The idea of public sociology, as introduced by Michael Burawoy, was inspired by the sociological practice in South Africa known as ‘critical engagement’. This volume explores the evolution of critical engagement before and after Burawoy’s visit to South Africa in the 1990s and offers a Southern critique of his model of public sociology. Involving four generations of researchers from the Global South, the authors provide a multifaceted exploration of the formation of new knowledge through research practices of co-production. Tracing the historical development of ‘critical engagement’ from a Global South perspective, the book deftly weaves a bridge between the debates on public sociology and decolonial frameworks.

Rising Powers, People Rising is a pathbreaking volume in which leading international scholars discuss the emerging political economy of development in the BRICS countries centred on neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggles. The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These socio-economic fault lines have, in turn, given rise to political convulsions across the BRICS countries, ranging from single-issue protests to sustained social movements oriented towards structural transformation. The contributions in this book focus on the ways in and extent to which these trajectories generate distinct forms and patterns of mobilization and resistance, and conversely, how popular struggles impact on and shape these trajectories. The book unearths the economic, social, and political contradictions that tend to disappear from view in mainstream narratives of the BRICS countries as rising powers in the world-system. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

The idea of public sociology, as introduced by Michael Burawoy, was inspired by the sociological practice in South Africa known as 'critical engagement'. This volume explores the evolution of critical engagement before and after Burawoy's visit to South Africa in the 1990s and offers a Southern critique of his model of public sociology. Involving four generations of researchers from the Global South, the authors provide a multifaceted exploration of the formation of new knowledge through research practices of co-production. Tracing the historical development of 'critical engagement' from a Global South perspective, the book deftly weaves a bridge between the debates on public sociology and decolonial frameworks.

Rising Powers, People Rising is a pathbreaking volume in which leading international scholars discuss the emerging political economy of development in the BRICS countries centred on neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggles. The rise of the BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These socio-economic fault lines have, in turn, given rise to political convulsions across the BRICS countries, ranging from single-issue protests to sustained social movements oriented towards structural transformation. The contributions in this book focus on the ways in and extent to which these trajectories generate distinct forms and patterns of mobilization and resistance, and conversely, how popular struggles impact on and shape these trajectories. The book unearths the economic, social, and political contradictions that tend to disappear from view in mainstream narratives of the BRICS countries as rising powers in the world-system. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Has the apartheid workplace been superseded or entrenched over the past ten years of democracy in South Africa? In order to answer these questions, the authors of this book studied seventeen different workplaces, including BMW, a state hospital, footwear sweatshops and the wine farming industry. The editors broaden the definition of work to cover studies of the informal economy, including street traders, homeworkers and small rural enterprises. Beyond the Apartheid Workplace shows how South Africa's triple transition - towards political democracy, economic liberalisation and post-colonial transformation - has generated contradictory pressures at workplace level. A wide range of managerial strategies and union responses are identified, demonstrating both continuities and discontinuities with past practices. These studies reveal a growing differentiation within the world of work between stable, formal-sector work, casualised and outsourced work, and informal work where people struggle to 'make a living' on the margins of the formal economy. The majority of workplaces are marked by the persistence and reconfiguration of the apartheid legacy.The growth of casualisation and informalisation generates deepening poverty and exclusion among great numbers of households. These are some of the startling conclusions drawn by the editors of this groundbreaking collection, which will undoubtedly stimulate debate and further research among social scientists, trade unionists, managers and policymakers.

This title takes a very different approach, exploring the transition from below at a micro-institutional level. It analyses the militant struggle of black workers against the despotism and racism of white power in the workplace, and of their participation in the broader political struggle against apartheid; the triumphant democratic breakthrough which culminated in the election of an ANC government in 1994; and the workers' strategy for reconstruction in the workplace and in local politics. The author explores the chaos and ungovernability in workplace and community as activists endeavoured to disrupt the order of apartheid, as well as the outlines of a new order that emerged from this turbulence. Simultaneously, it examines the divisions and contestation within the union - between political activists and shop stewards, between migrant outsiders and urban locals - that erupted in open conflict and violence between workers. The struggle against white power was simultaneously a struggle to build trade union organisation in a continuous process of forging and reforging the meaning and 'law' of the union. This title shows how trade union collective identity in the 1980s consisted of a complex amalgam of popular, class and workplace identities, many of which - popular political identity and migrant identity in particular - were forged beyond the workplace.