Berkeley Sociology mourns the loss of Michael Burawoy, a world-renowned sociologist and professor emeritus who died February 3. Professor Burawoy is famous for his contributions to theory, methods, analyses of labor processes in industrial worksites, and analyses of the university as a workplace..
As ASA President, Burawoy developed and advanced his call for “public sociology” a call that energized more diverse and younger generations of sociologists to practice sociology through proactive engagement with concerns and questions that emanate from communities beyond academia. As ISA President, Burawoy built infrastructure for sustained scholarly exchange between scholars of the “global south” and the “global north.”
Burawoy’s teaching and mentoring were legendary, as were his commitments to the improvement of pedagogy and sustaining accessible, high-quality public education. Read more about Professor Burawoy’s life and legacy as well as the memories and tribes from his students and colleagues..
Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…
Departmental Colloquium Series
Alexandra Brewer, "Painful Solutions: How Corporatization Sustains Racial Inequality in Healthcare"
Monday March 31st, 2025 at 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom
Abstract:
Why, in a healthcare context that increasingly recognizes medical racism as a problem, do healthcare providers still make racially unequal decisions? In this talk, I make the case that to better understand enduring racial inequality in pain care, we need to look at how hospital work has changed under increasing pressures to cut costs, limit care, and protect the interests of insurance companies – a process broadly referred to as corporatization. Focusing on the case of hospital-based pain care and drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with clinicians at urban academic hospital, I show how corporatization has transformed what it means to be a good doctor in ways that put Black patients at a disadvantage. Today’s doctors grapple with two competing definitions of what it means to practice “good” pain medicine. The ideal of evidence-based medicine encourages doctors to keep patients in the hospital until patients themselves report improvement. The newer, corporatized ideal of high-value care pushes doctors to provide efficient pain treatment by getting patients out of the hospital as quickly as they can. Because of structural inequalities outside the hospital, doctors find it easy to reconcile these ideals when treating White and higher-income pain patients yet struggle to make them align when treating Black and poorer patients. As a result, they often feel that it is impossible to practice good medicine when treating Black pain patients. Ultimately, even well-intentioned doctors come to believe that Black pain patients should be discouraged from seeking hospital care.