Why do households use alternative consumption practices?

In recent years, the emphasis on economic necessity when explaining engagement in alternative consumption practices (i.e. informal and/or second-hand modes of goods acquisition) has been challenged by an agency-oriented reading that views participation to be more a matter of choice, and more recently by a geographically sensitive approach that ascribes agency to affluent populations and economic necessity to deprived populations. To evaluate critically these contrasting explanations, data collected from 120 face-to-face interviews in the city of Leicester are here reported. The finding is that these previous accounts that reduce consumers participation in alternative consumption practices to the mono-causal explanations of either economic necessity or choice obfuscate how both often coexist in people's explanations for participation, albeit in varying ways in different populations. This paper thus displays the need to reconcile the previous reductive either/or explanations through the use of a both/and approach that recognizes and unpacks how both economic necessity and choice are variously entangled in rationales for participation in alternative consumption practices.