The year 1974 marked a rupture in the study of labor. It was the year in which Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was published, making a break with a moribund industrial sociology. It was a rupture inspired by the resurgence of Marxism, critical of the euphoric sociology of the...

Michael Burawoy reflects back on 40 years of industrial ethnography in Zambia, the USA, Hungary and Russia to discover the mistakes he made and, thus, to infer the fallacies to which ethnography is subject. He traces these fallacies not to any ‘theoretical imposition’ but to...