Returning to Manufacturing Consent 45 years on

Abstract

We open the special section ‘Forty-five Years of Manufacturing Consent’ by returning to Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent 45 years after its publication to ask why it remains both enduring and contested in the sociology of work. Burawoy’s core insight was that workplace order is not secured by control alone: consent can be organised through everyday routines, incentives, relationships, and ‘games’ that make work workable even when power is uneven. Yet work has changed sharply since 1979, raising fresh questions about where consent is now produced when labour is dispersed across platforms, homes, care settings and fragmented labour markets, and how agency and subjectivity are shaped under precarity. The timing of this revisit is also shaped by Burawoy’s tragic passing in February 2025, which has prompted renewed reflection on his intellectual legacy and his commitments to engaged sociology. In this introductory article, we ask what the book helps us see now, what it cannot capture, and what it still provokes, then we introduce the papers in the section and reflect on what they mean for research on work, labour politics and sociological practice going forward.

This special section returns to Michael Burawoy’s (1947–2025) Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (1979) 45 years after its publication. The occasion, as when marking any anniversary, is partly chronological, but our primary motivation is more straightforward. The book remains a remarkably durable point of reference for thinking about the labour process, an ever mutating ‘shop-floor’ politics, and the practical organisation of cooperation at work. It also remains contested. Readers continue to disagree about what the book most clearly explains, what it leaves ambiguous, and what it encourages us to treat as significant in empirical accounts of work (Burawoy, 2012, ‘Manufacturing Consent revisited’). When we began working on this issue, Michael Burawoy was still with us. He was pleased to hear of the project, and we began arranging a time to talk through the issue’s aims and to reflect on what he thought the book had come to mean over its many afterlives. That conversation never happened.

The timing of this revisit is therefore shaped not only by an anniversary, but by Burawoy’s untimely death in February 2025 and the reflections it has generated on his intellectual presence and the kind of sociological life he represented. The outpouring of messages and memorials in the days and weeks following his passing emphasised the breadth of his engagements, spanning labour studies and wider debates about the public role of sociology (International Sociological Association [ISA], 2025). Read alongside Burawoy’s own late conversation with Michaela Benson, recorded only a week before his death, these reflections offer a particular way into the special section. They draw attention to the book’s afterlives, but also to the practices of enquiry, teaching and institutional work that sustained Burawoy’s scholarship and continue to shape its reception (Burawoy & Benson, 2025).

Revisiting Manufacturing Consent now therefore involves more than a return to a canonical argument. It involves returning to a style of sociological problem-setting that treats everyday life as consequential, and that takes seriously the relationship between ethnographic description, conceptual ambition, and importantly the publics they serve. The question for us, as editors and the authors of papers that make up this special section, is to explore how that style is packaged and travels, and how it might be reworked under present conditions of work and new domains of research (Burawoy, 2012, ‘Manufacturing Consent revisited’).

Consent, work games and the making of workplace order

One reason Manufacturing Consent has remained central to the sociology of work is that it offered a way of describing workplace order that neither rests content with managerial control nor reduces cooperation and worker cohesion to false consciousness (Hammer & Ness, 2021; Lin et al., 2023; Manolchev et al., 2018). Burawoy’s account of work games and shop-floor interaction attends to how effort is organised and how meanings attach to tasks, incentives and relations among workers. In this account, the ‘game’ is not an incidental feature of work culture. It is a mechanism through which the labour process becomes liveable and, at times, compelling, even when the distribution of power is not in doubt (Burawoy, 1979; Manolchev et al., 2025; Thompson & Vincent, 2010).

Burawoy’s own later reflections, penned on the book’s 30th anniversary, are useful here because they show him thinking with his earlier claims rather than simply defending them (Burawoy, 2012). He revisits the analytic choices that made certain dynamics visible, and he notes limits to what the book could track from within a particular industrial setting at a particular moment. Those limits matter for a revisit, because they make it possible to treat the book as a strong case whose portability to a particular now should not be assumed or taken for granted. They invite attention to what changes in labour regimes do to the very phenomena the book set out to explain, including the organisation of incentives, the patina of workplace community, and the relationship between ‘shop-floor’ (a location less obvious to locate these days) relations and broader institutions (Burawoy, 2012).

In this sense, revisiting Manufacturing Consent raises a methodological question as much as a substantive one (see, for example, Burawoy, 1998). What does it take to observe the production and politics of cooperation, or the negotiation of conflict (Burawoy, 1990), when workplaces are differently organised, when labour markets are fragmented (Kalleberg, 2011), or when the emergence of the gig-economy and platform work obscure both worker agency and its exploitation (Pulignano et al., 2023; Tirapani & Willmott, 2023)? Again, Burawoy’s own retrospective stance helps set the terms. It treats the original ethnography as grounded and historically situated, and it treats conceptual development as something that remains open to revision as the world, and the world of work, shifts.

Reading with and against Burawoy: Lines of enquiry for the special section

For the special section, we interviewed renowned labour process scholar Paul Thompson. Out of our discussion emerged an approach to the book that is attentive to inheritance and disagreement at the same time. Reflecting on Burawoy’s influence, Thompson notes the ways in which subsequent research has been shaped by the questions Manufacturing Consent made available, while also suggesting that some lines of enquiry have developed in tension with Burawoy’s framing, even, as Thompson put it, ‘in spite of what Burawoy did’ (Manolchev & Nolan, 2026, this issue). In context, this reads less as a provocation for its own sake than as a reminder that classic works are a product of their time, and represent distinctive and complex social realities (Jameson, 2002; Osborne, 1995). As such, they play an important role in the ongoing organisation of fields and disciplines by crafting problems, privileging certain vantage points, and creating habits of explanation that can later be reworked – to be taken up and treated as works in the sociology of history, rather than the history of sociology, so to speak.

Thompson also returns us to questions that remain central for labour process analysis and related traditions: how workers’ practical agency is expressed under constraint, how cooperation becomes patterned, and how accounts of workplace politics handle the relationship between immediate organisational relations and broader political-economic dynamics (Manolchev & Nolan, 2026, this issue). These questions are not resolved by revisiting the book per se but they are sharpened by it.

Burawoy’s conversation with Michaela Benson offers a complementary register. It situates the book within a longer arc of intellectual and institutional commitments, including questions about sociology’s publics, its internationalisms, and the conditions under which sociological work is carried out and circulated (Burawoy & Benson, 2025). That conversation encourages a reading of Manufacturing Consent that pays attention not only to what the book argued, but to what it exemplified as a form of sociological practice.

The contributions: Reworking consent, labour and sociological practice

The papers gathered in this special section approach Manufacturing Consent as a living problem-set rather than a settled template. They return, in different empirical settings, to questions Burawoy made difficult to ignore: how workplace orders become workable, how participation is organised, and how the rhythms of the everyday shape what can and cannot be contested.

Yiru Zhao extends Burawoy’s insights into a setting that sits well outside the factory, yet remains saturated with the organisation of effort and value creation. ‘Gamification, metrification, and data fans in China: From lovebour to playbour’ develops an account of ‘data fans’ whose participation in Chinese music-platform ecosystems is structured through metrification and gamification. On Zhao’s analysis, quantified rankings, leaderboards and algorithmic feedback loops help organise sustained engagement, producing a form of consent oriented around play, competition and collective achievement. Key to the argument here is to treat pleasure and expertise as features of the labour process rather than as evidence that labour is absent. The paper’s ethnographic attention to how people learn platform rules, build folk theories of algorithms, and invest time and resources in ‘bounty-hunting’ practices reframes consent as something that can be cultivated through the ordinary satisfactions of participation, even where the parameters of participation remain opaque and asymmetrical (Zhao, 2026, this issue).

In their paper ‘Domestic and care work and the reproductive labour process’, Tom Hoctor and Joana Almeida work in the opposite direction, taking labour process analysis into reproductive labour and social care. Starting from Burawoy’s insistence that the labour process is constituted through human relations as much as through technical instruments, the paper develops the contours of a reproductive labour process and traces how coercion, consent and resistance are lived across the overlapping domains of paid care and unpaid domestic labour. What stands out in the framing and the empirical material is how consent often takes an affective form, and how the ‘games’ carers play centre on time, exhaustion and the continual negotiation of competing obligations. The diaries and ethnographic vignettes help make visible a labour process shaped by precarious employment, migration, gendered responsibility and a blurring of workplace and household pressures. The authors’ broader claim is that bringing reproduction into labour process analysis is not an add-on; it clarifies the changing social organisation of work in contexts where care is increasingly commodified yet still anchored in informal expectations and unevenly distributed burdens (Hoctor & Almeida, 2026, this issue).

Daniel Nicholson approaches Manufacturing Consent through a different register again, treating it as a pivotal text in Burawoy’s wider intellectual and political commitments. ‘Between utopia and anti-utopia: Labour process analysis and the collective struggle to transcend managerial domination’ builds on Burawoy’s framing of sociology as moving through utopian, anti-utopian, and ‘real utopian’ moments, and uses this to reflect on labour process analysis as a tradition that has been exceptionally good at documenting managerial control while often struggling to develop sustained accounts of collective alternatives. In this reading, Manufacturing Consent is an important work partly because of its analytic power, and partly because of the pessimism it seemed to imply about workers’ capacity to push back against managerial domination once consent is organised through everyday workplace arrangements (see also the discussion on worker agency in Manolchev & Nolan, 2026, this issue). The paper then uses this as a prompt to ask what a more publicly engaged labour process analysis might look like, particularly one that stays close to workers and unions and treats ‘alternatives’ as an empirical and strategic question rather than a purely normative one (Nicholson, 2026, this issue).

Mia Zhong, Cassie Kill, Kirsty Finn, Rachel Cohen, Kim Allen and Kate Hardy consider the reasons why students engage in poor quality/low paid work. Their ‘Student workers as proto-workers: “Experience”, quitting and the production of consent’ suggests that student employment has gradually been re-framed as 'proto-work’, that is, work undertaken in order to gain enough experience to secure ‘real work’. This need to gain experience is exploited by employers, treating students as ‘proto-workers’ and offering them worse pay and working conditions. It is also facilitated by the centrality of ‘experience’ and employability in educational policy. As a result of such employment realities and education pressures, students consent to their exploitation at the current time in the name of experience and hope for future employment opportunities (see also Manolchev et al., 2025). Students retain their ‘labour mobility power’ and the article identifies the scope for student resistance. However, and drawing on Manufacturing Consent, the authors acknowledge the act of quitting simply reinforces existing hegemonic structures and reinforces the role of students as disposable ‘proto-workers’.

As a collection, these papers broaden the empirical terrain on which Manufacturing Consent can continue to be read and reworked. They also sharpen a set of cross-cutting questions that matter for the section’s overall arc. Where, today, do we locate the production of consent, and as we alluded to above, what counts as a relevant ‘shop-floor’ when labour is distributed across platforms, homes, care settings and fragmented organisational forms? What are the contemporary equivalents of work games, and what do they organise, deflect or make thinkable? How does worker subjectivity, expressed as affect, enjoyment, duty and insecurity, figure as practical mediator of participation? And, as a further question for the issue as a whole, what are the implications for how sociologists write about work and engage with the publics that form around it (Burawoy & Benson, 2025; Manolchev & Nolan, 2026, this issue).

Repositioning Manufacturing Consent

A useful way to see the special section’s emerging shape is to treat Manufacturing Consent as offering a set of analytic sensitivities rather than a single transferable model or inevitability. One sensitivity concerns the hegemonic production of workplace order. Burawoy argued that workers could not challenge the rules of the game while playing it. Connecting with Paul Thompson’s critique (Manolchev & Nolan, 2026, this issue), the articles featured in this special issue show that workers are not ‘blind-sided’ by the game. The production of consent is not the result of a single game, but multiple ones, with rules both reinforced and at odds with each other, and spanning the pleasures, solidarities and competitions of daily life at work. Even though these games may reinforce the regimes within which workers are situated and act, the hegemonic bulwark separating worker consent from the consequences of this consent seems to be crumbling. Worker subjectivity is retained and expressed with Nicholson (this issue) reminding us that employment settings may differ but the capacity for collective participation and co-creation remains.

Consequently, another sensitivity concerns the relationship between consent and subjectivity. Across the papers in the section, consent is not approached as a simple acceptance of domination, or an unexpected consequence. It appears as a practical orientation that is produced and reproduced through the organisation of time, recognition, metrics, affective ties and collective routines. This is clear in the platform context, where Yiru Zhao (current issue) shows how competitive play and algorithmic opacity can sustain ongoing engagement. It is equally clear in the care context, where Tom Hoctor and Joana Almeida’s diarists article shows how decisions about overtime, exhaustion and care obligations show consent as entangled with necessity, attachment and moral responsibility.

A final sensitivity concerns the limits of critique that stops at diagnosis. Mia Zhong et al. show games as continuous cycles played over time and space. Such exploitative games appear unchanged even as the initial players exist, and new ones enter. This argument foregrounds an issue that has hovered around Manufacturing Consent since its publication. If the point is to understand how domination becomes workable, what follows for sociological practice and for the politics of work? This is a question important not only for work sociology scholars, or this special issue but central to the legacy of Burawoy’s work. It uses Burawoy’s own reflections on public sociology to argue for research that is willing to move beyond documenting constraint in order to imagine collective possibilities and alternatives, even when those are not quite the fully-fledged ‘real utopias’ but simply possibilities – partial, provisional and hard-won.