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We analyse the corporate governance of professional football clubs operating in England's Premier and Football Leagues. Good corporate governance is essential if clubs are to be managed effectively and to survive in the difficult economic circumstances surrounding the football industry. The past couple of years have been especially testing, as Football League clubs have had to deal with the aftermath of the collapse of the ITV digital contract. Our analysis reveals that while there are some noticeable improvements in governance standards, many clubs would benefit from following best practice guidelines on information disclosure, the appointment of directors, board composition, induction and training of directors, risk management and consultation with stakeholders. Despite improvement in some areas over the past three years, standards of corporate governance in football clubs are significantly below those of listed companies as a whole and there is thus considerable need for improvement.Corporate governance in the UK is regulated by Company Law and by codes of corporate governance such as The Combined Code (CC) and The OECD Principles. Whereas compliance with company law is obligatory, compliance with best practice codes of corporate governance, such as the CC, is voluntary in the sense that companies listed on the London Stock Exchange must either comply with the code or else explain any instance of non‐compliance in their Annual Report. The rationale for this self‐regulatory process is that good corporate governance brings benefits to companies in terms of engendering the trust of investors and improving corporate performance. Firms will therefore find it in their own best interests to comply with the code unless there is a good reason not to do so which can be explained to shareholders in the company's statement of compliance. Since the CC was first introduced, the degree of compliance, as measured by the proportion of companies adopting best practice, has increased considerably, representing a welcome improvement in governance standards.In this paper we present results from our annual survey of FA Premier and Football League clubs, and our analysis of corporate governance statements published by listed clubs, to provide an assessment of the state of corporate governance of professional football clubs. On the basis of this analysis we make a number of recommendations for how the corporate governance of professional football clubs might be improved in the future.

The March 2000 Budget in the UK introduced tax incentives to encourage employee shareholding. The theory is that if employees feel that they have a stake in the enterprise or organisation in which they work, they will be more motivated and committed, with positive outcomes in terms of productivity and organisational performance. This theory has received support from research currently being conducted within the School of Management and Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, which has found significant positive links between "progressive" human resource practices that promote participation and involvement on the one hand, and corporate performance and organisational outcomes on the other. This is in line with other recent research in the UK and internationally. The question both for business and government is how to engender such participation and involvement and, specifically, whether this can be brought about through employee shareholding, when such individual shareholdings, taken separately, are insignificant in terms of the overall share capital of the corporation. By pooling the voting rights – although not necessarily the actual ownership – of their shares, an employee shareholder trust could represent a significant voice. However, some mechanism is needed to translate individual employee shareholding stakes into a collective voice that can deliver results, both in terms of representing the interests of employees and in convincing employees that their shareholding gives them a stake in the enterprise. Such a move could have important beneficial effects for corporate performance and hence economic growth. It could also have significant welfare effects in terms of enriching the experience of working life.

This paper examines the nature of economies of scale in the small firm sector and aims to provide new insight into the economic efficiency of small firm industrial districts. The theoretical analysis identifies the role played by collective external economies of scale that are realised through cooperation over input activities. Using game theory it is shown that cooperation can emerge both as a result of rational profit maximising behaviour and as a result of institutional and cultural environments that encourage cooperation and trust. The implications for industrial policy are discussed in the concluding section.

This book is the culmination of several years work by a group of academics, policy-makers and other professionals looking to understand how alternative economic thinking - and indeed thinking from quite different social-scientific disciplines - could enhance the mainstream economic approach to environmental and natural-resource problems. Of the editors, Dietz comes from the mainstream economics tradition, while Michie and Oughton draw explicitly on institutional and evolutionary economics. The various authors represent a range of disciplinary backgrounds and approaches. This book draws on the strengths of each and all of these approaches to analyse environmental issues and what can be done to tackle these through corporate and public policy. The book argues that the need for an inter-disciplinary approach. Two themes which emerge repeatedly throughout the book are the need for an interdisciplinary theory of technological change, and the need for a similarly interdisciplinary approach to the study of human behaviour and how it influences both production and consumption choices. The two themes are of course related. Resolving environmental questions requires an understanding of their nature, of their causes and, to the extent that they are anthropogenic, of how to change human behaviour. These fundamental issues are the focus of the four chapters that form Part 1 of this volume. The remainder of the volume develops them in more detail.

Classical political economy recognised that what needed analysing, explaining, and acting on was an economic system inextricably linked to the wider political and social systems. Smith and Ricardo, as well as Marx, saw class and the distribution of income as key. Neoclassical economics replaced these social and collective categories with the individual consumer and the marginal product of labour as the fundamental analytical categories—the "political" having been discarded. Yet even one of the founders of neoclassical economics, Alfred Marshall, would barely recognise nor accept what is today presented as economic analysis, ignoring as it does the key industrial and organisational detail underlying production. The "new political economy" claims to incorporate insights from other disciplines. But far from enriching economic analysis, these new strands of theory simply impose the assumptions and methods of neoclassical economics. We argue that this new economic imperialism needs to be replaced with a genuinely multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to analysing economic issues.