European colleagues, notably Robert Erikson at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, University of Stockholm, and Walter Müller at the University of Mannheim. In the late 1980s he acted as consultant on sociological research in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He played a leading role in the creation of the European Sociological Review and in the formation of the European Consortium for Sociological Research. He became an Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield in 2002 but continues to be research active. Research While at Cambridge, Goldthorpe undertook, together with David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt, the Affluent Worker studies, which called into question the idea of the embourgeoisement of the British working class. After arriving at Nuffield, he co-directed the Nuffield Social Mobility study of 1972, which introduced the loglinear modelling of social class mobility tables, leading to the crucial distinction between absolute and relative mobility rates. Several prevailing views about mobility in mid-twentieth century Britain were challenged. During the 1980s he worked with Robert Erikson and Walter Müller on the CASMIN project – a cross-national comparative study of intergenerational class mobility. On the basis of further technical innovations in the analysis of mobility tables, Erikson and Goldthorpe developed the concept of a ‘core model’ of such mobility, which, they suggested, was prevalent, with national-specific variations, across all advanced industrial societies. In the course of this work the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) class schema was developed and has subsequently been widely used in comparative social research. A specifically British version of the schema was also developed by Goldthorpe and this provided the theoretical basis for the Office for National Statistics' Socio-Economic Classification which, in 2002, was introduced into British official statistics in replacement of the old Registrar-General's Social Classes. In the 1990s Goldthorpe concentrated mainly on theoretical and methodological issues, in particular on the understanding of social causation and, relatedly, on the application of rational action theory in the explanation of the probabilistic empirical regularities typically established through large-scale social survey research. As an illustration, he produced, together with Richard Breen, a rational action model of class-linked differences in educational choice, which has been widely tested and discussed. He also worked with Robert Erikson and Michelle Jackson on ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ effects in the creation of educational inequalities and, with these colleagues and in collaboration with David Cox, proposed statistical methods for distinguishing between the two