social exclusion, equality of opportunity, distributive justice and the culture of economic enterprise, and he has written widely on these topics. He played an instrumental role in the Government Review of social classifications, both as a consultant and as a member of the steering group to the study, which was run jointly by the ESRC and the Office for National Statistics and which resulted in major changes to official classifications. Marshall's early research was focused on Max Weber and the origins of modern economies. His first book, based on his doctoral thesis, concerned Calvinism and the development of capitalism in seventeenth-century Scotland. In later publications he addressed the complexities of social mobility and social class which were central to the concerns of the so-called ‘Nuffield School’ of sociology. In his co-authored volume, Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies, published in 1997, Marshall and his colleagues took a cautious and nuanced view of the relationship between social class, social mobility and social justice through educational opportunities. Their research was rooted, in Nuffield style, in a range of social survey empirical data. His single-authored volume Repositioning Class: Social Inequality in Industrial Societies, also published in 1997, brought together a number of his essays from the previous decade, in which he argues that public pronouncements about the death of social class were greatly exaggerated. As Marshall wrote in the preface to this volume, “Social class is as important to the understanding of late twentieth-century industrial societies as it was to their early capitalist counterparts and class analysis is probably now in a healthier state than at any previous time in its long sociological history”. Marshall’s main contribution to Nuffield sociology was his connection of concepts of social justice with social mobility. He argued persuasively that political intervention is required to prevent class inequalities from impeding the advance of social justice. During the 1990s Marshall also played an important part in the creation of the department of sociology at Oxford University, in the teeth of some stiff resistance, especially from among the political scientists who wanted to subsume the subject under their discipline. Awards and honours He was an Official Fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford from 1993 until 1999. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000 and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in 2001 and awarded a CBE in