Graduating as a mathematics student from the University of Cambridge in 1968, Burawoy went on to pursue post-graduate study in the newly independent African nation of Zambia, while simultaneously working as a researcher for Anglo American PLC. Completing a master's degree at the University of Zambia in 1972, Burawoy enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, finishing a sociology dissertation with an ethnography of Chicago industrial workers, later to become . Aside from Burawoy's sociological study of the industrial workplace in Zambia, Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in Chicago, Hungary, and post-Soviet Russia. His method of choice is usually participant observation, more specifically ethnography. Based on his studies of the workplace he has looked into the nature of postcolonialism, the organization of state socialism, and the problems in the transition from socialism. In more recent times, Burawoy has moved away from observing factories to looking at his own place of work—the university—to consider the way sociology is taught to students and how it is put into the public domain. His work on public sociology is most prominently shown in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 2004, where he divides sociology into four separate categories: public sociology, policy sociology, professional sociology, and lastly critical sociology which, like public sociology, produces reflexive knowledge but which is only available to an academic audience, like professional sociology.
The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism. London: Verso, 1985
The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992
The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition, 2009
Collaborative and edited books
Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class and States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Supplement to the American Journal of Sociology. Edited with Theda Skocpol, 1983
От Деревянного Парижа к Панельной Орбите: Модель жилищных классов Сыктывкара.. Syktyvkar: Institute of Regional Social Research of Komi, 1999
Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000
Articles
"Dwelling in Capitalism, Traveling Through Socialism.]" pp. 21–44 in Baldoz et al., The Critical Study of Work
"What Happened to the Working Class?" pp. 69–76 in Kevin Leicht, The Future of the Market transition, 2002
"Sociological Marxism." pp. 459–86 in Jonathan Turner, The Handbook of Sociological Theory, 2002
"The Critical Turn to Public Sociology," pp. 309–322 in Rhonda LevineEnriching the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline, New York, 2004
"Antinomian Marxist," pp. 48–71 in Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties, 2005
"Provincializing the Social Sciences." pp. 508–525 in George Steinmetz, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, 2005
