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This paper aims to contribute to understanding Brazilian fashion consumer behavior. The subsequent research question is formulated as follows: How are the consumers purchasing new clothes and disposing of used ones, and how is their awareness of sustainable fashion consumption and disposal of used clothes?

An online questionnaire was sent to nearly one thousand e-mails. A database was formed with 182 complete answers to 13 questions concerning consumer behavior toward sustainability, especially clothing acquisition, use and disposal. A multimethod approach was used to analyze the initial attributes, applying descriptive statistics, cluster analysis and data mining.

This survey obtained valuable answers from Brazilian fashion consumers grouped into four clusters. Age and yearly income were more critical in determining the clusters. Only four attributes were chosen by the algorithm to build the trees (age, annual income, yearly spending on clothes and how long the clothes are worn). The consumer's profile may help the fashion industry redirect investments in sustainability. The most critical factor leading to the sustainability of clothing fashion was the duration of the clothes. The study dealt with a limited sample size that was not representative of Brazil's broader population. Despite numerous attempts to seek responses through e-mail, the participant pool was predominantly composed of highly educated individuals.

This assessment of Brazilian consumer behavior toward sustainability and fashion presents essential knowledge to understand the relationships among variables affecting the purchase and discharge of clothes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore mechanisms of supply chain inclusion in Base of the Pyramid (BOP) settings. It distinguishes micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSME)-led local supply chains on the one hand and multinational enterprises (MNEs)-led global supply chains on the other hand. This paper aims to answer the following research question: Which mechanisms of supply chain inclusion are employed empirically by MSMEs and how can these mechanisms influence social impact creation in MNE-led global supply chains?

A large-scale empirical study of MSMEs operating in BOP markets is performed and a cluster analysis conducted to systematically categorize supply chain inclusion. The cluster analysis and current literature yield theory-based implications for MNE-led global supply chains.

The cluster analysis reveals three meaningful clusters of supply chain inclusion in BOP markets and highlights two main aspects. They include direct vs indirect mechanisms of inclusion and diversity in supplier relationships with local organizations aimed at either “sourcing” local capabilities needed for inclusion or “outsourcing” the inclusion. Based on these aspects, two scenarios are proposed and evaluated for local-global supply chain symbiosis.

This study aims to contribute to the existing literature with a more fine-grained understanding of the inclusion of BOP actors in local supply chains and by proposing alternative trajectories for global supply chain inclusion.

The findings outline several important decisions that managers need to make to include BOP actors in supply chain activities.

This paper contributes a novel, combined perspective of local supply chains (MSMEs) and global supply chains (MNEs).

Prior research has highlighted the pervasive importance of digital technologies in business and societal settings, but their enabling role in digital transformation, and effective forms of organization to address tensions that arise during attempts to promote it, have been insufficiently explored. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why tensions affect clusters established to foster digital transformation.

Empirical data were acquired through a qualitative exploratory holistic single case study, focused on the Swedish Cluster of Forest Technology. This included interviews with informants, selected by homogeneous purposive sampling, and event observation to investigate the personal perspectives of representatives of every company engaged in the cluster, followed by a thematic analysis of their comments.

The case study revealed three major tensions, between knowledge flow, collaboration and competition, but also others that were interrelated with those major tensions, related to matters such as trust and protection of intellectual property, power equality and hierarchy, and networks that must be managed in digital transformation efforts.

The paper extends understanding of the tensions that arise, and their management, in digital transformation processes.

Involvement of parents/carers may increase effectiveness of primary school-based alcohol-misuse prevention projects through strengthening family-based protective factors, but rates of parental engagement are typically low. This paper reports findings from an exploratory trial of a school-based prevention intervention – Kids, Adults Together (KAT), based on the Social Development Model, which aimed to promote pro-social family communication in order to prevent alcohol misuse, and incorporated strategies to engage parents/carers. The purpose of this paper is to assess the feasibility and value of conducting an effectiveness trial of KAT.

The study was a parallel-group cluster randomised exploratory trial with an embedded process evaluation. The study took place in south Wales, UK, and involved nine primary schools, 367 pupils in Years 5/6 (aged 9-11 years) and their parents/carers and teachers. Questionnaires were completed by pupils at baseline and four month follow-up, and by parents at six month follow-up.

Overall KAT was delivered with good fidelity, but two of five intervention schools withdrew from the study without completing implementation. In total, 50 per cent of eligible parents participated in the intervention, and KAT had good acceptability among pupils, parents and teachers. However, a number of “progression to effectiveness trial” criteria were not met. Intermediate outcomes on family communication (hypothesised to prevent alcohol misuse) showed insufficient evidence of an intervention effect. Difficulties were encountered in identifying age appropriate outcome measures for primary school-age children, particularly in relation to family communication processes. The study was unable to find comprehensive methodological guidance on exploratory trials.

It would not be appropriate to conduct an effectiveness trial as key progression criteria relating to intervention and trial feasibility were not met. There is a need for new measures of family communication which are suitable for primary school-age children, and more guidance on the design and conduct of exploratory/feasibility trials.

KAT achieved high rates of parental involvement, and its theoretical framework and processes could be adapted by other interventions which experience difficulties with recruitment of parents/carers.

Vehicle fault diagnosis is a key factor in ensuring the safe and efficient operation of the railway system. Due to the numerous vehicle categories and different fault mechanisms, there is an unbalanced fault category problem. Most of the current methods to solve this problem have complex algorithm structures, low efficiency and require prior knowledge. This study aims to propose a new method which has a simple structure and does not require any prior knowledge to achieve a fast diagnosis of unbalanced vehicle faults.

This study proposes a novel K-means with feature learning based on the feature learning K-means-improved cluster-centers selection (FKM-ICS) method, which includes the ICS and the FKM. Specifically, this study defines cluster centers approximation to select the initialized cluster centers in the ICS. This study uses improved term frequency-inverse document frequency to measure and adjust the feature word weights in each cluster, retaining the top τ feature words with the highest weight in each cluster and perform the clustering process again in the FKM. With the FKM-ICS method, clustering performance for unbalanced vehicle fault diagnosis can be significantly enhanced.

This study finds that the FKM-ICS can achieve a fast diagnosis of vehicle faults on the vehicle fault text (VFT) data set from a railway station in the 2017 (VFT) data set. The experimental results on VFT indicate the proposed method in this paper, outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

This is the first effort to address the vehicle fault diagnostic problem and the proposed method performs effectively and efficiently. The ICS enables the FKM-ICS method to exclude the effect of outliers, solves the disadvantages of the fault text data contained a certain amount of noisy data, which effectively enhanced the method stability. The FKM enhances the distribution of feature words that discriminate between different fault categories and reduces the number of feature words to make the FKM-ICS method faster and better cluster for unbalanced vehicle fault diagnostic.

The article investigates whether and to what extent outsiderness is gendered in Western Europe, both in terms of its spread and degree. It thus explores which male and female post-Fordist social classes are more exposed to the risk of this phenomenon. It also scrutinizes whether such a gendered characterization has varied over time and across clusters of Western European countries.

Relying on a comparative analysis of the data provided by the European Social Survey (ESS) dataset and comparing two points in time – the early/mid-2000s and the late 2010s – the work provides both a dichotomous and continuous variable of outsiderness, which measure its spread and degree in the female and male workforces of a pooled set of growth models.

The empirical analysis shows that outsiderness is profoundly gendered in Western Europe and thus a feminized social phenomenon. However, the comparative investigation highlights that outsiderness has been genderized in diverse ways across the four growth models. Different patterns of gendered outsiderness can be identified.

The article provides a comparative and diachronic analysis of outsiderness from a gender lens, putting into a mutual dialogue different literature on labour market, and shows that outsiderness represents a key analytical dimension for assessing gender inequalities.

This paper examines how different configurations of societal impact are pursued by purpose-driven organizations (PDOs) and how these configurations align with the application of varying supply chain design (SCD) practices.

This multi-method study uses quantitative data from 1588 B Corps and qualitative data from 316 B Corps to examine how PDOs align SCD with the pursuit of diverse types of societal impact. The authors first conduct a cluster analysis to group organizations based on the impact they create. Second, qualitative content analysis connects impact with enabling SCD elements.

The analysis of the five identified clusters provides detailed empirical insights on influencers, design decisions and building blocks adopted by PDOs to drive a range of societal impacts. Specifically, the nature of the impact pursued affects (1) whether a PDO will be more influenced by a need in the political environment or an opportunity in the industry environment, (2) the relative importance of the design of social flows versus material flows and (3) the need to develop new relational resources with beneficiaries versus leveraging existing capabilities to manage inter-firm processes.

This study responds to calls to disaggregate different dimensions of societal impact and examines the relationship between SCD and a breadth of sustainability impacts for different stakeholders. In doing so, the authors identify four SCD pathways organizations can follow to achieve specific societal impacts. This study is also the first to employ a supply chain perspective in the study of certified B Corps.