Traditionally, the impact of capitalism upon society has been a core prerogative of Sociology. Over the last decades, however, we have seen the emergence of a research (and teaching) programme on ‘Everyday International Political Economy’ (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2009; Andersson, 2020: 15–40) highlighting that decisions and developments in the global political economy have important repercussions on daily life – and that everyday behaviour of non-elite actors can have important consequences for the global political economy, if aggregated.

Crucially, social factors such as gender, race and class – woven together in the concept of ‘intersectionality’ that indicates that some people combine several dimensions of discrimination (Crenshaw, 1991) – are important variables for post-coronavirus capitalism. However, the most immediate implications of the coronavirus pandemic on individuals were mediated by the health system (Chapter 2) and the welfare state (Chapter 3), at least in the Global North. In day-to-day life, a core question was the sharing of reproductive work within families (Chapter 4) and we need to ask how gender differences in sharing this load affects the gender pay gap (Chapter 5). Many important tasks – in the health system and in reproductive work – are performed by migrant workers and we need to establish whether the crisis has ameliorated or deepened previous divides along race lines, among others (Chapter 6). Finally, divides along gender and race lines are only a small part of the inequalities within our societies and we need to measure the effect of the pandemic on income and wealth differences (Chapter 7).