On Sociology is a path-breaking book...Goldthorpe's project has all the scope and reach of the postwar fuctionalist program of Parsons and Merton, but it is likely to be more successful precisely becuase it allows a substantial role for empirical scholarship and can therefore contain and encompass the ongoing quantitative revolution...It is not, then, altogether implausible that the publication of On Sociology will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of the discipline.