I took a break from posting for a few weeks while having a much needed internet free vacation - Algarve and then London. Now I'm back in harness and catching up. For those that missed it here is a link to an interview with John Goldthorpe in which he sets out the case for paying serious attention to ALL the relevant evidence about social mobility in the UK. The argument is pretty unanswerable unless you have no interest in evidence based science and policy. At the end he also has a few choice comments on the Great British Class Survey. I'm actually impressed that an LSE site hosted the interview given that it draws attention to the inadequacies of some of the work produced by the School's own faculty. It will be interesting to see how long this open minded policy survives in the era of impact spin.
As I mentioned before I submitted my own thoughts on the GBCS to Sociology and promised to keep you informed about the outcome. I didn't have long to wait (only about half the time it took from submission to acceptance of Savage et al.'s original article). My effort received a flat desk reject - ie not sent out to referees - which increased my respect for the rapidity with which the referees of the original article acted if not for the soundness of their judgement. A radically shortened version will be going back.
Those that are interested in the full length version can find it here. It's not just a simple rehash of my original blog post and has some new material which I think is quite important (well I would wouldn't I?).
Undeterred, the fight against all sorts of Bad Social Science will continue, with or without the help of the conventional print journals.
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