John Goldthorpe's 1995-96 Annual Research Report

John Goldthorpe (Official Fellow) combines interests in comparative macrosociology and in sociological theory. His central concern is with the problem of explaining at the level of social action the macrosocial regularities over time and place that can be displayed through the quantitative analysis of large-scale data-sets - in particular in the field of social stratification. In March he gave the keynote paper to a conference on ‘Causation, Actors, and the Empirical Analysis of Social Processes’, organized by the University of Bremen. In May he presented a paper (with Richard Breen, Queen’s University Belfast) to an international seminar in Stockholm, which attempted to formalise a rational action explanation of persisting class, but declining gender, differentials in educational attainment. In June he gave the opening address on ‘The Integration of Sociological Research and Theory’ to a conference in Groningen to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Netherlands Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology. He became a member of the International Curatorium that supervises the work of the Centre. In September he gave a paper on modelling the persistence of class voting in British General Elections to a joint meeting in Paris of sociologists from Nuffield and the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique.

During the year he also worked further with Richard Breen on problems of measuring ‘meritocracy’; with Garrett Fitzmaurice on problems of overdispersion in survey data and model choice; and as a consultant to the ESRC Review Committee on ‘social’ classifications in official statistics.

Publications

‘The Service Class Revisited’ in M Savage and T Butler (eds.), Social Change and the Middle Classes. London: UCL Press, 1995.

‘Problems of “Meritocracy”’, in R Erikson and J O Jonsson (eds.), Can Education be Equalized? Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996.

‘Class and Politics in Advanced Industrial Societies’ in D J Lee and B S Turner (eds.), Conflicts about Class. London: Longmans, 1996.

‘Il voto di classe in Gran Bretagna’, Polis, 10, 1996.

‘The Quantitative Analysis of Large-Scale Data-Sets and Rational Action Theory: For a Sociological Alliance’, European Sociological Review, 12, 1996.

‘Class Analysis and the Reorientation of Class Theory: the Case of Persisting Differentials in Educational Attainment’, British Journal of Sociology, 45, 1996.