Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer who question, Why do workers not labour harder? Michael Burawoy consumed ten months as a machine driver in a Chicago factory trying the answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why how workers routinely permission to their own exploitation?

Manufacturing Consent, the result from Burawoy’s research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy had been able to analyze his own versuche in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory xxx years earlier. Burawoy marks the technical, political, and ideological change in factory live to and transformations of the market relations of the work (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and in broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.