John Goldthorpe (Official Fellow) was chiefly occupied in completing a collection of essays, to be published by OUP under the title of Numbers and Narratives. These bring together his work over the past ten years aimed at achieving a closer relationship between research and theory in sociology and, more specifically, between the quantitative analysis of large-scale data-sets and social, especially rational, action theory. He also continued his work, with Richard Breen of the European University Institute in Florence, on ‘meritocracy’ in present-day Britain.

In December he took part in a conference organized by the ESRC and ONS to launch the new Socio-Economic Classification that has been adopted by the ONS to replace the Registrar General’s Social Classes in official statistics and that in effect takes over the conceptual and theoretical basis of the class schema that he and various colleagues developed. In October, he gave the Geary Memorial Lecture at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin on ‘Causation, Statistics and Sociology’, which was subsequently published by ESRI in an extended version. In May he was one of the opening speakers at a conference at the University of Umeå on ‘The state of sociology at the end of the twentieth century’.

He continued to serve 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 Consortium for Sociology in the Netherlands.