Michael Burawoy had three lifelong passions. The first was English football, specifically Manchester United, the team he supported from childhood and to which he remained loyal for the rest of his life. The other two were Marxism and sociology, into which he poured his prodigious energies for over half a century. I don’t know anything about football, but I was privileged to have firsthand exposure to Michael’s other two obsessions over five decades.

I can still remember when I was a naive, newly radicalized undergraduate floundering in search of a political and intellectual home and attended a meeting billed as “Marxism Without Dogma.” I was deeply disappointed to discover that this was merely false advertising for some left sectarian group. But a few years later, I stumbled onto the real thing in Michael, who soon became my dissertation advisor and later a beloved friend.

I had entered graduate school ambivalently, with a limited understanding of sociology and an even more limited self-confidence. At the time, I was deeply committed to Marxist feminism and to women’s labor history, which I thought, at least at the University of California, Berkeley, I might somehow be able to pursue within the discipline. That proved far more challenging than I’d expected, and I likely would have dropped out entirely if not for Michael. He arrived in the department a year after I did, and I was drawn to him immediately. I later came to believe this was partly because we both came from Russian-Jewish immigrant families from which we inherited a passion for social justice, but there were other affinities as well.

Mine was the very first dissertation Michael agreed to chair. He had not yet developed the legendary approach to mentorship that so many of his later students experienced. But he gave me everything I needed at the time: engaged and respectful critique of my ideas and writing and unwavering support. He once told me I was a “natural sociologist,” which was his generous and diplomatic way of prodding me to pursue my own peculiar intellectual agenda and at the same time to engage seriously with the discipline. His unflagging nurturance of the former was vital for my survival; I never fully embraced the latter, but over the years, I gradually came to appreciate why he thought it mattered.

Michael’s own dissertation, which became the iconic 1979 book Manufacturing Consent, inspired me and many others with an interest in work and labor. It was an instant sociological classic, as well as a signal intervention in Marxist theory. Like many other late-twentieth-century Marxists, Michael was wrestling with the failure of Karl Marx’s vision of socialist transformation to materialize and the stubborn ability of capitalism to endlessly reproduce itself. Unlike those who sought answers to that puzzle in the ideological sphere, Manufacturing Consent located it at the heart of the capitalist labor process. He would go on to explore the failures of “actually existing socialism” in Hungary and then Russia, once again through participant observation in factories.

Michael’s subsequent rise to prominence in the sociological profession, among other things as president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and then of the International Sociological Association, may have obliterated from memory his early struggles to win a place in the academy. I vividly remember how a slew of his Berkeley colleagues pushed to deny him tenure —  some of whom had also been opposed to hiring him in the first place. It didn’t help that he had been one of very few faculty to support a student campaign against sexual harassment in a case involving one of his colleagues shortly beforehand.

But the roots of opposition to granting him tenure were much deeper: his adversaries were professional gatekeepers for whom his commitments to Marxism, ethnography, and to what he later called “public sociology” were anathema. Ultimately, with the overwhelming support of his students along with colleagues at Berkeley and beyond, he did secure tenure.

Over the years that followed, Michael nurtured dozens of Berkeley graduate students, both individually as a dissertation advisor and in a series of collective projects, including the books Ethnography Unbound (1991) and Global Ethnography (2000). He had an uncanny talent for bringing out the best in all of us, with unstinting empathy and yet holding us to the most rigorous intellectual standard. Perhaps reflecting his early training in mathematics, he helped us shape our most fragile, embryonic insights into serious (socio)logical analysis.

He could be combative if he thought any of us was pursuing the wrong path, yet his critiques — even if they stung — were always aimed at supporting and improving our efforts. He was a treasured mentor not only to his own graduate students and colleagues at Berkeley, but also to many others around the globe. And his legendary undergraduate theory course inspired thousands. Some of them went on to pursue academic careers, but most brought what they learned from Michael into other arenas, including a rich variety of progressive political projects.

Over the years, Michael continued to engender opposition from conservative sectors of the profession, but he remained intrepid, never wavering in his intellectual and political commitments. He understood that many of those attracted to graduate study in sociology wanted not only to gain academic credentials and jobs, but first and foremost to understand and change the world. He created space in the discipline for us, and helped legitimate our work, against the dominant currents in the field. Although I can’t evaluate his abilities as a footballer, on the sociological field Michael could curve his shots just as deftly as David Beckham (or Jess in Bend it like Beckham).

Yet he also valued the contributions of the mainstream sociologists who would never reciprocate his appreciation, as his ASA presidential address underscored in pointing to the productive synergies among four types of sociology, prominent among which was what he dubbed “professional sociology.” His trademark “extended case method” involved careful empirical case studies designed to systematically engage with and improve existing social theory — especially but not exclusively Marxism.  The body of work that approach has generated is relevant far beyond the academy.

At the same time, Michael maintained an unwavering commitment to the pursuit of social justice both inside and outside the discipline. After October 2023, he helped lead the “Sociologists for Palestine” campaign within the ASA that won support from the majority of its members, once again meeting fierce resistance not only from committed Zionists but also those who thought academics and scholarly societies should not engage directly in politics.

When his life was tragically cut short as he was struck by a car and killed in a hit-and-run accident in Oakland on February 3, he was at work on a comparative analysis of the Palestinian and South African liberation movements, while also continuing his long-standing engagement with the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. He left behind not only a formidable body of scholarship, but also a model of how to pursue a distinctive form of sociology, one both informed by and informing efforts for social change. Marxism without dogma. Ethnography — and sociology — unbound. Bend it like Burawoy!