Traveling games: Burawoy’s making-out game in China labor studies

Michael Burawoy’s game of making out was developed from a unionized workplace under postwar US monopoly capitalism, supported by an internal labor market, grievance procedures, collective bargaining, and broader regulatory protections. Treating this theory not as a universal model of consent but as a historically contingent framework, we review Chinese- and English-language studies that cite Manufacturing Consent and examine workplace games in China. We analyze how Burawoy’s framework has traveled through three patterns: approximation, reconfiguration, and displacement. Few studies approximate Burawoy’s original model, in which workers possess meaningful room for maneuver and games generate consent. Most studies show the reconfiguration of workplace games under despotic or semi-despotic conditions, where management-organized games, piece rates, algorithms, and complex rule systems elicit participation alongside coercion, evasion, and resistance. A final strand displaces the labor-process problematic by explaining participation primarily through morality, identity, affect, and discourse. The Chinese case shows that workplace games remain analytically useful, but only when consent is disaggregated and games are situated within historically specific regimes of production politics.