ABSTRACT
John Goldthorpe has never been one to extend his undoubted belief in the potential scientific neutrality of sociology as a discipline to embrace the neutrality of his own position and work. In fact, he has always been at some pains to make clear his own value commitments. For example, in Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain he remarks:
…we would recognise, and insist upon the need to recognise, that mobility research is an ideologically loaded area—in the sense that underlying a research interest in it, one must expect there to be also an ‘interest’ of a different kind, which in some way derives from the researcher’s own socio-political experience, values and commitments. (1980a: 2)
