Honoring Michael Burawoy (1947–2025): Production regime theory and its influence on labor studies and public sociology in China

Michael Burawoy was a great Marxist and reflexive scholar in sociology and beyond. We begin with his own reflection on his scholarship to illustrate his humility and deep concern with class and social inequalities in the life-world. His passion, commitment, and persistence in pursuing human emancipation, and his care for workers’ lives and subjectivity, colored his lifelong academic career. His sudden death in 2025 has shocked and heartbroken the intellectual circle, leading to widespread celebration of his work, especially in economic and industrial sociology, comparative sociology, and the sociologist’s place in society (Chesta, 2025; Elger, 2025; Manolchev and Nolan, 2026; Thompson and Nies, 2026; Wood, 2026). This special issue of Critical Sociology is part of that commemoration and evaluation of Michael Burawoy’s work, with a focus on the impact of his labor regime theories and public sociology in China, a country with a relatively recent engagement with the sociology of labor, work, and employment. Burawoy was a life-long Marxist in practice, although “what this meant changed radically over the 55 years that spanned his career” (Wood, 2026: 2). His theories, as we show, helped shape researchers seeking to critically interpret China’s transition from existing socialism to a form of state capitalism, a transition historically unprecedented in speed and scale and divergent from those of Russia and Eastern European countries, which experienced simultaneous economic and political transformation. China maintained a one-party state, which has been both directed and shaped by internal capitalist forces and global institutions of capitalism. Many others have written accounts of this shift (Chan and Florence, 2026; Estlund, 2017; Feng, 2026; Liu, 2009, 2020; Liu and Smith, 2016; Pun, 2016, 2024), and our focus here is not China per se, but the influence Michael Burawoy’s ideas have brought to understanding changes in labor, capital, and the state in China. This introduction has three purposes. First, it honors Michael Burawoy’s lifelong contributions and offers a crisp summary of the key texts referenced by the researchers contributing to this special issue, thus avoiding the need for repeated summaries of these texts in each paper. Second, it presents a quantitative account of the papers and books by Chinese and other scholars that have used Burawoyan concepts to understand the radical transformations in work and society in China. Third, it introduces the seven papers that make up this special issue.

Michael Burawoy is an absolutely central figure in the development and diffusion of labor process theory, concepts, and research. Born in England, he moved to the newly independent Zambia and worked in the personnel department of Anglo-American Corporation, a mining conglomerate, between 1969 and 1970, observing and collecting information on migrant mine workers. After 2 years in the copper industry, he left to attend the new University of Zambia to complete an MA in social anthropology—his first degree was in mathematics at the University of Cambridge (1968). The anthropological research method learned during this time imprinted itself on Michael, creating a life-long stress on getting close to research subjects, with a Marxist orientation in using theory and ethnographic fieldwork, especially participant observation. Burawoy rejected the idea of entering the field “empty headed,” but neither did he go in to find a prescribed story or angle. His approach was an open-system dialectical interaction between research questions, theory, and the field as encountered.

Drawing on his African experience and research, he published a book (Burawoy, 1972) that examined how companies accommodated the introduction of African managers rather than fundamentally changing. He also engaged with theories of development, race, and the reproduction of labor, the latter of which was consolidated in a paper on the spatial separation of the long-term and daily reproduction of migrant labor, a topic of renewed prominence today with the globalization of capital and enhanced geographical flows of labor (Burawoy, 1976). He then undertook a PhD at the University of Chicago (1972–1976), working for 10 months in 1974 as a shopfloor machinist in an engineering company where the famous industrial sociologist, Donald Roy, conducted participant observation between 1944 and 1945. Roy completed his PhD in Chicago in 1950. Participant observation was strong in the Chicago School, but Burawoy had learned the method from a Marxist supervisor in Zambia and brought to it a more comparative and theoretical approach than was evident in the Chicago School.

In the book that grew out of his doctoral work, Manufacturing Consent, he said he read the 546 pages of Roy’s thesis while doing fieldwork and developing his own thesis. As Wood (2026: 4) notes: “By comparing his ethnographic research as a machine operator to Donald Roy’s at the same factory 30 years earlier, he identified two contrasting labor-process forms. The first he termed the ‘despotic organization of work’ and the second the ‘hegemonic organization of work’.” As we discuss below, through the micro-politics of the shop floor, Burawoy advanced the argument that workers create consent to produce surplus labor through “making out” or playing games on the shop floor, conforming to rules that tie them to producing surplus value through “consent.” His thesis appeared in his most integrated and most cited book on the labor process, Manufacturing Consent (Burawoy, 1979b). In this book, there are 66 references to Roy, 32 to Marx, and only 5 to Braverman, often seen as the originator of contemporary labor process ideas through his major work, Labor and Monopoly Capital, which appeared in 1974. His other major book, The Politics of Production (Burawoy, 1985), is mentioned in Manufacturing Consent as “forthcoming,” but it did not, in fact, appear for another 6 years.

Burawoy joined the UC Berkeley Sociology Department in 1976. Berkeley was his only academic home, and he retired in 2023 after 47 years of service to the university. He favored ethnography and case-based research but did not conduct fieldwork in China. Having conducted fieldwork in Africa, England, the United States, Hungary, and Russia, he observed China’s transition from historically existing socialism to state capitalism from afar while visiting China, engaging with labor scholars, and supporting young scholars seeking to critically understand the changes taking place there. His limited writing on China was more macro and comparative, and was designed as a critique of those advocating the market and weakening the state as the route for managing the transition from state socialism (Burawoy, 1996). This writing was more about Russia than China, and was rather idealistic about China’s transition: “China has manufactured a more effective transformation of socialism, creating a fourth alternative, which for all its problems offers some optimism for the future.” (Burawoy, 1996: 1115). But later, he recognized the problems of migrant labor under the new Chinese production system:

I could only participate in China’s amazing growth vicariously through the work of my students . . . Yet while industrial workplaces were disappearing in advanced capitalism and the post-Soviet world, they were expanding in China, giving The Politics of Production a new lease on life. China was able to attract capital from the West and build up its own industrial capital in large part because it created new forms of bureaucratic despotism, built on the bodies of migrant labor. (Burawoy, 2023: 5)

His ideas on the Marxist analysis of the labor process, the extended case method, the role of the intellectual in civil society, and the role of the sociologist as a change agent were all influential, as this special issue will show. Given Burawoy’s commitment to workplace ethnography as a way of making sense of workers and the labor process, we examine his direct and indirect effects in China through scholars who champion, revise, or critically engage labor with his ideas. Michael Burawoy’s influences are wide-ranging. As Wood (2026) notes in a recent critical appreciation, he was one of the highest-profile Marxist scholars in the United States, and although born in Manchester, England, to Russian-Jewish parents, his professional academic career was in the United States, while he engaged in global sociology and was elected President of both the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association.

Burawoy’s approach to the labor process in capitalism and state socialism is historically and empirically situated. In capitalism, he used both historical assessments of the development of managerial control and what he terms production regimes, which changed in different contexts, reflecting both stages of capitalism as a political economy and country differences in the development of the working class, the capitalist class, the state, and the organized nature of capitalist production. Alongside historical accounts, he conducted empirical studies of the labor process, using participant observation to engage with the micro-politics of shop-floor life. Both involved history, as noted above. The dialogue with Roy in Manufacturing Consent was also an engagement with different practices of shopfloor life and forms of control and consent that, while containing a certain autonomy from external forces of the market and the state, were nevertheless also partial products of these external circumstances. We can therefore read different production regimes through different historical conditions, as well as through what these conditions meant for shopfloor micro-politics.

Burawoy (1983) critiques Braverman, who is principally associated with the development of modern labor process analysis through his monumental 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital (Smith and Thompson, 2024). Rather than the single monopoly-capitalist/Scientific Management account of skill or craft degradation advanced by Braverman, Burawoy identified types of “production politics” (despotic, hegemonic, and hegemonic-despotic) based on external and internal conditions. The differentiation between these types is due in part to forces external to the immediate labor process: state interventions establishing social insurance and the welfare state to lift the worker from the economic compulsion of wage labor; state legitimation of trade unions, collective bargaining, and what we would call pluralist industrial relations; and the repeal of employer controls over labor mobility—the old master-and-servants laws—that gave workers the freedom to move without being punished by employers. There is also the suggestion of an overall direction: the labor process in capitalism is converging into a new form of “production politics,” namely “hegemonic despotism” founded “on the mobility of capital.”

Burawoy brought a different dynamic to labor process theory and research: a deep knowledge of industrial sociology in the United States and the United Kingdom (Burawoy, 1979a); a detailed and creative explanation of comparative histories of factory regimes in phases of capitalism within and between countries (Burawoy, 1984); an embedded comparative perspective; a sensitivity to, and direct experience with, the character of colonial and post-colonial work, where migrant workers and new working classes (Burawoy, 1976) were divided by layers of segmentation; and a concern to undertake ethnography in state socialist workplaces to compare with his fieldwork on UK and US factory floors.

In Burawoy (1978), he reviews several key post-Braverman texts—Friedman (1977), Edwards (1979), and Littler (1982)—finding strengths and faults, and shows his concern with the convergent forces in the labor processes, national patterns, and developmental trends. He rejects what he sees as a teleological approach that gives capitalism a destination and the working class a historical mission to transform capitalism. He considers Braverman pessimistic and utopian, investing in a craft-ideal for the labor process (where conception and execution, or what Burawoy calls, the mental and manual sides of production, are united). By contrast, Burawoy suggests a cycle of skilling and deskilling, within developments of technology and work organization, arguing that Britain had a different entry route and trade union presence in the labor process, compared with the United States and Japan. Importantly, state socialism, wherever operative, revealed a different form of the labor process from capitalism. Braverman, whose little-known book on Russia (Braverman, 1963) and thesis in Labor and Monopoly Capital, suggested a Soviet Union embracing Taylorism equivalent to that of the United States, was challenged by Burawoy, who argued that a command and shortage economy under state socialism produced a different labor process, which formed the underpinnings of his participant observation in Hungarian steel works (Burawoy and Lukács, 1985).

Favoring historical and comparative approaches, Burawoy’s early contribution to labor process theory emerged from his ethnographic account of working in an engineering plant. In Manufacturing Consent (Burawoy, 1979b), based on his year-long experience as a machine operator at Allied Corporation in suburban Chicago in 1974, he shifted attention from coercion alone to the production of consent at the point of production. Against readings of the capitalist labor process that emphasized deskilling and managerial domination, Burawoy asked why workers work hard enough to produce the surplus value on which capitalist profit depends (Burawoy, 2021: 25). His answer drew on Gramsci’s (1971) theory of hegemony but relocated it from the institutions of civil society and the state to the shop floor itself. For Burawoy, consent was not simply imposed from outside production through schooling, family, media, or the state; it was also organized inside production through workplace rules, incentives, games, and workers’ practical participation in making out. This move made Manufacturing Consent a foundational text for later studies of labor control, worker subjectivity, and the contradictory coexistence of compliance and resistance in capitalist workplaces.

Burawoy subsequently developed this argument in a more explicitly comparative and historical direction in The Politics of Production (Burawoy, 1985). Responding to the question of whether the hegemonic regime identified in Manufacturing Consent was specific to capitalism or reflected a broader industrial logic, he shifted from the micro-politics of consent to the broader analysis of factory regimes. His central move was to treat workplace control and worker subjectivity as shaped not only by shopfloor labor processes, but also by the enterprise’s relations to the state and market and by the reproduction of labor power. This move made his framework especially generative for China labor studies, where scholars have used, revised, and criticized Burawoy’s concepts to analyze migrant labor, state-owned enterprise restructuring, global factories, platform work, and changing relations among labor, capital, and the state.

Burawoy’s concept of the factory or labor regime was designed to connect the labor process to wider political-economic conditions. In The Politics of Production, he identified “a constellation of determinants of factory regime”: the labor process, the enterprise’s relations to the state and market, and the mode of reproduction of labor power, all shaped by “wider political and economic forces of an international character” (Burawoy, 1985: 17). This framework allowed him to distinguish among despotic, hegemonic, hegemonic-despotic, bureaucratic-despotic, and collective self-management regimes, while also showing how different regimes shape workers’ struggles in different ways. The value of the concept lies not simply in the typology, but in its attempt to link internal workplace relations with external structures. Labor regimes can be analyzed “from the inside out,” beginning with shop-floor games, managerial rules, wage systems, and workers’ practices; but they can also be analyzed “from the outside in,” beginning with markets, states, welfare arrangements, migration systems, global production networks, and technological change. This tension between internal workplace dynamics and external political-economic forces is one reason Burawoy’s framework has traveled so widely in China labor studies.

In The Politics of Production, a text that brings together papers Burawoy published before and after Manufacturing Consent, he historicizes three periods of labor process development, which he terms “despotic,” “hegemonic,” and “hegemonic despotism.” Despotism, associated with 19th-century competitive capitalism, refers to a regime in which employers dominate production through mechanization and the detailed division of labor in factories, weakens workers’ bargaining power, obstructs trade unions, and maintains hire-and-fire policies to discipline workers. With the growth of giant firms and the move to monopoly capitalism, the competitive pressures between capitals diminish, internal labor markets secure mutual dependency and hence direct employment, trade unions force collective bargaining on employers, and state intervention weakens despotic forms of control. What emerges is a hegemonic period, with the state pushed by labor to provide welfare benefits and legislative recognition of trade unions, pushing employers to adopt more indirect practices to gain worker consent. This was achieved by management establishing rules governing production, but also by allowing workers to construct consent based on shop-floor games that were developed in relation to piecework shop-floor cultures. Elger (2025: 116) notes that “games constituted around work allocation, workloads, and payment systems on the shop floor, represented Burawoy’s distinctive contribution to the Marxist sociology of work.”

Burawoy, reacting to the growth of the international division of labor and global competition, suggests a new phase, hegemonic despotism, where organized labor is compelled to make concessions to management to keep production at home. This was a strategy that generally failed in the United States as manufacturing moved to low-cost production sites, making the “hegemonic” side of this phase questionable, and making the coercive and repressive pattern of manufacturing both in the Global North but especially the Global South far more prominent as a production practice. Although this has been challenged by workers in China and elsewhere, with despotism in production more typical, some writers have suggested notions that recognize forms of compromise, as in Siu’s (2020) “conciliatory despotism” or Chan’s (2010) “contested despotism.” Both highlight resistance, not simply consent to the production of surplus value through following shop-floor games, and therefore consent to the rules that govern these games. Thompson and Nies (2026) show in a recent paper that consent to rules is not a sign of conformity or of resistance, as compliance and resistance coexist, especially in new forms of gamified rules where workers do not make the rules themselves but are driven by platforms.

In short, he mainly developed “labor regimes”—whether despotic, hegemonic, bureaucratic, collective self-management, or combinations of these types—through internal dynamics within the workplace, such as making out or games on the shopfloor, while also examining structures like sector trends, technological change, the international division of labor, and globalization, that is, external forces beyond the workplace. A production regime can be constructed from the outside in—and many labor geographers define labor this way—but also from the inside out, building out from the actions of workers and employers/managers within production or labor processes.

To illustrate his theory of the production regime or labor regime, Burawoy (1998) champions the United States of the single case study in his participant observation research, but he also theoretically generalizes from each case, making comparisons with the work of Roy in Manufacturing Consent, and the work of Haraszti (1977), Worker in a Worker’s State, which he compares to his experience on the shop floor in the Red Star factory in Hungary, discussed in The Politics of Production. He notes: “I called the regime in Red Star, . . . bureaucratic despotism because I saw it was constituted by the administrative hierarchy of the state. Market despotism, by contrast, is constituted by the economic whip of the market . . .” (Burawoy, 1985: 12). Indeed, this book is constructed in terms of production archetypes that are historically excavated through Marx and labor history accounts of working in England and the United States in the 19th century, industrial sociology case studies of Jays and Allied in the United Kingdom and the United States, and his own participant observation experiences in Hungary compared with other such accounts. The sweep of The Politics of Production is comparative, both across time and space, and between capitalism at different moments and state socialism in a period of change and transition.

From extended case studies, production typologies are sketched and used repeatedly in his many publications on the labor process in ways that follow abstracted case studies, such as Gouldner’s (1954) Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy—a text that Burawoy acknowledges as having long inspired him (Burawoy, 1985: 3). His compilation text, The Extended Case Method, (Burawoy, 2009) is subtitled Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations and One Theoretical Tradition. He duly acknowledges that applying ethnography to the sweep of change in Zambia, the United States, Hungary, and Russia may seem “absurd” (Burawoy, 2009: xv), but he defends this with a stress on theory and on extending the gaze of the observer into the lives of participants, the temporality of the case, the movement from the micro to the macro, and the extension of theory—“the most important” part of his thesis. This book is part of Burawoy’s continuing recycling and revisiting of his fieldwork, with new theories, but with the same comparative archetypal approach that elevates the case inside-out and across time and space, rolled out to support new theorizations, which are constant in his understanding of the case study method.

He uses the single case to build a general theory of consent and resistance that locates his case company in Manufacturing Consent, in broad terms, describing the underpinnings of shopfloor hegemony in relation to the growth of the thin welfare state in the United States, strong trade unions, monopoly capitalism, and the United States economic hegemony globally. But this is not really linked to the political economy of Chicago, the city of his factory study, or the United States. It is presented at a relatively abstracted, ideal-type level. Thus, the terminology of despotic, hegemonic, and combinations of production archetypes assumes an overarching character and a degree of regularity and permanence when invoked to describe a very particular labor process. The details of the labor process, the wage system of piece working in all his factory ethnographies, for example, appear set, although this payment system (and the idea of games constructed around it) is historically very specific. In the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 1970s, piece-working was in a declining phase in manufacturing, with automation eliminating the ability of the worker to affect output, as described by Smith et al. (1990) in their account of automation in chocolate production in the late 1970s. Moreover, trade unions and employers were developing policies to move away from piecework in, for example, the United Kingdom aerospace industry, where the confrontation between rate fixers and workers was considered dangerous, bad for quality, and where unions supported “synthetic” times rather than direct timing of workers that formed Burawoy’s terrain of making out (Smith, 1987). Therefore, the shop-floor games experienced and celebrated by Burawoy’s United States and United Kingdom case study research were rapidly disappearing during the time of his fieldwork. In other words, his case studies have major temporal constraints.

Burawoy himself acknowledged temporal limitations and, hence, restraints on case abstraction, as what he reported was not outside of time, but of its time. As well as the micro picture of wage systems, there were also macro political shifts, such as the Reagan-Thatcher move towards neo-liberalism and a shift from Keynesianism, and hence a move in manufacturing towards deindustrialization in the United States and the United Kingdom, an expanded role for finance capital, and the offshoring and internationalization of production. Bluestone and Harrison’s (1982) seminal book, Deindustrialization of America, commissioned in 1979 by a coalition of trade unions and community organizations concerned about plant closings in the United States, presents actual accounts, not typological and abstracted constructions, of the political economy of work at the time. Later, Burawoy (2004) acknowledged the limitations of typological constructs for generalizing from one factory to his theory of consent, as shown at the beginning of this introduction.

Covering similar ground to the Introduction to the Chinese edition of Manufacturing Consent, this text continues with the self-critique of his earlier work for looking inward and not outward:

I mistook the hegemonic regime of production for a natural and eternal form in large part because I froze the external forces that generated it. I did not see that those external forces - markets and states - are not fixed but themselves the product of social processes that have their own dynamics. First, I could not see that global markets were enveloping national markets and sending US manufacturing industry into a nosedive. Like so many companies Allied could no longer compete on an international or domestic market. Second, I did not anticipate the political offensive against labor, marked by Reagan’s election as President. (Burawoy, 2015: 4)

To further develop his labor process and factory regime theory in the context of state socialism, Burawoy examined the factory regimes in 1980s’ Hungary in The Radiant Past (Burawoy, 1992), based on his fieldwork in different factories. Inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement, he asked “why the first genuine working-class revolt in history had been against state socialism and not capitalism, and why in Poland and not Hungary” (Burawoy, 2004: 15). To answer the question, Burawoy first distinguished two types of factory regimes under state socialism: bureaucratic despotic and bureaucratic hegemonic. Under despotic regimes, management is aided by the trade union and the party in attaining submission from workers due to workers’ dependence on the enterprise’s supply of goods and services. However, in the case of the Hungarian bureaucratic hegemonic regime, the enterprise no longer controls the distribution of scarce goods and services; thus, management loses its capacity to extract workers’ submission. In addition, management must obtain workers’ consent through financial incentives, bonus systems, and piece rates, among other means. Burawoy summarizes that under state socialism, it is the market provision of consumer goods and services that undermines despotic regimes, whereas under capitalism, it is the state, as the organizer of welfare and regulator of industrial relations, that undermines them (Burawoy, 1992: 32–33).

In sum, the major contributions of Burawoy’s labor process and factory regime theory are twofold: First, drawing on theories of politics and ideology from Gramsci, Poulantzas, and Althusser, he developed Braverman’s labor process theory by emphasizing the subjective side of production and the key concept of consent (Burawoy, 1979b: xii; 1985: 10). Second, he argued that production is not only an economic process but also a political and ideological one. Depending on external determinants and the relations between state and factory production apparatuses, factory regimes can be categorized into different types, ranging from hegemonic to despotic and collective self-management. However, these contributions also set their own limits, detaching Burawoy’s theory from the core issue of class—the contradictions of production rooted deeply in the interlocking dynamics among capital, state, and ideology.

While Burawoy found that hegemony exists, ironically, in both advanced capitalist and state socialist factories, one cannot ignore the role of particular historical conditions and class relations in shaping outcomes. Looking retrospectively at Manufacturing Consent, Burawoy (2004: 4–5) explicitly acknowledges the limitation of his earlier analysis: he “turned the hegemonic regime of production into a natural and eternal form” because he treated external forces—markets and states—as fixed factors, without noticing that these factors are also “the product of social processes that have their own dynamics.” Burawoy (1980) did not anticipate that his fieldwork would be followed by the deindustrialization and the state’s crackdown on unions in the United States from the 1980s onward, and thus by the demise of the hegemonic regime of production.

In The Radiant Past, Burawoy (1992: 34) acknowledges that “there is no natural evolution from despotic to hegemonic regimes in state socialism.” The collectivization of agriculture after 1956, the greater autonomy of enterprises, the opening up of a legal second economy after 1968, the policy of using foreign exchange to import consumer goods, and the goods and services available through the marketplace or direct state allocation, enabled the Hungarian workers to become better off compared to their Polish counterparts in the 1980s (Burawoy, 1992: 21). Thus, the hegemonic regime of production occurred in Hungary while working-class revolt happened in Poland. Parallel to the story that unfolded in South Chicago, the hegemonic regime of production in Hungary was also transient: In 1999, when Burawoy returned to Hungary and interviewed his fellow workers of the October Revolution Socialist Brigade, all he found was the demise of “the radiant past.” For those “lucky few to still have jobs . . . They were no longer the proud workers I knew, however, but the demoralized refuse of an untamed capitalism” (Burawoy, 2004: 16).

Left scholars born in the so-called “end of history” era are, for the most part, inevitably afflicted with a despair syndrome. The left has lost its way: bidding farewell to the working class, turning toward various new social movements, or developing a nostalgia for the familiar old golden age. The symptoms in Burawoy’s theory were not a sudden eruption, just like everyone else’s, they were long foreshadowed. In Burawoy’s thought, the labor regime, as a theoretical framework, occupies an epistemological position, and we must recognize that this framework inherently entails epistemological paradoxes. What is the relationship between labor regime and labor process? Burawoy seems never to have answered this question. If we say that the labor regime is the total form of the labor process—as he theorized in The Politics of Production—where the labor regime encompasses the labor process, the relations between the firm, the state, and the market, the modes of labor reproduction, and even influences from the broader world economy, then strangely enough—where is capital? Is capital merely a presumed precondition? Can we abandon the analysis of capital’s movement simply because of this “actually existing capitalism”? If capital is an immanent force and Burawoy neglects to analyze it, the consequence is that the enemy of labor somehow becomes the state, the firm, and the market—these external forces vis-à-vis labor itself. The labor process is reduced to a mere “process,” serving only as a theoretical backdrop and no longer occupying the central position in his analysis.

The analysis of capital logic, however, must be situated within the labor process, which should not be reduced to an “economic factor” but instead should be understood as constituting modes of production and social reproduction across historical stages and geographic locations. Even if Burawoy did not intentionally neglect the role of capital, he nevertheless weakened the analysis of capital-labor antagonism. This results in a labor regime theory without a labor process, as the materiality of class and its embedded contradictions are blurred and reduced to consent or hegemony by highlighting the labor regime’s political and ideological control over workers. The “why” question—every question in Burawoy begins with “why” in a highly insightful way—yet in his analysis, it often turns into a “how is it possible” question, stepping outside the antagonism between labor and capital to analyze the state, market policies, and corporate actions. This tendency, we will later find, takes vicious forms among Chinese labor scholars, as discussed in Liang, Pun, and Qian’s paper in this special issue.

Overall, despite the inherent limits of his theoretical constructs, Burawoy brought a significant academic and theoretical toolkit to examine the nature of work, favoring participant observation (and all forms of workplace ethnography)—by “working as a worker” in the United Kingdom, the United States, Hungary, and Russia, within his linguistic repertoire. His massively cited extended case study approach (Burawoy, 1998) alongside his 2009 autobiographical review, suggests this was the dominant method he championed. He was always both an ethnographer and a social theorist; always trying to link the micro and the macro, and always looking for agents of change, which, as Wood (2026) captures well, moved from the shop floor to civil society, to the elevated role of public intellectuals, such as sociologists. With China, we show in this special issue, all these actors at work through those who borrowed and extended his analysis of class and social transformation.

To complement the preceding discussion of Burawoy’s theoretical contributions, we provide a brief bibliometric sketch of how his work has traveled into China-related scholarship, especially China labor studies. The aim is not to present a full bibliometric study, but to offer a quantitative indication of the scale, trajectory, and thematic scope of Burawoy’s influence. We draw on three sources: Google Scholar, Web of Science (WoS), and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). Google Scholar provides a broad measure of citation visibility across books, articles, chapters, dissertations, and working papers; WoS offers a more selective view of internationally indexed journal articles and conference papers; and CNKI captures the uptake of Burawoy’s work in Chinese-language scholarship. The results should be read with caution. In the Google Scholar and WoS searches, “China” and “Chinese” were used as filtering terms, which may capture some items that mention China only tangentially. In the Google Scholar data, an additional round of manual screening was therefore used to identify more substantively relevant journal articles. Nevertheless, these sources together provide a useful picture of Burawoy’s intellectual afterlife in China studies.

The first striking pattern is the scale of Burawoy’s overall citation footprint. According to the Google Scholar records collected for this paper, Burawoy’s work had received 52,016 citations by October 31, 2025, including 13,545 citations since 2020. His most cited works are also the works most relevant to the themes of this special issue: Manufacturing Consent had 7983 citations, The Extended Case Method 6431, For Public Sociology 4965, and The Politics of Production 4157. When the search was limited to literature containing “China” or “Chinese,” these four texts continued to stand out: Manufacturing Consent appeared in 935 China-related citing documents, The Extended Case Method in 813, The Politics of Production in 705, and For Public Sociology in 253. After further manual screening of journal articles, the same pattern remained: Manufacturing Consent, The Politics of Production, and The Extended Case Method were the most substantively visible in China-related journal literature (133, 95, and 85 citations, respectively), while For Public Sociology had a smaller but still meaningful presence (10 citations). This distribution suggests that Burawoy’s influence in China labor studies has not rested on a single canonical text. Rather, it has traveled through several connected bodies of work: labor process theory, factory and labor regimes, ethnographic method, and public sociology.

The WoS results point in the same direction. A cited-reference search for Burawoy identified 6432 journal articles and conference papers, of which 486 were retrieved after further filtering by “China” or “Chinese.” The time trend suggests three broad phases (see Figure 1(a)). From 1996 to 2003, Burawoy’s China-related citation visibility in internationally indexed literature remained very limited, with only scattered publications. From 2004 to 2012, the number of publications increased unevenly, indicating the gradual incorporation of Burawoy’s work into China-related scholarship. From 2013 to 2025, the trend shifted to a higher and more sustained level of growth, with particularly strong visibility in the most recent years. This pattern suggests that Burawoy’s work became increasingly relevant as China labor studies expanded from earlier concerns with market transition, migrant labor, and factory regimes to newer debates on precarious work, platform labor, digital labor, and changing state-capital-labor relations.

The disciplinary distribution of WoS records further indicates that Burawoy’s China-related influence extends beyond labor sociology narrowly defined (see Figure 2(a)). The largest WoS categories are Business Economics, Sociology, and Area Studies, followed by Geography, Social Sciences Other Topics, Development Studies, Government and Law, and Anthropology. These categories reflect WoS journal classifications rather than precise substantive boundaries, but they nevertheless show that Burawoy’s work has circulated across a broad interdisciplinary terrain, including political economy, sociology, area studies, development studies, governance, geography, and labor-related social sciences.

In the WoS keyword results shown in Figure 3(a), the most prominent terms include “state,” “China,” “politics,” “labor,” “power,” “migration,” “reform,” “transition,” “workers,” “capitalism,” “employment,” “governance,” and “market transition.” These keywords indicate that Burawoy’s work has been mobilized not simply to analyze the workplace narrowly defined, but to connect production, state power, market reform, migration, and capitalist transformation.

The CNKI results show an even more direct connection between Burawoy and Chinese-language labor scholarship. The CNKI search, using both English and Chinese versions of Burawoy’s name, identified 1501 Chinese documents citing his work between 1983 and 2025 (as of October 31). Among the three most cited works in the Chinese literature, Manufacturing Consent again ranked first, with 765 citing documents; For Public Sociology followed with 278; and The Politics of Production with 209. The presence of For Public Sociology as the second most cited Burawoy text in CNKI is particularly noteworthy. It suggests that Burawoy has been read in China not only as a theorist of the labor process and factory regimes, but also as a theorist of sociology’s public mission. This is important for the present special issue, which includes a contribution engaging public sociology directly (see Chan in this special issue).

The temporal pattern in CNKI shows a somewhat different but complementary trajectory (see Figure 1(b)). From 1983 to 2001, Burawoy’s reception in Chinese-language scholarship remained very limited. The first major expansion occurred from roughly 2002 to 2012, when Chinese publications citing Burawoy grew rapidly, coinciding with the consolidation of labor process research, migrant-worker studies, and case-based sociology in China. From 2013 to 2020, the trend entered a higher but relatively flatter phase, with annual publication counts fluctuating around an elevated plateau. After 2020, the number of Chinese publications citing Burawoy increased sharply again, suggesting renewed interest in his work in relation to digital labor, platform work, algorithmic control, and public sociology.

The CNKI disciplinary distribution shows a related but more China-specific pattern (see Figure 2(b)). The leading CNKI subject areas are Social Sciences and Statistics, Macroeconomic Management and Sustainable Development, and Talent Studies and Labor Science, followed by News and Media, Economic Theory and History of Economic Thought, Political Parties and Mass Organizations, Information Economy and Postal Economy, and Business Economy. As with WoS, these categories should be read as database classifications rather than mutually exclusive intellectual fields. Even so, they indicate that Burawoy’s work has circulated widely in Chinese-language scholarship, especially across sociology, labor studies, political economy, Marxist theory, public administration, and studies of economic and social transformation.

The top themes in CNKI were labor process, sociology, migrant workers, case studies, and Marxism. These themes map closely onto the major concerns of China labor studies: how labor is controlled and mobilized in the workplace; how migrant workers experience capitalist transformation; how ethnographic and case-study methods can reveal the lived experience of production; and how Marxist categories can be reworked to understand China’s distinctive trajectory of state-led marketization.

The CNKI keyword analysis shown in Figure 3(b) further clarifies how Burawoy’s ideas have been used. The most frequent keywords were “labor process,” followed by “labor control,” “digital labor,” “migrant workers,” “labor relations,” “subjectivity,” “platform economy,” “case study,” “industrial relations,” “emotional labor,” “working class,” and “manufacturing consent.” More recent keywords such as “digital labor,” “platform economy,” “delivery rider,” “digital economy,” “AI,” and “algorithmic control” indicate that Burawoy’s conceptual vocabulary has not remained confined to the classic factory ethnographies that initially inspired China labor process research. Instead, his concepts have been extended to new terrains of labor control and consent, including platform work, algorithmic management, and digitally mediated labor, findings consistent with those of Jia et al. in this special issue. However, this extension is not always straightforward. The world of piece rates, shop-floor games, and industrial production that shaped Manufacturing Consent differs sharply from the more fragmented and data-driven regimes of contemporary platform labor. Yet the continuing use of Burawoy’s concepts suggests that Chinese labor scholars still find value in his central question: how domination is organized in production, and how workers participate in, accommodate, reinterpret, or resist that domination.

These bibliometric patterns also help specify the nature of Burawoy’s influence. First, his work has provided China labor studies with a vocabulary for analyzing production as a political and ideological process, not merely a technical or economic one. This is visible in the prominence of terms such as labor control, subjectivity, working class, labor relations, and manufacturing consent. Second, his work has supported an ethnographic and case-study orientation in the field. The visibility of “case study” in the CNKI keyword results, together with the high citation count of The Extended Case Method, suggests that Burawoy’s methodological influence has been almost as important as his substantive concepts. Third, his work has helped scholars link workplace regimes to broader transformations in the state, the market, and society. This is especially important in China, where the labor process cannot be understood apart from migration controls, local states, global production networks, platform governance, and the changing role of socialist and post-socialist institutions.

A brief comparison with Harry Braverman helps sharpen what is distinctive about Burawoy’s influence (see Table 1). Using a parallel search strategy in Google Scholar, WoS, and CNKI, we find that Braverman’s (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital remains a foundational text for labor process theory (Smith and Thompson, 2024), with substantial visibility in both English-language and Chinese-language scholarship.1 Braverman’s major work had 23,322 Google Scholar citations; in WoS, cited-reference searches identified 2145 articles citing Braverman, including 128 articles retrieved after filtering by “China” or “Chinese.” In CNKI, 654 Chinese documents cited Braverman between 1978 and 2025. The leading CNKI themes associated with Braverman were labor process, Marx, Marxism, artificial intelligence, and labor process theory, while prominent keywords included labor process, AI, labor control, digital labor, platform economy, digital economy, labor relations, subjectivity, deskilling, algorithmic control, and capital accumulation.

This comparison should not be read as a simple ranking of intellectual importance. Braverman’s contribution was foundational: he re-centered the capitalist labor process, the separation of conception and execution, managerial control, and the degradation of work. Burawoy’s influence in China studies, however, appears broader and more modular. Whereas Braverman’s China-related influence is strongly anchored in Labor and Monopoly Capital and the problematic of deskilling and control, Burawoy’s influence travels through multiple texts and concepts: consent, factory regimes, labor regimes, production politics, ethnography, the extended case method, and public sociology. This difference is theoretically meaningful. Braverman helps pose the question of how capital transforms work; Burawoy helps ask how domination is organized, lived, legitimated, and contested in historically specific production regimes. For China labor studies, where scholars have had to analyze the simultaneous transformation of state socialism, marketization, migrant labor, global manufacturing, and now platform capitalism, Burawoy’s conceptual toolkit has proven especially adaptable.

Taken together, the bibliometric evidence suggests that Burawoy has had a sustained, multidimensional influence on China labor studies. His impact is visible in citation counts, but, more importantly, in the field’s thematic organization. Chinese and China-focused scholars have drawn on Burawoy to study labor control, migrant workers, production regimes, worker subjectivity, case-based ethnography, public sociology, and, more recently, digital and platform labor. His work has therefore traveled not as a fixed theory to be applied mechanically, but as a set of questions and conceptual resources: why workers consent, how labor regimes are organized, how workplace relations are embedded in wider political-economic structures, how ethnographic cases can illuminate macro-social transformation, and how sociology might speak beyond the academy. These questions animate the articles in this special issue, even where the contributors revise, extend, or criticize Burawoy’s concepts in light of China’s changing labor regimes.

The seven articles in this special issue examine Burawoy’s influence from different but connected angles: the travel of Manufacturing Consent in Chinese labor studies, the limits of labor regime theory for class analysis, the extension of labor process analysis beyond manufacturing, the comparative study of labor regimes across national borders, and the practice of public sociology. Together, they show that Burawoy’s concepts have not simply been adopted in China; they have been translated, reconfigured, criticized, and extended across diverse empirical terrains, including migrant labor, factory work, retail, platform work, engineering labor, state socialism, and transnational skill-migration programs.

Jia et al. (2026) present the most systematic analysis to date of the use of Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent by labor scholars studying China. They present not a diffusion or adoption story of Burawoy’s game-based theory of worker consent, but rather a more nuanced interpretation of how Burawoy’s framework has traveled in three patterns: approximation, reconfiguration, and displacement. This country-level framework offers a template for analyzing how major theoretical ideas travel, mutate, and gain new meanings in particular national scholarly fields. They make three contributions to labor process analysis. First, the Chinese literature makes Manufacturing Consent contingent by showing that Burawoy’s making-out game is not a universal theory of consent, but rather a historically grounded account of how consent can be produced under particular institutional conditions. Second, they show how the Chinese literature extends a politics-of-production approach by showing how macro-institutional forces enter the labor process through workplace games. Finally, they suggest that the Chinese literature pushes labor process theory to analyze subjectivity-based control more carefully, particularly workers’ aspirations, moral commitments, emotions, identities, and self-understandings, which they suggest have become central to labor control in many Chinese workplaces.

Liang et al. (2026) offer a critical engagement with the influence of Michael Burawoy’s work in China, especially the idea of labor regimes and the constitution of Chinese workers as a social class. They argue that the architecture of Burawoy’s theory of labor regimes neglects the continued agency of capital in both production and beyond, and the different forms this agency takes as capitalism in China evolves and develops, especially within what they refer to as the dominant form of infrastructural capitalism. The frame of the “labor regime” is ahistorical and static and tends to decontextualize the economic power of capital. At the same time, this frame removes the idea of labor as a social actor and social class that continually projects its interests beyond the constrained framing of labor regime analysis. The authors critically review China scholars who have utilized Burawoy’s work on the labor process but, in their view, have simultaneously undermined Marxist class analysis, especially through ontological shifts away from class as both structural agency and revolutionary subject.

Otis (2026) engages with the work of Michael Burawoy by following his extended case method through a study of the US firm Walmart. This case acts as a conduit for exploring the shift in capitalism from manufacturing to retail, or what is referred to as merchant capital, and how the labor engaged with this shift differs from the production labor that centered Burawoy’s labor process analysis. Merchant capital is especially important for gender, employment contracts, and what Otis refers to as “realization labor,” which serves to finalize value through the movement, display, and sale of commodities rather than their production. Merchant capital constructs consent and control differently, as workers do not produce surplus value, but instead facilitate its conversion into value through circulation. The case of Walmart highlights the contradictions between production and consumption, and shows how Walmart addresses these contradictions through the internationalization of commodity production to China, which lowers commodity costs, and through the tight physical integration of production and consumption within its mass retail stores.

Chan’s (2026) paper explores how Michael Burawoy’s idea of public sociology has influenced Chinese labor scholars and emphasizes the importance of Gramsci’s concept of “civil society” for understanding the evolving relationship between the state and labor in China. He discusses a decade of practicing “public sociology” by Chinese labor scholars from 2005 to 2015. Since the crackdown on labor NGOs starting in 2015, Chan notes that Chinese labor scholars have shifted from organic public sociology to new forms of traditional public sociology and policy sociology, especially in the field of platform work. Given the limitations and debates around these public and policy sociology practices, Chan proposes looking beyond academia to identify organic intellectuals from the working class in China and elsewhere.

Zhang’s (2026) article emphasizes Michael Burawoy’s analysis of labor politics during “actually existing socialism” in the 20th century. Despite Burawoy’s significant insights—such as advocating for “immanent critique” within socialism and proposing that socialist production structures could enable workers to advance more democratic ideals—this perspective has received limited attention among Chinese labor scholars. Zhang attempts to reinterpret Burawoy’s theory for the transition period from socialism to capitalism and proposes a relational account of working-class politics under socialism that considers not only workers’ agency but also how regime leadership responds to it.

Siu and Koo (2026) use Burawoy’s extended case method to connect factory regimes, migration channels, and skill transfer across China, Vietnam, and Japan. Drawing on long-term ethnography in Shenzhen and Ho Chi Minh City and multi-sited research on Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program, they show how labor domination is organized through intertwined forms of efficiency and social governance. Their analysis identifies “conciliatory despotism” in South China, where coercion is softened by affective brokerage, and a more rule-bound familial despotism in Vietnam. Extending the analysis across borders, they show how TITP promises skill transfer but often produces debt discipline, symbolic certification, and blocked mobility. The article demonstrates the continuing value of Burawoy’s global ethnographic imagination.

Wu and Pan (2026) extend Burawoy’s theory of labor games to high-skilled digital production through a comparative ethnography of engineering work in the United States and China. Comparing a U.S. technology firm with a Chinese game-development division, they show how similar technical workers and agile workflows are organized through divergent labor regimes. In the U.S. case, managers transform uncertainty into adventure, mobilizing engineers’ gamer subjectivities to generate what the authors call “ludic hegemony.” In the Chinese case, game production is organized through disciplined execution, metricized accountability, and labor-time stacking, producing “de-ludic despotism.” The article highlights how digital labor regimes reshape uncertainty, subjectivity, creativity, and time.

Taken together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate the continuing vitality of Burawoy’s work for China labor studies and for the broader sociology of work, labor, and capitalism. They honor Burawoy not by treating his theories as closed formulations, but by extending, challenging, and reworking them in light of China’s changing labor regimes, the transnational organization of production and migration, the rise of digital and platform labor, and the unresolved question of class formation.