In an address to the American Sociological Association, Burawoy (2004),adistinguished sociologist of work, argued for a greater engagement of sociology in public debates.This would entail harnessing sociology’s‘longstanding critical imagination, reminding us that the world could be different’. Burawoy (2004) draws here on Mills’ (1970) notion of the sociological imagination, proposing that ‘as they turn private troubles into public issues, public sociologies should challenge the world as we know it exposing the gap between what is and what could be’. In the specific context of the sociology of work and employment, Stewart (2004) connects the notion of a public sociology to a recognition that there is ‘an ethical dimension underlying our work’. This might, in turn, be connected, in debates, to the ‘question[ing] of the hegemony of neo-liberalism and the need to challenge it in our workwhenever relevant’. Stewart (2004), in addition to suggesting a critique of neo-liberal market-based political-economic philosophies is particularly concerned, alongside Fevre (2003), to counter the influence of what he refers to as ‘a range of actors obsessed with paying court to management as consultants peddling the verities of, for example. . . lean production and High Performance Work Systems’.