Consent, coercion and conflict: interrogating the legacy of Michael Burawoy

Though Michael Burawoy had long abandoned any substantive interest in the politics of production, his work has continued to provide a conceptual language for important strands of contemporary research. This article seeks to critically evaluate this trajectory and legacy. The primary aim is to re-conceptualize the dimensions of consent making to create conditions for more-nuanced and less-pessimistic understandings of conflict and antagonism at work. We argue that Burawoy’s separation of the labour process from value extraction removes the source of resistance from inside the labour process and therefore diminishes the grounds for politics at work. The article recognizes that researchers in a Burawoyan tradition have applied its categories in creative and contingent way showing awareness of variation in regime dynamics, as well as political and ideological expression. However, we argue that the concept of consent still serves largely as a container category to describe the state of worker subjectivity amid workplace change. Shedding light on both the conceptual contradictions in Burawoy and the different dimensions of consent making and consent taking, we treat the potential effects on alignment of interests as an open and contingent matter and seek to offer conceptual clarifications that are a necessary precondition for putting a politics of production back in the picture.