PurposeThis paper, a pathway, aims to provide research guidance for investigating sustainability in supply chains in a post-COVID-19 environment.Design/methodology/approachPublished literature, ...personal research experience, insights from virtual open forums and practitioner interviews inform this study.FindingsCOVID-19 pandemic events and responses are unprecedented to modern operations and supply chains. Scholars and practitioners seek to make sense of how this event will make us revisit basic scholarly notions and ontology. Sustainability implications exist. Short-term environmental sustainability gains occur, while long-term effects are still uncertain and require research. Sustainability and resilience are complements and jointly require investigation.Research limitations/implicationsThe COVID-19 crisis is emerging and evolving. It is not clear whether short-term changes and responses will result in a new “normal.” Adjustment to current theories or new theoretical developments may be necessary. This pathway article only starts the conservation – many additional sustainability issues do arise and cannot be covered in one essay.Practical implicationsOrganizations have faced a major shock during this crisis. Environmental sustainability practices can help organizations manage in this and future competitive contexts.Social implicationsBroad economic, operational, social and ecological-environmental sustainability implications are included – although the focus is on environmental sustainability. Emergent organizational, consumer, policy and supply chain behaviors are identified.Originality/valueThe authors take an operations and supply chain environmental sustainability perspective to COVID-19 pandemic implications; with sustainable representing the triple bottom-line dimensions of environmental, social and economic sustainability; with a special focus on environmental sustainability. Substantial open questions for investigation are identified. This paper sets the stage for research requiring rethinking of some previous tenets and ontologies.
Purpose - Managing the green (environmentally sustainable) supply chain is an important issue for industry. This paper aims to provide a framework to understand and appreciate the relationships of ...various research streams and topics in this field. Utilizing this framework, emergent research directions to advance the field are also presented.Design methodology approach - Published research in peer-reviewed journals is evaluated using a new framework of nine non-exclusive, interrelated boundaries and five flows of resources related to green supply chains and supply chain management.Findings - The research literature can be integrated into these comprehensive multidimensional frameworks, which also provide opportunities as vehicles for future research. Research directions are described utilizing the framework presented in this paper.Research limitations implications - This work presents one potential set of frameworks. Insights relating to other potential frameworks are additional areas of investigation and not presented in this study. The literature reviewed in this paper focuses almost exclusively on peer reviewed journals. Emergent research in this area may also appear in books and conference papers. The frameworks provide guidance for various research streams.Practical implications - The frameworks and review also provide opportunity for managers and organizations to more comprehensively understand issues underlying green supply chain management.Social implications - Greening supply chains has become a necessity as environmental concerns have remained at the forefront of the debate of global and local social interests.Originality value - The comprehensive boundaries and flows framework can be valuable for identifying barriers to study and implementation of the interdisciplinary green supply chain management topic based on recent published literature. They also provide insights into research streams and practice. The research questions provide some further direction for those wishing to investigate this field.
Blockchain technology is a technology that can effectively support supply chain transparency. An important initial managerial activity is for organisations in supply chains to evaluate and select the ...most suitable blockchain technology. However, uncertainty and emphasis on sustainable transparency has made this appraisal more complex. This paper: (1) introduces blockchain technology performance measures incorporating various sustainable supply chain transparency and technical attributes; and (2) introduces a new hybrid group decision method, integrated hesitant fuzzy set and regret theory, for blockchain technology evaluation and selection. This method emphasises decision maker psychological characteristics and variation in decision maker opinions. An illustrative application and sensitivity analysis is introduced to aid supply chain managers and researchers understand the blockchain technology selection decision. Methodological and managerial implications associated with the decision tool and application are introduced. This research sets the foundation for significant future research in blockchain technologies evaluation in a supply chain environment.
Prior research has shown mixed results for the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance. Call for investigations on mediators and moderators have ...been put on notice to provide further explanations of previous mixed findings. This study responds to the calls for research by investigating the mediation effect of CSR outcomes, on the relationship between CSR governance and financial performance. We extract CSR governance and outcomes data from the Bloomberg environmental, social and governance (ESG) database and financial performance data from the COMPUSTAT database. Using a sample of 1980 firm-year observations from the top 500 Green companies in the United States for the years 2009 through 2013, we find that CSR outcomes mediate the relationships between CSR governance and financial performance. The results suggest that whether companies implement CSR governance successfully to generate good CSR outcomes plays an important role influencing companies’ financial performance. The results of our study contribute to the CSR literature by providing an explanation of the mediation effects of actual CSR outcomes to the previous heterogeneous findings on CSR-financial return relationships.
•CSR governance contributes to superior financial performance by achieving good CSR outcomes.•This study adopts the growing Bloomberg ESG database which measures CSR related governance and outcomes separately.•This study emphasizes the importance of the strategies to implement CSR governance.•The results provide an explanation for previous heterogeneous findings on CSR-financial return relationships.
Blockchain technology has gained global attention with potential to revolutionize supply chain management and sustainability achievements. The few applied ongoing use cases include blockchain for ...food, healthcare, and logistics supply chains have emphasized blockchain's untapped potential. Potential support for supply chain and sustainability issues include improving efficiency, transparency, and traceability in addition to billions of dollars in corporate financial savings. Given its promise, the adoption of blockchain technology, although hyped for years, has not seen rapid acceptance. In this study, the technology-organization-environment framework and force field theories are utilized to investigate blockchain adoption barriers. Using various literature streams on technology, organizational practices, and sustainability, a comprehensive overview of barriers for adopting blockchain technology to manage sustainable supply chains is provided. The barriers are explored using technology, organizational, and environmental – supply chain and external – framework followed by inputs from academics and industry experts and then analyzed using the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) tool. The results show that supply chain and technological barriers are the most critical barriers among both academics and industry experts. We further determine the similarities and differences among academics and practitioners in perceiving the barriers. This exploratory study reveals interesting relative importance and interrelationships of barriers which are necessary, theoretically and practically for further adoption and dissemination of blockchain technology in a sustainable supply chain environment. It also sets the stage for theoretical observations for understanding blockchain technology implementation in sustainable supply chains. A series of research propositions and research directions culminate from this exploratory study.
•Blockchain adoption barriers for sustainable supply chain management are examined.•Technology-Organization-Environment framework and force field theories inform study.•Technology barriers dominate blockchain and sustainable supply chain barriers.•Academic and practitioner perspectives are evaluated.•Research propositions provide guidance for further investigation.
Globalisation of supply chains makes their management and control more difficult. Blockchain technology, as a distributed digital ledger technology which ensures transparency, traceability, and ...security, is showing promise for easing some global supply chain management problems. In this paper, blockchain technology and smart contracts are critically examined with potential application to supply chain management. Local and global government, community, and consumer pressures to meet sustainability goals prompt us to further investigate how blockchain can address and aid supply chain sustainability. Part of this critical examination is how blockchains, a potentially disruptive technology that is early in its evolution, can overcome many potential barriers. Four blockchain technology adoption barriers categories are introduced; inter-organisational, intra-organisational, technical, and external barriers. True blockchain-led transformation of business and supply chain is still in progress and in its early stages; we propose future research propositions and directions that can provide insights into overcoming barriers and adoption of blockchain technology for supply chain management.
Sustainability has emerged as an important industrial strategic outlook expanding beyond organizational boundaries to include the supply chain. Simultaneously, the industry has also been faced with ...supply chain resilience concerns. Research on the intersection of supply chain sustainability and resilience is nascent and is a consequence of their observed mutual influences. However, confusion about concepts, implementation methods, and measurements of sustainable and resilient supply chains remains. This study completes a systematic literature review that critically examines several major observations and directions. We find the concept of sustainable supply chains is more established, and general agreement on its theoretical foundations exists. Supply chain resilience is relatively less mature. The nexus and relationships between the two topics are often incoherent: there is confusion on sustainable and resilient supply chains establishment; there is no clarity on what practices could jointly advance both areas. A major conflict exists since sustainability generally focuses on efficiency, while resilience seeks effectiveness. We recommend studies to analyze implementation relationships and impact. We also observe that performance measurement systems should be developed to assess supply chain sustainability and resilience performance taking with explicit consideration time horizons considered in these measures.
A large and growing body of literature to supplier evaluation and selection exists. Literature on green supplier evaluation that considers environmental factors are relatively limited. Recently, in ...supply chain management decision making, approaches for evaluating green supplier performance have used both qualitative and quantitative environmental data. Given this evolving research field, the goal and purpose of this paper is to analyze research in international scientific journals and international conference proceedings that focus on green supplier selection. We propose the following questions that will be answered: (i) which selection approaches are commonly applied?, (ii) what environmental and other selection criteria for green supplier management are popular?, (iii) and what limitations exist? Published research from 1997 to 2011 is structurally reviewed based on the first two questions. We find that the applied techniques are mostly fuzzy based single model approaches. The most common criterion considered for green supplier selection was “environmental management systems”. A further critical analysis is completed and gaps in the current literature are identified. These gaps help us to identify improvements for green supplier selection process and possible future directions.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology to identify sustainable supply chain key performance indicators (KPI) that can then be used for sustainability performance evaluation ...for suppliers.
Design/methodology/approach
– Initially the complexity of sustainable supply chain performance measurement is discussed. Then, a two-stage method utilizing neighborhood rough set theory to identify KPI and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to benchmark and evaluate relative performance using the KPI is completed. Additional analysis is performed to determine the sensitivity of the KPI set formation and performance results.
Findings
– The results show that KPI can be determined using neighborhood rough set, and DEA performance results provide insight into relative performance of suppliers. The supply chain sustainability performance results from both the neighborhood rough set and DEA can be quite sensitive parameters selected and sustainability KPI sets that were determined.
Research limitations/implications
– The data utilized in this study are illustrative and simulated. Only one model for the neighborhood rough set and DEA was utilized. Additional investigations using a variation of rough set and DEA models can be completed.
Practical implications
– This tool set is valuable for managers to help identify sustainable supply chain KPI (from among hundreds of potential measures) and evaluate sustainability performance of various units within supply chains, including supply chain partners, departments, projects and programs.
Social implications
– Sustainability incorporates many business, economic and social implications. The methods introduced in this paper can help organizations and their supply chains become more strategically and operationally sustainable.
Originality/value
– Few tools and techniques exist in the sustainable supply chain literature to help develop KPIs and evaluate sustainability performance of suppliers and the supply chain. This paper is one of the first that integrates neighborhood rough set and DEA to address this important sustainable supply chain performance measurement issue.
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