This Sociological Life

Pryor's office held precisely one decoration: a framed quote above his desk reading IN GOD WE TRUST; ALL OTHERS MUST BRING DATA. He was somewhere in his fifties, immaculate, and visibly irritated to be interrupted mid-equation.

"Desmond was a brilliant qualitative researcher," he said, in the tone of a man delivering a compliment as a weapon, "and an increasingly sentimental one. Candour's model is sound. Reliable. Replicable. What the client does with a reliable model afterwards isn't a flaw in the science, Dr Voss, whatever Desmond had started telling himself."

"He was going to call it a betrayal of value-neutrality. Publicly. Thursday."

"Value-neutrality," said Pryor, "is the idea you declare your values and keep them out of your method, not that you refuse any method capable of being used by anyone you personally dislike. Desmond had confused the two. I told him so, several times, with increasing lack of patience on both our parts."