 Based on his studies of the workplace he has looked into the nature of postcolonialism, the organization of state socialism, and the problems in the transition from socialism.In more recent times, Burawoy has moved away from observing factories to looking at his own place of work—the university—to consider the way sociology is taught to students and how it is put into the public domain.His work on public sociology is most prominently shown in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 2004, where he divides sociology into four separate (yet overlapping) categories