Michael Burawoy este profesor la University of California, Berkeley, din 1976. Este președintele International Sociological Association (ISA) și a fost președintele American Sociological Association (ASA) în 2004. Cele mai cunoscute publicații ale sociologului sunt The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization (1972), Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1979), The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism (1985), The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism (1992) (with János Lukács) și The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations and One Theoretical Tradition (2009). A editat, împreună cu mari nume ale sociologiei internaționale, Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class and States (1983) (with Theda Skocpol), Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (1991), Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the PostSocialist World (1998) (with Katherine Verdery) și Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (2000).
