professorship at the University of Exeter, UK. Scott was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to social science. Class, power, and elites Scott has been one of the few British sociologists to investigate the capitalist class and its power. His research in stratification and political economy has explored the changing patterns of ownership in contemporary capitalist economies and the ways in which these changes are reflected in elite recruitment. Critical of the prevailing managerialist interpretation of business enterprise, he developed the influential concept of 'control through a constellation of interests' to describe the dispersed forms of ownership and control that allow representatives of dominant shareholding interests in Britain and the United States to exercise a constraining power over internal business decision-making. His research on networks of shareholding and interlocking directorships has documented the structures and mechanisms through which this constraining power operates. The research has depicted the varying, path-dependent patterns of control found in major capitalist economies. Scott has contrasted the 'Anglo-American' pattern of controlling constellations with the 'German' pattern of aligned corporate filiations, the 'Latin' pattern of 'corporate webs', and the 'Japanese' pattern of corporate sets. Scott explored, in the British case, the historical development of a capitalist class through a close association of landholding and financial interests and showed the mechanisms through which this class could be described as a ruling class. Theory and methodology Social network analysis has been at the heart of Scott's methodological work. He has helped to popularise this method of structural analysis through synthesising texts and his own applications of the method. He has, in addition, undertaken work on the use of documents in social research, producing, in 1990, A Matter of Record as one of the first texts on this topic. Like his work on social network analysis, this work developed from a practical research involvement in the use of the method. Scott's reflections on documentary research derived initially from his use of company records, civil registration records, and newspapers as source materials in his studies of business organisation. Scott's commitment to social theory as the core sociological activity dates from his early engagement with the work of Talcott Parsons and has been inspired by that writer's commitment to theoretical synthesis. Scott's view is that behind the contending theoretical explanations proposed by different theorists there is a set of concepts that