Mainstream Alternatives Research Articles

Is fast fashion finally out of season? Rental clothing schemes as a sustainable and affordable alternative to fast fashion

The clothing sector is under increased global scrutiny as the second biggest polluter behind the oil industry. What was once termed the ‘democratisation of fashion’, fast fashion has become a low cost, high speed and resource intensive market. As a result, sustainable consumerism has gained traction, with innovative alternatives such as collaborative consumption and product service systems becoming more popular. However, despite growing concern, sustainable alternatives remain a niche market compared to the scale of global fast fashion. Rental clothing schemes remain under-researched in the UK. These collaborative consumption schemes promote a circular economy through reducing waste and increasing life cycles. This paper examines the determinants of rental clothing adoption by employing semi-structured interviews, specifically accounting for different generations across rural and urban areas. It presents a UK perspective on rental clothing.The findings suggest that the affordability of rental is dependent on the nature of the items and adoption is driven by style, sustainability desires, and geography of consumers. This paper concludes that to increase the adoption of rental clothing schemes, trust in schemes and increased accessibility are essential to allow them to become mainstream alternatives to fast fashion.

Energetic, GHG, and economic analyses of electrified steam methane reforming using conventional reformer tubes

A concept for electrified Steam Methane Reforming (eSMR) based on reformer tubes is proposed as a pathway for hydrogen decarbonization. The proposed concept applies radiant heating elements to a conventional gas-fired reformer. A thermochemical model and a techno-economic framework are developed to evaluate process performance at various conditions and the economic potential of the proposed concept. A baseline scenario with feedstock and electricity priced respectively at $4/MMBtu and $0.04/kWh, and assuming 2% of fugitive methane emissions and 50 gCO2eq/kWh, results in an LCOH of $1.53/kgH2 and a decarbonization cost of $38/tonCO2. The techno-economic results demonstrate that the proposed eSMR process leads to lower LCOH than mainstream alternatives over a wide range of energy prices. The study shows that reformer tube electrification is both economically viable and technically feasible, and therefore has the potential to decarbonize hydrogen production at a low cost.

Segmented Information, Segregated Outcomes: Housing Affordability and Neighborhood Representation on a Voucher-Focused Online Housing Platform and Three Mainstream Alternatives

Online platforms have become an integral component of the housing search process in the United States and other developed contexts, but recent studies have demonstrated that these platforms offer uneven representation of different neighborhoods. In this study, we use listings covering the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas to assess how GoSection8, a platform uniquely focused on affordable housing and voucher-assisted households, compares with the “mainstream” alternatives of Craigslist, Apartments.com, and Zillow. Through descriptive and regression analyses of the housing and neighborhoods represented on these websites and a new way of measuring the distribution of rental housing opportunities, we advance a multisource perspective on the role of online information exchanges in housing search processes. Specifically, we find that GoSection8 and mainstream alternatives capture spatially segmented information about housing markets, with GoSection8 ads representing units that are more affordable but also more constrained to higher-poverty neighborhoods where assisted households are already concentrated. The findings suggest that disadvantaged households are potentially funneled toward high-poverty, isolated neighborhoods by the operation of stratified information systems available for online housing searches.

Improving cross-lingual text matching with dual-level collaborative coarse-to-fine filter alignment network

Semantic alignment is a key component in Cross-Language Text Matching (CLTM) to facilitate matching (e.g., query-document matching) between two languages. The current solutions for semantic alignment mainly perform word-level translation directly, without considering the contextual information for the whole query and documents. To this end, we propose a Dual-Level Collaborative Rough-to-Fine Filter Alignment Network (DLCCFA) to achieve better cross-language semantic alignment and document matching. DLCCFA is devised with both a coarse-grained filter in word-level and a fine-grained filter in sentence-level. Concretely, for the query in word-level, we firstly extract top-k translation candidates for each token in the query through a probabilistic bilingual lexicon. Then, a Translation Probability Attention (TPA) mechanism is proposed to obtain coarse-grained word alignment, which generates the corresponding query auxiliary sentence. Afterwards, we further propose a Bilingual Cross Attention and utilize Self-Attention to achieve fine-grained sentence-level filtering, resulting in the cross-language representation of the query. The idea is that each token in the query works as an anchor to filter the semantic noise in the query auxiliary sentence and accurately align semantics of different languages. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets of six languages demostrate that our method can outperform the mainstream alternatives of CLTM.

How Does the Strength of the Far Right Affect Ethnic Minority Political Behaviour?

AbstractThis article considers how the far right affects ethnic minority vote choice and party evaluations, using the case of the British National Party (BNP). Minorities were more likely to vote for Labour in 2010 where the BNP received more votes, and a quasi-experimental increase in the BNP’s salience also increased support for Labour. However, ethnic minority voters evaluated the Conservatives more positively when the BNP put forward a candidate or received more votes. The strength of the far right may mobilise and reinforce traditional partisan loyalties among minorities, while changing perceptions of traditionally unpopular—but mainstream—alternatives.

Traditional Economies and Mainstream Alternatives: Business Anthropology Looks at Dong Tree Farming

Business anthropology typically deals with the modern world. In an era when economic intrusions from outsiders are increasingly impacting rural areas and indigenous people, however, a focus upon sm...

Voters' Perceptions of Policy Convergence and the Short‐term Opportunities of Anti‐immigrant Parties: Examples from Sweden

In contrast to previous studies on the political opportunity structures of anti‐immigrant parties, this article argues that voters’ perceptions of policy convergence between mainstream alternatives affect their short‐term propensity for supporting such partisan challengers. Drawing upon leading research in the field, two hypotheses about voters’ perceptions of policy convergence, in two policy areas (economic redistribution and immigration), are presented. The main findings in the article suggest that policy convergence between mainstream parties has a more immediate impact on the electorate than commonly recognised. Using unique data from Sweden, the article shows that perceived convergence between Swedish mainstream parties in the field of immigration policy increases potential support for the anti‐immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats (SD). Yet the results are the opposite when it comes to perceptions of convergence in the field of economic‐distributive policies. In contrast to widespread assumptions, the article thus finds that policy convergence between mainstream parties only appears to create short‐term opportunities for anti‐immigrant parties if it takes place on their own policy turf. These results indicate, in other words, that the potential electorate of the SD – which is a wider group than hard‐core xenophobes – is largely driven by preferences about immigration policy, rather than the short‐term urge to protest against mainstream parties. The article, therefore, concludes that the cordon sanitaire to isolate the SD in Sweden – which is underpinned by de facto convergence between mainstream parties on immigration policy – could improve, and is unlikely to curb, the short‐term electoral opportunities of this party.

Opportunist dealing in the UK pig meat supply chain: Trader mentalities and alternatives

The scandal surrounding the presence of horsemeat in UK supermarket meat products has focused public attention on the problems of complex, fragmented food supply chains. Through a study of the UK's pig meat supply chain, this paper proposes a new framing of the problem in terms of opportunistic dealing adopted by the supermarkets in vertically disintegrated supply chains, where all actors attempt to pass the risks and costs onto somebody else. This outcome is the result of cultural practices and competences in buyer-led supermarket organizations where strong supermarket chains have the power to capture processor and producer margins. One consequence is that mass-market meat production and processing is close to unviable, as evidenced here by the analysis of the VION Food Group. However, there are mainstream alternatives to the retail-led dysfunctional supply chain. This paper presents an alternative integrated supply chain model using the case of Morrisons, the UK's fourth largest supermarket chain. If fragmented supply chains are not inevitable, the important issue explored in the conclusion is how the inadequacies of government policy, which understands the problem of the sector but is stuck with a competition-based mindset, obstruct the creation of a more sustainable supply chain.

Prospecting for political economy

This paper argues for a return to political economy in its best and earliest sense. Conventional economics has tried to colonise the social sciences from a narrow base in formalistic neo-classical theorising. It has failed as a guide to explaining economic development and crisis and become theoretically narrow. It is now in retreat in the wider social sciences but remains strong in the field of economics itself. Critics of the conventional wisdom like Stiglitz and Krugman cannot develop a full critique and attempts to develop mainstream alternatives through behavioural economics reproduce problems already apparent in the core approach. It cannot deal with the issues of power and conflict that are at the heart of the current situation.

Throwing out the Bums: Protest Voting and Unorthodox Parties after Communism

The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (UOPs) in recent East European elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies. Why did the power alternation of the mid-1990s not result in party-system consolidation, as suggested by some earlier studies, but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which established mainstream political parties lost considerable ground to new political formations based on personalist and populist appeals? Why did this reversal in Eastern Europe happen during a period of economic recovery, remarkable Western integration progress, and a broad acceptance of electoral democracy as the only game in town? This article suggests that these electoral dynamics can be explained by focusing on the interaction between protest voting and election sequence. While protest voting to punish unpopular incumbents has been a widespread but understudied practice since the collapse of communism, the beneficiaries of these protest votes have changed in recent elections. Whereas in the first two generations of postcommunist elections, disgruntled voters could opt for untried mainstream alternatives, in third-generation elections (defined as elections taking place after at least two different ideological camps have governed in the postcommunist period) voters had fewer untried mainstream alternatives, and therefore opted in greater number for unorthodox parties. This explanation receives strong empirical support from statistical tests using aggregate data from seventy-six parliamentary elections in fourteen East European countries from 1990 to 2006, survey evidence from twelve postcommunist elections from 1996 to 2004, and a survey experiment in Bulgaria in 2008.

Alternative, Mainstream, Mainstream Alternatives: The Viability of the Artist-Led Initiative

Alternative, Mainstream, Mainstream Alternatives: The Viability of the Artist-Led Initiative