John Goldthorpe: Annual Report 1999-2000

John Goldthorpe (Official Fellow) worked with Colin Mills (LSE) on the British part of a collaborative cross-national research project, centred on the EUI in Florence, and aimed at establishing trends and patterns of intergenerational class mobility in Europe and the US in the last decades of the twentieth century. This work involved the creation of a major new data-set from the General Household Survey files. Some preliminary findings were presented at a conference held at the EUI in December and a more advanced paper was completed later in the year which presents results on teh (declining) role of education in class mobility that link encouragingly with those of his further work on 'meritocracy', with Richard Breen, based on the NCDS and BCS70 cohort studies.

He also pursued his interests in the theory of social class and social mobility, giving a paper on the latter theme at the 50th anniversary meeting of the Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility of the ISA which was held at Libourne, France in May. In the summer he took up a new topic, that of the effect of globalization on national class structures, and prepared a paper on this topic for an international conference to be held in Stockholm in October.

He continued to act as consultant to the ESRC-ONS committee working on the implementation of the new ONS Socio-Economic Classification, and also as a member of the Scientific Council of the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin and of the International Curatorium of the Inter-University Centre for Social Science Theory and Methodology in the Netherlands. In the latter role, he spent a week in December at the Universities of Gröningen and Utrecht.

In September he acted as academic organizer of the second Graduate Summer School of the European Consortium for Sociological Research that was held in Oxford, and then took part in teh ESF-ECSR Conference that followed in Giens, France, on the theme of 'Educational Differentiation in European Societies', presenting a paper, with Richard Breen, on their work referred to above.

Publications

On Sociology: Numbers, Narratives and the Integration of Research and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

'The Present Crisis in Sociology: A Way Beyond Spurious Pluralism?', in Stefan Svallfors and Thomas P. Boje (eds.), The New Millennium: Essays on the Current State of Sociology. Umeå: Sociologiska Institutionen, Umeå Universitet, 2000.

'Rent,Class Conflict and Class Structure: A Commentary on Sørensen', American Journal of Sociology, 105, 2000.