Sustainable Development in Supply Chain Management: The Role of Organizational Learning for Policy Implementation

Implementing sustainable policies in supply chains is a significant challenge for businesses. Recent evidence has shown that failure to manage supply chains responsibly can have significant impacts on firms' reputation and financial performance. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework, which focuses on organizational learning, and outline specific channels through which firms can generate learning processes and build appropriate capabilities to successfully implement social and environmental supply chain policies. Drawing on 57 in‐depth interviews from a cross‐sectional sample of seven UK and nine German companies, we empirically assess our conceptual framework in accordance with a grounded, in‐depth case study analysis approach. We find compelling evidence to suggest that organizational learning is an important factor for a successful implementation of sustainable supply chain management. Organizational learning is often established as a result of training, knowledge acquisition, stakeholder engagement and collaboration between intra‐organizational and inter‐organizational partners, including suppliers and NGOs. Nonetheless, our results also emphasize that firms often have few systematic processes through which organizational learning is developed, and that such learning processes are often ad hoc at best, which in turn has significant implications for the responsible supply chain practices. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Stakeholder management in sustainable supply chains: A case study of the bioenergy industry

Engaging with stakeholders and managing their issues when striving for a sustainable supply chain (SC) is a significant challenge. Although most studies on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) consider stakeholder management necessary, little is known about related stakeholder management practices in SSCM. Thus, this paper seeks to enrich the theoretical debate on stakeholder management practices in SSCM through a case study approach to bioenergy SCs in Chile. Based on 28 interviews with SC actors and representatives from the surrounding stakeholder environment, the deductive–inductive analysis reveals that stakeholder management combines different practices to discuss stakeholder concerns, address them, and evaluate the process at the SC's external and internal levels. We propose structuring these practices based on two dimensions: “practices to address stakeholder requirements” and “practices whereby stakeholders are integrated.” The analysis' results indicate that although two-way communication with stakeholders can be seen as the core of stakeholder management, a certain willingness to learn and transform SC design is a prerequisite for true orientation toward stakeholder management in SSCM. Additionally, linkage development and local anchoring are practices used to obtain further legitimacy at the external level. Building on these findings, this study can guide practitioners in engaging with stakeholders and managing their issues across the SC.     

How Does Sustainable Development of Supply Chains Make Firms Lean,Green and Profitable? A Resource Orchestration Perspective

This paper theorizes and tests the effects of sustainable development of supply chains on cost‐reduction (lean), environmental (green) and financial (profitable) performance. Based on the resource orchestration theory, we argue that internal, supplier and customer sustainable development each orchestrate different types of resource and therefore their effects vary. Structural equation modeling of data from a survey of 203 Thai manufacturers was used to test a new theoretical model. Results confirm that financial performance was achieved through cost reduction created by customer sustainable development supported by internal and supplier sustainable development. On the other hand, better environmental performance created by internal sustainable development generated no financial gains. However, internal, supplier and customer sustainable development positively affected each other, and by acting together they made firms lean, green and profitable. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Adopting Proactive Environmental Strategy: The Influence of Stakeholders and Firm Size

abstract While smaller firms are less likely to undertake as many environmental practices as larger firms, extant literature suggests that smaller firms may be more responsive to stakeholder pressures. This paper contributes to the development of stakeholder theory by deriving a size moderated stakeholder model and applying it to a firm's adoption of proactive environmental practices. The empirical results show that smaller firms are more responsive to value‐chain, internal, and regulatory stakeholder pressures. These findings suggest that researchers evaluating organizations and the natural environment should be cautious about associating stakeholder pressures directly with firms' environmental strategies. Rather, the relationship between stakeholder pressures and environmental strategy tends to vary with size.     

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.     

Gaining sustainable development by green supply chain innovation: Perspectives of specific investments and stakeholder engagement

Despite general attention has been given to sustainable development and green innovation, little empirical effort has been made to explore the factors influencing green innovation performance in the context of supply chain relationships, especially in emerging countries like China. To address this research gap, from the perspectives of specific investments, we examine the role of specific investments in relation to the outcome of green supply chain innovation. Drawing on knowledge management theory, we propose that knowledge transfer plays a mediating role underlying the relationship. On the basis of the stakeholder involvement theory, we argue that partner social responsibility plays moderating roles not only in specific investments—green supply chain innovation performance link—but also in the link of knowledge transfer and performance. We tested the proposed relationships with a sample consisted of 331 questionnaires and validated responses from 187 high‐tech firms in China. The results generally support the proposed hypotheses, and the integrative model—moderated mediation—is also supported. As such, this study contributes to understand about how specific investments affect the performance of green supply chain innovation, providing new insights on stakeholder involvement and knowledge transfer in green supply chain innovation management.     

Sustainable supply chain management and partner engagement to manage climate change information

Climate change poses significant new risks and challenges for businesses and their supply chains. Additionally, in many sectors, Scope 3 indirect greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the sourcing and distribution of goods and services are larger than firms' own carbon footprints. Here we study how firms engage their key stakeholders in their supply chains in obtaining, processing, and transferring relevant climate change‐related information designed to overcome information asymmetry and drive sustainable development. Grounded in organisational information‐processing theory (OIPT), we draw on data from the Carbon Disclosure Project's Climate Change Supply Chain initiative for a qualitative content analysis of a large sample of global firms. Consistent with OIPT, we find that although firms primarily engage their supply chain partners in a variety of ways to reduce information uncertainty around indirect emissions data, effectively interpreting and managing broader sustainability information equivocality becomes a growing priority. Our findings further suggest that firms engage suppliers, customers, and other supply chain partners through basic, transactional, and collaborative types of engagement. We contribute to literatures on interorganisational information processing and sustainable supply chain management by providing a more detailed understanding of how firms engage supply chain partners in the context of climate change.     

Is Supply's Actual Contribution to Sustainable Development Strategic and Operational?

This paper addresses the issue of how sustainable supply practices are actually used as a leverage for sustainable development (SD). In order to assess the level of sustainable supply management within an organization, the authors have reviewed the literature extensively and then developed a five‐step maturity model around five management dimensions. A qualitative exploratory approach based on two detailed case studies of organizations whose reputation for SD is recognized internationally has been used. This methodology allowed us to show (1) how sustainable supply practices could be used as a leverage for an organization's sustainable development approach and (2) that sustainable supply practices still have quite a distance to go with regards to the maturity model for sustainable supply, even in organizations that are often mentioned as leaders in the SD area. In these organizations, managers still emphasize environmental considerations, while neglecting practices that would make it possible to reach the three SD objectives simultaneously. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Understanding sustainable development flexibility: An information perspective

Although flexibility has been considered critical in responding to uncertainty in a business environment, few studies have explored firms' flexibility in sustainable development. To understand the nature of firms that can respond better to uncertainty in their sustainable development practices, this study defines sustainable development flexibility and investigates the mechanism underlying its formation. The study proposes a conceptual framework on the interactions of managers' environmental attitude and cognitive style, as well as firms' information integration on sustainable development flexibility. A questionnaire survey was developed to test the corresponding hypotheses, and 241 valid responses were received from middle- and top-level managers in Chinese firms. The results show that (a) the higher the manager's environmental attitude, the higher the firm's information integration and greater sustainable supply chain flexibility, and (b) the more intuitive the manager's cognitive style, the greater the impact of environmental attitude on sustainable development flexibility.     

Making tough choices: A policy capturing approach to evaluating the tradeoffs in sustainable supplier development initiatives

This research explores the tradeoffs that decision makers are willing to make when implementing development initiatives to improve supplier sustainability performance. We employ a policy capturing methodology in which respondents are forced to choose between multiple potential sustainable supplier development initiatives. Data were collected from traditional and executive MBA students. The results suggest that when confronted with tradeoffs, decision makers value improvements in supplier cost savings and injury reduction equally, which was somewhat unexpected. Further, both improvements in supplier cost savings and injury reduction were valued over supplier emissions performance. Because we measure individual tradeoff preferences, multi-level regression analysis was used to better understand the impact of respondent value structure regarding sustainably developing suppliers. Our findings suggest a hierarchy of tradeoff preferences for decision makers as they pertain to sustainable supplier development. As the pressure to ensure supply chain sustainability increases, more firms will engage in sustainable supplier development. The outcomes of the choices they make when choosing between initiatives, and how managers make these choices, will be of increasing interest in both industry and academia. This research answers previous calls for further examination of decision maker tradeoff preferences in sustainable supply chain development.     

Our Collaborative Future: Activities and Roles of Stakeholders in Sustainability‐Oriented Innovation

While stakeholders have long been at the forefront of sustainable development debates, the emphases have tended to be on different stakeholder pressures, or managing stakeholder expectations about controversial issues. In this paper we bring a fresh direction to these debates and ask in what ways different stakeholders can contribute to sustainable innovation in firms. Based on 80 semi‐structured interviews, we conduct a fine‐grained qualitative analysis of stakeholder activities in sustainability‐oriented innovation (SOI) processes in 13 different companies across Europe. Our analysis identifies eight roles that stakeholders play in SOI processes: stimulator, initiator, broker/mediator, concept refiner, legitimator, educator, context enabler and impact extender. More traditional roles such as legitimator and educator are less common in our cases. However, emerging roles such as stimulator, concept refiner, context enabler and impact extender are clearly identifiable and could be particularly valuable for SOI. We enhance a collaborative perspective of stakeholder theory, finding that stakeholders can play highly collaborative and proactive roles, and argue that secondary stakeholders may actually be more relevant for SOI than primary stakeholders. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Public procurement for innovation through supplier firms' sustainability lens: A systematic review and research agenda

Public sector purchasing processes are gaining increasing prominence as a demand-side innovation tool for addressing national sustainability challenges. Accordingly, there has been growing research attention to this topic. Prior studies suggest three key rationales that underlie the use of public sector procurement to drive innovation: (i) the buyer–user rationale (for creating new needs); (ii) the market/system failure rationale (for improving suppliers' capacity to innovate); and (iii) the public services rationale (for improving public services). However, operational activities at the upstream supply chain affecting the sustainable innovation capacities of supplier firms appear to be under-researched in the public procurement for innovation (PPI) scholarship, despite knowledge about innovation capacity being critical to successfully implementing PPI. This paper adopts a systematic literature review approach to synthesise existing fragmented literature on sustainability-oriented PPI, focusing on supplier perspectives. Findings from a synthesis of 41 relevant articles suggest, among others conditions, that a procurement framework that maintains a good balance of competition and innovation, builds buyer–supplier relationship and urges strong supply networks, maintains a stable political commitment, offers security for niche markets with effective innovation risk management culture would enhance suppliers' sustainability capacity and propensity to innovate. This paper contributes to the PPI literature and the literature on determinants of sustainable innovation systems from supplier firms' sustainability lens.     

Assessing the Comprehensiveness of Supply Chain Environmental Strategies

As environmental awareness grows, firms are expected to expand the scope of their environmental strategies beyond organisational boundaries and to address more comprehensively environmental issues in their supply chains and product life cycles. Drawing on different literature streams, international standards and corporate disclosure, this paper presents a conceptual framework for the quantitative assessment of the comprehensiveness of firms' environmental strategies. This framework allows us to capture: (i) the environmental inputs and outputs addressed, (ii) the firm versus supply chain orientation of environmental strategies, and (iii) the environmental management practices adopted by companies. We illustrate the application of this framework with a content analysis of corporate sustainability reports for a cross‐sectoral sample of sustainability leaders. Our results indicate that there is a need for greater specificity in environmental reporting and that, overall, companies remain firm‐oriented. It is also observed that supply chain orientation can generally be associated with stakeholder pressure. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The role of intermediaries in establishing a sustainable supply chain

In sustainable supply chain management, buyers may use intermediaries to bridge exchanges with suppliers when knowledge of suitable sustainability practices is weak and in need of facilitation. Understanding how supply chain intermediaries perform this role and what happens when intermediation is no longer needed is important in establishing more sustainable supply chains. Two supply chain intermediaries have been investigated with the resulting case study evidence analysed using the Gioia methodology. The findings suggest supply chain intermediaries add value to the buyer-supplier exchange by facilitating sustainability-related information transfer, knowledge development, risk management and improved capabilities. For example, specific practices such as corrective action reports, often managed by the intermediary, underpin the development of a sustainable supply chain. When the intermediary is no longer needed, they become disintermediated from the specific buyer-supplier exchange but may be re-employed in a new triadic relationship in the future with previous parties. This provides positive spill-over effects through intermediation–disintermediation–post-intermediation cycles for both the buyer and supplier populations and for broader society. Overall, the findings highlight the value of the transient position of supply chain intermediaries in establishing sustainable supply chains and the intended consequences of their involvement.     

Information and profit sharing between a buyer and a supplier: Theory and practice

This paper is about aspects of an optimal relationship between 2 firms, a supplier and a retailer, in a 2‐party supply chain. The focus is on sharing private information when demand uncertainty exists so as to better coordinate the supply chain. It draws inspiration from a real case in Ireland of a new fish‐processing company, Oceanpath, and a supermarket chain, Superquinn, in which information was shared. The argument is that sharing the retailer's information increases supply chain profit, as well as benefiting consumers. Profit sharing will be needed to guarantee that both the retailer and the supplier gain when information is shared.     

Sustainable environmental practices and financial performance: Evidence from listed small and medium‐sized enterprise in the United Kingdom

In this article, we investigate the financial implication of sustainable environmental practices on UK small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs)–traded firms. Existing literature indicates that there is a direct relationship between sustainable environmental practices and financial performance. However, studies looking at this relationship have focused mainly on large firms with little attention paid to SMEs. Further, those looking at environmental and financial performance relationships have often used a single measure of performance in their studies. This study bridges these research gaps by focusing on listed SMEs in the United Kingdom using multiple measures of sustainable environmental policy indices on a panel of 201 SMEs on the Alternative Investment Market from 2011 to 2016. Evidence from our panel data analysis suggests significant and a nonlinear (concave) relationship between sustainable environmental practices and firms' financial performance. Specifically, energy efficiency practices, greenhouse gases, material, and resource efficiency revealed an inverted U‐shaped relationship with financial performance. The results will offer guidance to management in terms of allocating resources to sustainable environmental practices investment.     

Identifying critical success factors for the agri-food cold chain's sustainable development: When the strategy system comes into play

With serious environmental, cost, and social concerns arising from emerging countries' rapid growth in agricultural food cold chain (AFCC), AFCC firms urgently require a set of comprehensive sustainable strategic solutions. Therefore, this research identified and modeled the critical success factors (CSFs) that support the sustainable development of AFCCs. The study integrated institutional theory, stakeholder theory, and the triple bottom line model; it also surveyed cold chain experts from 16 different organizations in China and applied the adversarial interpretation structure model (AISM). This comprehensive analysis indicates that managing stakeholder pressure is the most motivating CSF of all strategies. This strategy eventually contributes to the sustainability of AFCC in China by driving other CSFs. Additionally, the study determined the degree of interdependence and dominance of different strategies. Thus, this study establishes a theoretical foundation for the sustainable improvement of AFCC organizations' business strategies and environmental policies.     

The impact of stakeholder orientation on sustainability and cost prevalence in supplier selection decisions

The stakeholder approach has taken a prominent role in the discussion of sustainability measures at varying strategic levels and corporate functions. Literature on sustainability suggests that firms have to cope with enhanced pressure from different stakeholder groups regarding their upstream supply management practices. At the same time purchasing managers face the trade-off between sustainability and cost prevalence in selecting new suppliers. Thus, it is of major concern for companies in general and purchasing organizations in particular to know and understand how purchasing managers react to the influence of specific stakeholder groups when it comes to supplier selection decisions. Following this notion we formulate six sets of hypotheses linking the adoption of ethical business culture to the prevalence of sustainability and cost criteria in supplier selection decisions to be tested in a path analytical model.Based on the results of an empirical study conducted with purchasing managers from multi-national firms located in Germany, this paper makes two major contributions: first, it sheds light on direct effects of shareholder, public, and customer orientation on the evaluation of the outlined-trade off; second, it investigates the indirect effects by introducing the formalization of ethical culture as a mediating variable to assess the impact of the three kinds of shareholder orientation on the propensity to select suppliers based on their performance in terms of social and environmental criteria as well as cost performance.     

Stakeholder pressure for sustainability: Can ‘innovative capabilities’ explain the idiosyncratic response in the manufacturing firms?

This study explores role of innovative capabilities in determining a manufacturing firm's response to stakeholder pressure for adopting sustainable practices. Drawing on the theory of conservatism, we delineate that the firm's response is idiosyncratic and undergirded in the nature of its innovative capabilities. Our empirical investigation reveals that the response to the stakeholder pressure is mediated by the nature of the firm's innovative capabilities. Indian manufacturing firms are identified as unit of analysis for this study. The individual manufacturing facilities implement the environmental practices. The findings suggest that the manufacturing firm's exposure to exploitative/exploratory innovative capabilities triggers sustainable behaviours with ephemeral focus and enduring focus. Further, the exploratory/exploitative innovation is capable of explaining idiosyncratic behaviour for the firms' sustainability practices adoption. The findings delineate, with analysis, that unlike China, regulatory stakeholder pressures in India inhibit the adoption of sustainable practices with enduring focus in manufacturing firms.