Burawoy, public sociology is a part of a matrix that includes four
different types of sociology, i.e., professional sociology, policy
sociology, critical sociology, and finally, public sociology
(Burawoy, 2005a).
Professional sociology constitutes multiple formal research
programs with intersecting conceptual apparatuses. Critical sociology
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10.3389/fsoc.2024.1337742
examines the implicit and explicit foundations of professional
sociology, while policy sociology is often conducted in service of a
specific goal at the client’s behest. Burawoy mentions that professional
sociology, the kind that is practiced within the university space, is
concerned with concepts and theorists. In contrast, public sociology
is more diverse in that it attempts to bring sociology back to the public
from which it emanates and re-engages with it. Burawoy goes on to
elucidate the different flavors of public sociology. Firstly, traditional
public sociology emerges from the national newspaper columns and
opinion pages wherein sociologists write extensively. In this type of
public sociology, journalists also play a pivotal role since they carry
academic research into the public domain. This, in turn, ignites debate
among ordinary people, even though the sociologist might not directly
participate in it. Another way of practicing sociology, which Burawoy
has called organic public sociology, brings the two strands of academic
and non-academic into conversation with one another. This usually
happens when sociologists work closely with a dense, organized
counter-public. Thus, public sociology is perhaps Burawoy’s most
comprehensive attempt at reshaping the theory and practice of
sociology. In the decade since the arrival of public sociology in the
disciplinary mainstream, following Burawoy’s call-to-action, a surge
of research has attempted to take sociological knowledge to the
non-academic audience. Particularly, in the Global South, with its
historical legacy of exclusions, there is a need to reflect seriously on
the utility of public sociology without getting caught up in the
typology. It is therefore crucial to point out that even though the
premise of Burawoy’s concept hinges upon a distinction between
professional, and public sociology, it may be argued that such watertight compartmentalization are untenable, given the possibility that a
single sociologist may occupy more than one quadrant at a single
point or at various junctures in their career (Ericson, 2005). Thus, all
sociology, weather explicitly public or not, should generate a degree of
civic engagement. Even as research and teaching become a lucrative,
for-profit initiative and there is an ever-increasing influence of money
power and political muscle, young scholars of the discipline must ask
themselves how sociology can be helpful to the public and what
measures of course correction can be taken to reduce public
indifference towards the discipline.
Through thematic mapping and synthesis of all four clusters, it is
possible to reveal the research foci, locate scopes of interest and relate
it to corresponding institutional contexts.
5.2 Temporal analyses
Temporal analyses of Burawoy’s scholarship was done through
overlay visualization on VOSviewer. This map is identical to the
network visualization map except that this corresponding functionality
uses both term co-occurrence linkages as well as average publication
per year scores to interpret the year to year evolution of research topics
covered in the retrieved literature within the given time period. Two
shades of colors, dark purple and yellow are used by the software on a
continuum to represent time-variance in key-word co-occurrences
where the former signifies topics covered earlier and the latter
represents topics studied more recently. In Figure 4, the timescale
represents the years between 2000 and 2015 because the visualization
is based on the average publication year of the articles in which a
specific term appeared. We can interpret from the figure that there has
been a shift in the main focus of research for Burawoy. His early
research, represented by the dark purple region that is on the left side
of the timescale, tended to explore labor relations and how that in turn
is designed to control and dominate industrial workers in different
FIGURE 4
Temporal visualization of Burawoy’s scholarship based on term co-occurrence and average publications per year. Source: Generated by authors from
VOSviewer.
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socio-political contexts such as U.S.A and Africa. However, from the
2000s onwards, his scholarship on public sociology and the
theorization on extended case method has taken on an increasingly
central role. This is represented by the yellow section on the right side
of the timescale. These emergent trends in research provides a more
robust understanding of the shifts in Burawoy’s long scholarly oeuvre
and encourages other scholars to carve out a niche in sociological
knowledge that is about the public and for the public.
interdisciplinary areas. There are two major reasons to argue for the
use of the bibliometric method for studying the work of other
theorists: coverage and collaboration. Firstly, bibliometric analyses
provides ready access to aggregated data from diverse research
journals and therefore provides in-depth coverage of literature which
is important to gauge future research directions, secondly, it can track
collaborations that a researcher makes with various institutions and
other researchers, which this paper argues is integral to the building
of a cohesive academic community.
6 Conclusion
Author contributions
This paper enabled us to argue that bibliometric analyses can
be an effective complement to traditional review methods through
qualitative synthesis and aides researchers to gain in-depth insights
about the academic research output of not just Burawoy but any
sociologist. Too often, sociology is entangled in lofty theorization that
merely reproduces patterns of thought dominant in the West without
orienting itself adequately to local contexts. A kernel of this argument
can be found throughout Burawoy’s own academic research career,
be it in the topics he chose to work on or the entities he chose to
collaborate with. While the standing of Michael Burawoy as a scholar
can always be effectively gauged through detailed engagement with his
scholarship, bibliometric inquiry helps to consolidate the fragmented
structure of knowledge production within sociology. Burawoy has
himself noted that digital media has set a new standard for how local
pedagogy and its dialogue with the global takes place (Behbehanian
and Burawoy, 2014). However, it should be noted that the present
analyses comes with a limitation. Since this paper focused on
Burawoy’s publications within the field of sociology, the
generalizability of the findings are relative to the growth of knowledge
within the discipline. Therefore, one important future direction of
work would be to link the type of bibliometric indicators analysed
here to data from Burawoy’s publications in other disciplines such as
history (Burawoy, 1990) and labor studies (Burawoy, 2010). The
analyses in this paper provides a strong empirical base and some
cursory guidelines on which later scholarship can be built to assess
the contribution of Burawoy, or other sociologists, in other
AR: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – original draft,
Writing – review & editing. AS: Data curation, Formal analysis,
Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors
and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations,
or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product
that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its
manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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