This paper draws on theories of franchising in examining the emergence of the UK Netball Superleague (UK NSL) in 2005. The focus of the paper is to explore the development of an empowered franchise framework as part of England Netball's elite performance strategy and the consequences of the Superleague for player performance, team success and commercial potential of the franchises. Twenty-two in-depth interviews conducted between 2008 and 2011 with franchise and sport media/marketing personnel inform the discussion. The paper explains the UK NSL as an empowered franchise model characterised by a shift from the centralised hierarchical model of the business format franchise to one which is decentralised and informal and whereby different franchises are characterised by high degrees of diversity in terms of organisational environment and their own structural characteristics of specialisation and standardisation.

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The World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO-ICF) model has been advocated as a model of function to conceptualize physical therapist practice. Among its advances, the WHO-ICF model explicitly recognizes the existence of social factors that may influence patients' and clients' understanding of pain. However, understandings of the historical, social and cultural processes that shape the individual and collective experiences of pain and the therapeutic relationship remain limited. We call for a more intentional and sustained dialogue between clinical practice and sociology to help elucidate the nature, characteristics, complexities and clinical implications of one specific element of the WHO-ICF model, environmental factors. The purpose of this review is to advocate for the continued adoption of a sociological lens to help physical therapists better understand the broader networks of people, ideologies and practices in which people 'in pain' are enmeshed and the historical, geographical and cultural spaces in which they operate. In this review, we discuss existing empirical findings in sociology to introduce the concept of 'pain worlds', which can be applied by physical therapists to help characterize the sociocultural factors identified in the WHO-ICF model. Pain worlds is designed to complement the WHO-ICF model and assist in developing interdisciplinary research agendas that illuminate and examine the role, significance and clinical implications of sociocultural and environmental dimensions of pain. We conclude with a brief set of recommendations for the development of such translational research agendas and call for the integration of pain worlds in clinical practice.

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