John Harry Goldthorpe FBA (born 27 May 1935) is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 sociologist and an emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College

Nuffield College, Oxford

Nuffield College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is an all-graduate college and primarily a research establishment, specialising in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. It is a research centre in the social sciences...

, Oxford. He works in the areas of social stratification

Social stratification

In sociology the social stratification is a concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions ... a relational set of inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions."...

, macrosociology

Macrosociology

Macrosociology is an approach to the discipline which emphasizes the analysis of social systems and populations on a large scale, at the level of social structure, and often at a necessarily high level of theoretical abstraction. Microsociology, by contrast, focuses on the individual social agency...

, and recently cultural consumption. He has made important contributions to the practical application of sociological Rational Choice Theory

Rational choice theory

Rational choice theory, also known as choice theory or rational action theory, is a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior. It is the main theoretical paradigm in the currently-dominant school of microeconomics...

.

He was a student of David Glass at the London School of Economics.

Early life

Goldthorpe was born in Great Houghton

Great Houghton, South Yorkshire

Great Houghton is a village and civil parish in the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, England), on the border with West Yorkshire. It lies to the west of Thurnscoe, on the B6411 road, and is located at approximately 53° 33' 20" North, 1° 21' West, at an elevation of around 60...

, West Riding of Yorkshire

West Riding of Yorkshire

The West Riding of Yorkshire is one of the three historic subdivisions of Yorkshire, England. From 1889 to 1974 the administrative county, County of York, West Riding , was based closely on the historic boundaries...

; his father was a colliery clerk. He was educated at
Wath-upon-Dearne Grammar School, University College, London and the London School of Economics.

Research

His work on social class led to the well-established Goldthorpe class schema, one of the standard approaches to classify class in sociology. The Goldthorpe class schema is based on eleven classes, which are grouped into three main clusters—the service class, the intermediate class, and the working class.

Goldthorpe has contributed to the understanding of social mobility

Social mobility

Social mobility refers to the movement of people in a population from one social class or economic level to another. It typically refers to vertical mobility -- movement of individuals or groups up from one socio-economic level to another, often by changing jobs or marrying; but can also refer to...

. Goldthorpe is also well-known for his work on the embourgeoisement thesis

Embourgeoisement thesis

Embourgeoisement is the process of migration of individuals into the bourgeoisie as a result of their own efforts or collective action, such as that taken by unions in the US and elsewhere in the 1930 through 1960s that established middle class status for factory workers and others that would not...

 which he dispelled in 1963.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy

British Academy

The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national body for the humanities and the social sciences. Its purpose is to inspire, recognise and support excellence in the humanities and social sciences, throughout the UK and internationally, and to champion their role and value.It receives an annual...

 in 1984. He is also a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.The Academy was founded on 2...

 since 2001.

Works

• 2007 On Sociology (2nd Edition). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• 2004 The economic basis of social class. London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics
  London School of Economics
  The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
  
  .
• 2000 On sociology: numbers, narratives, and the integration of research and theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-829571-5
• 1996 Rational choice theory and large-scale data analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 1992 The constant flux: a study of class mobility in industrial societies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-827383-5
• 1992 Revised class schema. London: Social and Community Planning Research.
• 1989 The uses of history in sociology: reflections on some recent tendencies. Oxford: Nuffield College.
• 1987 Social mobility and class structure in modern Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-827286-3
• 1963 The affluent worker: political attitudes and behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-07204-2