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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.

26:T4ee,

Few texts have done more to shape how sociologists and social theorists think about workplace politics, labour agency, the everyday production of cooperation and even the sociology of work than Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent. As a result, discussing it poses a two-fold challenge – of scope and of depth. The first requires a profound understanding of the theoretical foundation of industrial sociology on which Burawoy built. The second, in-depth expertise of the organisation-level issues Burawoy puts forward. Paul Thompson, Emeritus Professor of Employment Studies at the University of Stirling, is a scholar equal to this challenge. Paul’s influential work has been central to shaping labour process analysis and debates, which Manufacturing Consent opened. Having extensively engaged with Burawoy’s work, Paul is uniquely placed to comment on the book’s legacy, over 40 years on. In the conversation which follows he reflects on how Burawoy is being taken up today, how Manufacturing Consent and its successor, The Politics of Production, changed the discipline, which of its insights have endured, and what still requires reflection and critical conversation.

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