From 1970 to 1973 Goldthorpe was Editor of "Sociology." But from the mid-1970s he became disappointed and disillusioned with the state of sociology in Britain, chiefly because of what he regarded as the undue dominance of socio-political commitments and pseudo-philosophical positions and the disregard of, if not actual hostility towards, new quantitative methods. He left the British Sociological Association and, outside of Oxford, worked mainly with 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.