Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper traces how Michael Burawoy used revisiting as a technique to account for social change. It rereads his work through the lenses of historical consciousness: his own, his interlocutors', and the one dominating his intellectual field at specific moments.

Paper long abstract

Michael Burawoy’s work is an ode to revisits. He steps in Donald Roy’s footsteps to write his Chicago machine-shop ethnography, in Miklos Haraszti’s to examine labour regimes and ideological work in state socialism, and finally, in his own, to think about ‘the colour of class’ in postcolonial Zambia or about the ‘radiant past’ in postsocialist Hungary. He thinks with what he calls ‘the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit’ (2003) to account for the interlacing trajectories of the researcher, of their interlocutors, of one’s conceptual apparatus, of the place itself, and of the global forces at play in a particular time/space nexus.

One year and a half after his absurd death, the paper traces how Michael Burawoy used revisiting as a technique to account for historical change throughout his career, whether it concerned the labour process, shopfloor solidarity, or the mundanity of ‘manufacturing consent’. Following closely Burawoy’s own reflections on the ways in which ethnography-as-revisit forces researchers to ‘directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study’ (2003), the paper argues that this confrontation takes the form of an encounter between three forms of historical consciousness: the researchers', their interlocutors’, and the one dominating their intellectual field at specific moments. Since neither the past nor the present can be understood in their own terms, the shifts in the stakes and meanings of these encounters give us crucial clues about the mechanisms through which historical process keeps past and present into perpetual unity.