He developed the institute into a major center for anthropological research, and continued to maintain close connections there after he moved to England in 1947 to take up a lectureship at Oxford.
One feature of the Manchester School that derives from Gluckman's early training in law was the emphasis on "case studies" involving analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions.
Gluckman combined the British school of structural-functionalism with a Marxist focus on inequality and oppression, creating a critique of colonialism from within structuralism.
Bruce Kapferer described Gluckman as "perhaps the anthropologist par excellence whose own personal life, history and consciousness not only embodied some of the critical crises of the modern world but also demanded that the anthropology he imagined should confront and examine them" (in "The Crisis in Anthropology" on the occasion of the first Max Gluckman Memorial lecture.)
Gluckman was of considerable influence on several anthropologists and sociologists Lars Clausen, Ronald Frankenberg, Bruce Kapferer, J. Clyde Mitchell, Victor Turner, Johan Frederik Holleman, and other students and interlocutors.