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.
Manolchev et al. (2026) studied this question.