‘False’ Optimism: The Key to Historic Breakthroughs? A Response to Michael Burawoy’s ‘From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The False Optimism of Global Labour Studies’ (GLJ 1.2)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael Burawoy has been a foundational figure for the contemporary left in sociology. His method has shaped the thinking and the work of a generation of scholars. At numerous points he has taken strong stands on principle regardless of the risk to his career, most notably in exposing the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) machinations to prevent a black candidate from becoming editor of the association’s flagship journal. Burawoy’s whistleblowing led the president of the association to threaten to expel Burawoy from the ASA. When Burawoy ran for president of the ASA he insisted that there be a political reason for the campaign and the presidency, that it not be (as it almost always is) simply an individual honor. From this he developed and promoted the concept of ‘public sociology’, a sociology that reaches out to and engages with a larger public, a concept that has opened vital debates within sociology and provided room for numerous scholars who wish to be politically engaged but fear the professional consequences of doing so (Burawoy 2007). Burawoy’s presidency of the International Sociology Association will have a similar character, devoted not to his own career but rather to an attempt to make a significant political intervention. One of Michael Burawoy’s distinguishing characteristics is his generosity, his willingness to devote substantial amounts of time and attention to the work of not only his students, but of scholars working in related areas. His comments are serious and engaged, and therefore often critical, but consistently supportive, written from a sense of ‘we are comrades in struggle and should treat each other as such’. Even those who strongly disagree with him are treated generously. Which poses the question of why, in this piece, Burawoy has adopted a tone that is not just
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.038 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.027 | 0.061 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".