Review of Michael Burawoy's 'The Extended Case Method'

of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, is not a conventional academic.His approach to research meant that he spent years doing manual labour, including two years as a furnaceman in the Lenin Steel Works in communist Hungary, almost a year as a machine operator in a Chicago engineering factory, a period in a personnel office in Kitwe, Zambia, working on a Hungarian state farm producing champagne, time as a machine operator in Hungary, and drilling holes in a small furniture factory in northern Russia.None of these experiences were easy, yet it was not as an itinerant worker but as a professional sociologist that he undertook this work.His scholarly career has extended over four decades, conducting research by way of participant observation, a method that took him to the mines and factories and offices of four countries -Zambia, the United States, Hungary and Russia.The outcome is an academic engagement with the four great transformations of the twentieth century; decolonization, the transition to organized capitalism, the Soviet transition to socialism, and the painful Soviet transition from socialism to capitalism.Apart from the sojourn in the personnel office in order to study 'Zambianization' in the mining industry, and a year in a Chicago engineering plant, these experiences were part of his 'journey into the hidden abode of actually existing socialism', as he writes in his book.All this research has led to numerous journal articles and the publication of sociological classics such as The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines (1973), based on his research in post-independence Zambia, Manufacturing Consent (1979), based on his work in a Chicago engineering firm in the seventies, Global Ethnography (2000), a book that takes the approach of understanding globalization from below to various countries, and most recently, The Extended Case Method (2009).These research experiences underpin Burawoy's commitment to scholarly engagement with a wider world outside the confines of the university, to his rejection of what the French sociologist and activist Pierre Bourdieu calls 'scholastic enclosure' or a remote and detached academic elitism.Burawoy has theorized this commitment to academia engaging with the real world in two forms: 'the extended case method' and as 'public sociology'.His theory of the extended case method essentially involves a dialogue between researchers and those they do research on that is respectful, sensitive and reflexive.Instead of university intellectuals imposing their understanding on people, they must be willing to extend their experiences into the lives of those they research.But this is not enough They

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