A record 11.7 million viewers tuned in to see England's 2019 Women's World Cup semi-final loss to the United States; 38,262 supporters watched the North London derby between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal in November 2019. In the summer of 2020 Women's Super League (WSL) clubs made a number of signings of key players from the United States and from leading French club Lyon. Chelsea completed a world record deal of around L300,000 for Danish attacker Pernille Harder. It could justifiably be claimed that “women's football is going through seismic change on an unprecedented scale, as men's clubs and commercial partners finally begin to get serious about it” (Brewin 2020: 55).

Referring to women's football implies that it is something unusual and different from the men's game. A controversial question is, “why should women's and men's football be kept separate? … What is it about sociocultural understandings of women's and men's bodies that mean it is impossible for them to appear – officially – on the same field of play?” (Caudwell 2011: 339). As it is, the whole history of women's football “is a story of repression and exclusion” (Koller & Brändle 2015: 276). This is in large part because the presence of women in football is seen to challenge traditional notions of masculinity. One of the oldest clichés in football is that it is a “man's game”. Hence, “the foundational fact that football was a locus of masculine self-representation changed very little. Football remained a starkly masculine sport” (Koller & Brändle 2015: 266). Many of the standard treatments of the economics of football either do not mention the women's game at all or only do so in passing.

Even when women have been present, they have often been largely invisible, as was the case for female fans for much of the period when football was a popular spectator sport

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Lucy May (1872– 1956), who was its original inspiration. Until I undertook the research for this book, I was puzzled by this otherwise Victorian lady's interest in football, but I did not realize how early women's football developed in this country. She was particularly interested in questions of promotion and relegation, but considered one had to look beyond the manager and the teams, important though those were, to explore longer-term socioeconomic trends which is what I have done in this book.

I am a long-standing fan of Charlton Athletic where I am a regular contributor to the fanzine. At my local non-league club, Leamington, I am secretary of the Vice-Presidents’ Club and write an article in each home match programme. I have therefore been able to observe changes in football from two ends of the spectrum. Both Charlton and Leamington have had troubled histories, losing their grounds. Leamington disappeared altogether as a club for over a decade and was only revived due to the tireless efforts of fans. Hence, I have direct personal experience of the struggles faced by clubs and their fans to survive, let alone succeed.

Football is being transformed by forces outside the control of the ordinary fan. These may be summarized by one word that offers a central theme of this book: globalization. Clubs are increasingly controlled by foreign owners who usually have no personal or emotional link with the club. They have a variety of motives, ranging from prestige and political protection to making money. Not all foreign owners are bad, indeed the “rogue owner” problem often occurs domestically. However, as the owner of a football club you are a trustee for a community asset and many owners do not understand that.

While this book is written by a football fan, my working life has been as an academic with a broad interest in what has been termed “political economy”. In particular, one area of interest has been in the way in which the excesses of a capitalist market economy may be tempered by regulation. Indeed, regulation may be necessary to prevent a market economy destroying itself and its potential benefits.

The Bloomington school and the new economic sociology both attempt to understand how and why people actually act and interact, rather than pursuing single explanatory factors to explain human behavior. Both posit that an individual's economic action is embedded in their social relations, their social context, their social norms, their community, but that people are individuals who think freely and deeply, reflecting on their choices, and are not guided entirely by formal and informal rules. Both schools also share an important intellectual foundation in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Bringing together thought from these schools will show what each can offer the other, strengthening their shared ideas and opening up areas of research where knowledge from both can be combined to explore new and old puzzles. Economic sociology, as Emile Durkheim ([1909] 1978) described, is the application of the sociological perspective to the study of economic phenomena.

Economic sociology, thus, approaches the study of economic phenomena with an appreciation that social factors, forces and structures can affect economic phenomena and that in turn economic phenomena can impact social factors, forces and structures. Max Weber (1949) has, similarly, explained that the field of economic sociology, or Sozialokonomik as he called it, is principally concerned with pure economic phenomena like prices, consumers and firms, economically relevant phenomena like religion which can shape the economic behavior of adherents, and economically conditioned phenomena like the family whose structure can be shaped by economic outcomes. Consider, for instance, Max Weber's ([1905] 1998) most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he explores how Protestantism offered an ethical foundation for the particular spirit of enterprise that animates modern capitalism in the West. More recently, Viviana Zelizer (1978) has explained how a shift in attitudes about life insurance, from something that was stigmatized to something that was celebrated, changed the prospects of that industry.

Most early political economists, such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, could be quite accurately described as economic sociologists, although the term didn't come to be used until the late nineteenth century, with thinkers such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (Smelser & Swedberg 1994: 8).

The final substantive chapter examines the impact of international sanctions on the North Korean political economy. On the one hand, sanctions can be said to have exacerbated the tendency whereby North Korea has become an economic appendage of the booming Chinese economy. Indeed, we examine how the strengthening of sanctions have coincided with a shift away from economic relations with its erstwhile trading partners of South Korea and Japan and towards China. In terms of their impact, we argue that sanctions until 2017 at least largely failed to exert pressure on the North Korean economy, but they have at the same time deepened the illicit nature of its external economic relations. Even less have they translated into political pressure on the North Korean regime. We also examine the impact of increased enforcement by China of UN sanctions since 2017 and the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign. By examining the unintended consequences of sanctions, the chapter contributes to critiques of the mainstream sanctions literature and has direct policy implications.

This chapter attempts to understand the medical innovation landscape of India in detail by specifically focussing on the pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and medical technology sectors. The first part of the chapter overviews the performance of these sectors with a special focus on research and development (R&D). The second part attempts to unearth the institutional co-production of medical R&D. This section of the chapter examines the formal and informal actors and processes in the network of production, the institutional network of funding and product development. The data presented in the chapter are drawn from secondary sources and published literature on medical innovations in India and other countries. The data on industry performance are obtained mainly from CMIE Prowess, reports of the Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises (ABLE) and the published reports of the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Biotechnology and the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers. The data on funding are compiled from various sources including CMIE Prowess for private and public Indian and foreign companies, the Department of Science and Technology, the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), Government of India (GOI), for funding of research institutions and websites of the companies and service aggregators for the funding of start-ups. The data on clinical trials across companies and disease and participating hospitals are compiled from the Clinical Trial Registry of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

The Indian pharmaceutical industry: sales, export and R&D

Studies have already shown that the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) regime provided an impetus for the industry to change its direction and destination and become more export oriented in its production activities (Dhar and Gopakumar 2006). Concerns were raised that imports would increase in the product patent regime and unfavourably affect the balance of trade. However, the Indian pharmaceutical industry could achieve a positive balance of trade mainly due to the export of formulations (Joseph 2009). Studies further revealed that the compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of exports of formulations are greater than those of bulk drugs in the TRIPs era, a trend opposite to one observed in pre-TRIPs era. These trends showed that imports also increased though the leading importers are multinational companies (MNCs), which was attributed to the removal of restrictions in the post-reform period.

Having laid out the critical importance of finance to energy transitions, this chapter briefly explores the historical role of finance capital in fuelling energy booms and the growth of the fossil fuel economy, before looking at slow shifts in strategy towards a more de-stabilising role in the face of concerns about un-burnable carbon, fears about the risk of stranded assets, as well as the potential returns to be made from expanding investments in renewable energy. In the section on the political economy of finance, however, this more optimistic reading of the role of finance is nuanced by looking at the practices of finance. Finally, in the section on ecologies of finance, the chapter looks at the circulation and interconnectedness of different forms of finance, in which, despite the fetishisation of private finance, public finance still has a vital role to play in the form of aid, multilateral development bank lending and procurement. It also explores the under-acknowledged challenge for finance of energy systems which will have to restrict supply and demand if they are to be compatible with a sustainable climate future.

Medical expenditure constitutes a significant component of out-of-pocket health spending in India. Recent research has shown that catastrophic household health expenditure has increased in India (Brinda et al. 2015; Pandey et al. 2018). Studies have found several policy interventions that are responsible for the increase in the cost of medical expenditure. These include structural adjustment policies and the resultant rapid privatisation of healthcare (Ghosh 2011), non-regulation of the private sector (Bonu et al. 2009; Bandameedi et al. 2016), irrational prescription practices of doctors (Bhaskarabhatla and Chatterjee 2017), poor health financial protection (Devadasan et al. 2007; Selvaraj and Karan 2012), market-based pricing policies of drugs (Narula 2015) and, above all, the higher cost of medicine. Development of new branded generics and biosimilars has contributed immensely to the treatment of several infectious and non-communicable diseases in India. However, with the adoption of a market-based pricing policy, it is not clear whether new drugs that are coming to the market are affordable to people. This chapter critically examines the question of affordability due to considerable variations in the prices of newly approved branded generics in the light of the market-based pricing policy of drugs in India. It also offers a discussion on various policy initiatives across the globe on pharmaceutical pricing and its relationship with affordability.

The chapter has used secondary data sources to examine the financial burden of medicines and prices of formulations of drugs. Data on prices of medicines for inpatient and outpatient treatment presented in the chapter are drawn from the nationally representative data of India – social consumption – health survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, collected from January to June 2014. Medical expenditure is provided for a reference period of 365 days for inpatient care and 15 days of outpatient care for items including doctor's fee, diagnostic tests, bed charges, cost of medicine and other medical as well as non-medical expenditure. The data on the prices of formulation and brands of selected drugs discussed in the study are obtained from the web portal of Pharma Sahi Dam of the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority, Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, Government of India.

After setting out the centrality of governance to understanding and engaging with energy transitions, I show how ideologies and strategies of governance have been shaped by broader shifts in capitalism around neo-liberalism regarding the role of the state and the re-scaling of the global economy through processes of globalisation. I show how at every level from local, city, national, to regional and global governance, political systems reflect and are imbued with the structural and material power of incumbent energy providers and interests, reinforced by institutional power through high levels of access and representation in the key discussion and decision-making centres to frame their needs as congruent with those of the state and their energy pathways as the most viable for tackling the energy trilemma of energy poverty, security and sustainability. I describe an energy governance complex: a web of distributed (but unevenly concentrated) power and agency over different parts of the energy system and its multi-functionality. Ecologising governance draws attention not only to its interconnections and interdependencies but also to its ecological blindness.