Hero shots: involved fathers conquering new discursive territory in consumer culture

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore how visual expressions of culture offer new discursive territory within which consumer cultural ideals can be negotiated on a global scale. Through a critical visual analysis of the revelatory case Swedish Dads, we find hero shots depicting involved fathers where children’s needs and the hermetic confines of the home take center stage, as opposed to the traditional fatherhood ideals portrayed in western contemporary advertising, media, and popular culture. We demonstrate how the Swedish state’s gender ideology was encoded into a communicative event in the form of hero shots and subsequently dispersed by visual consumers as well as political and commercial stakeholders pushing this particular agenda and/or capitalizing on its tendencies. This in such a way that the event conquered new discursive territory fostering new types of consumer cultural negotiations on fatherhood ideals also in other cultural settings.     

Supply chain collaboration and eco‐innovations: An institutional perspective from China

This study explores the impact of supply chain collaboration on eco‐innovations in the context of 220 Chinese manufacturing supplier firms involved in global supply chain networks. It investigates how supplier and customer collaborations help firms to enhance product eco‐innovations, and/or process eco‐innovations, and how the institutional context (i.e., regulatory, market, and community pressures) influences these relationships. The structural equation modeling approach is used to analyze the data captured from medium and large manufacturing enterprises in three major sectors: automotive, electronics, and textiles. The results show that community pressure has a positive effect on supplier collaboration, which further leads to enhanced process eco‐innovation. On the other hand, the findings indicate that while market pressure enhances customer collaboration, this does not reinforce product eco‐innovation. Contrary to our expectation, regulatory pressures do not impact supplier or customer collaboration for innovation. Overall, different institutional factors indicate divergent effects on supply chain collaboration and product/process eco‐innovation. The importance of normative pressures, such as those applied through the local community and interest groups, for eco‐innovations in production processes is further discussed as a typical feature of the institutional environment of Chinese supplier firms.     

Towards a classification of marine wildlife crime: Marketing strategies to curtail illegal fishing,malicious acts,and waterway pollution

Much effort has been dedicated to fighting wildlife crime with modest results. This paper focuses on marine wildlife crime, which suffers from a certain level of neglect due to terrestrial bias (a predominant focus on land animals). Despite legislative and enforcement efforts, there has been little integration of marketing techniques to curtail marine wildlife crime. For these reasons, we set out to study current issues surrounding marine wildlife crime by conducting interviews with three experts in areas of marine education, research, and legislation. The interviews provide an overview of the threats to marine wildlife, aid in the development of a classification of marine wildlife crime, and provide strategies as to what marketing actions may be useful to reduce it.     

Influence of Socio-Demographics and Residential Environment on Leisure Activity Participation

Participating in leisure activities provides important benefits for all people. However, there is a substantial reduction of (green) leisure opportunities in cities, and the green spaces that are available often are poorly accessible. The purpose of this study is to analyze the diversity of participation in various types of leisure activities and to determine the relationship between leisure activity participation and characteristics of the residential environment depending on socio-demographic characteristics. Diary data from 803 respondents living in the Eindhoven region in the Netherlands were used. Four segments were identified that differ regarding their leisure activity participation, and a modest impact of green space accessibility was found.     

Price cap regulation and water quality

Journal of Regulatory Economics - A number of studies suggest that price cap regulation may reduce the quality of the regulated good. This paper analyzes the impact on drinking water quality of a...     

A Unifying Framework and Comparison of Algorithms for Non-negative Matrix Factorisation

Non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) is an increasingly popular unsupervised learning method. However, parameter estimation in the NMF model is a difficult high-dimensional optimisation problem. We consider algorithms of the alternating least squares type. Solutions to the least squares problem fall in two categories. The first category is iterative algorithms, which include algorithms such as the majorise–minimise (MM) algorithm, coordinate descent, gradient descent and the Févotte-Cemgil expectation–maximisation (FC-EM) algorithm. We introduce a new family of iterative updates based on a generalisation of the FC-EM algorithm. The coordinate descent, gradient descent and FC-EM algorithms are special cases of this new EM family of iterative procedures. Curiously, we show that the MM algorithm is never a member of our general EM algorithm. The second category is based on cone projection. We describe and prove a cone projection algorithm tailored to the non-negative least square problem. We compare the algorithms on a test case and on the problem of identifying mutational signatures in human cancer. We generally find that cone projection is an attractive choice. Furthermore, in the cancer application, we find that a mix-and-match strategy performs better than running each algorithm in isolation.     

The impact of the new protectionist stance in US trade policy on selected German companies in Mexico

ABSTRACT

Previous studies on the impact of the new protectionist stance of the United States have focused mainly on the imposition of the controversial border tax. This research advances the understanding of the possible impacts of the tightening of the rules of origin and the imposition of the most-favored nation tariffs on manufacturing companies. The findings show a negative impact from the protectionist measures on businesses by increasing costs per unit and decreasing the gross margin. The results suggest that those additional costs could be passed on to the final buyers, raising the price level by more than previously assumed.