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Sustainability and corporate social responsibility in supply chains: The state of research in supply chain management and business ethics journals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pursup.2015.11.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The systematic review covers 195 articles published in 2007–2013 in 12 journals.

  • We examine and contrast research published in SCM and business ethics streams.

  • We find complementary research areas but limited synergy between the disciplines.

  • The study proposes open research gaps and new paths for future research.

  • We also discuss implications for theory development on sustainable supply chains.

Abstract

Sustainability has become a popular topic, not only in business research at large, but specifically in the supply chain management (SCM) discipline. In addition, the business ethics (BE) field has an extensive stream of literature focusing on supply chain topics. While some exchange of ideas can be witnessed, the two streams developed largely independently. A key purpose of this article is to examine and contrast existing research and knowledge creation, focusing on sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in supply chains, within and across these two disciplines. The in-depth systematic literature review covers 195 articles, published in 12 peer-reviewed journals from 2007 to 2013, examining the methodological and theoretical approaches, as well as the main research focus areas. We found highly complementary research topic areas but only limited synergy and dialogue between the disciplines. The research area at large would benefit from greater integration. Based on our findings, we propose a future research agenda that connects across the disciplines and highlights key areas that would benefit from further inquiry.

Introduction

Academic research focusing on environmental and other sustainability issues in the supply chain management (SCM) discipline started about two decades ago (e.g., Klassen and McLaughlin, 1996; Murphy et al., 1996; Walton et al., 1998; Wu and Dunn, 1995). Since then, a considerable body of literature examining various sustainability-related topics has been produced (e.g., Bowen et al., 2001; Carter and Jennings, 2004; Tate et al., 2011; Zhu and Sarkis, 2004). In an effort to understand what has already been investigated, several researchers have reviewed extant literature and discussed possible future research directions (Srivastava, 2007, Walker et al., 2012, Winter and Knemeyer, 2013). Many of these reviews focus on broad areas, such as environmental purchasing (Tate et al., 2012) or sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) research (Carter and Easton, 2011, Carter and Rogers, 2008, Seuring and Müller, 2008). Other articles investigate more specific issues, such as definitions and measures used in sustainable purchasing research (Miemczyk et al., 2012). While the previously mentioned literature review articles offer robust analyses of sustainability-related research published within the broader SCM discipline, they may only deal with other fields tangentially, or examine a limited set of issues across disciplines. The missing aspects in these review articles suggest that SCM and purchasing researchers are not benefiting from the full array of insights developed in other disciplines.

A significant amount of sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) research concerning supply chains has appeared not only in the SCM discipline but also in business ethics (BE) journals. The BE field is especially interesting because it is a major forum for discussions on sustainability and CSR, including research that extends beyond the focal firm. However, it has not been sufficiently incorporated into prior review articles published in the supply chain, purchasing and supply management fields, and it is therefore worthwhile to investigate how research on sustainability and CSR in supply chains is connected across these fields. The two distinct streams of literature covered are: 1) SCM, including more specific purchasing and supply management as well as logistics journals, and 2) business ethics and CSR. In this study, we provide a thorough investigation and comparison of research and knowledge creation within and across these disciplines, as to date no studies have investigated how much cross-fertilization takes place between them. The three research questions that guide our study are as follows. 1) How does research published in the SCM stream differ from that published in the BE stream? 2) What can the SCM discipline learn from BE? 3) Which areas would especially benefit from further inquiry? Through these questions, we examine an extensive amount of relevant research through a new lens, which allows us to generate novel perspectives and suggestions for future research on sustainable supply chains. This is particularly valuable in the rapidly expanding research area, which attracts the attention of a growing number of scholars from multiple fields.

In this research, 195 articles published in 12 peer-reviewed academic journals from 2007 to 2013 were content-analyzed and classified. We examined the methodological and theoretical approaches used, as well as industry and geographic contexts, sustainability dimensions and topics. A systematic approach was used in an effort to summarize, contrast and synthesize research evidence in a rigorous and transparent manner (Cooper, 2010, Denyer and Tranfield, 2009). Our approach of focusing on a specific set of journals and years is similar to the one used by Carter and Easton (2011), and gives a solid basis for a robust and thorough analysis. Simultaneously, the sample of articles is broad compared to similar review and meta-studies (Carter and Easton, 2011, Golicic and Smith, 2013, Miemczyk et al., 2012, Tate et al., 2012).

The study provides scholars a deep-level understanding of the research that has recently been produced at the intersection of the SCM and BE fields, highlighting both saturated areas as well as unclosed gaps. Overall, we assert that despite complementary research focus areas, synergy and dialogue between the disciplines appear to have been limited. Similar to Doh et al.'s (2010) examination of the (lacking) integration of international business and BE research, we identify new areas of shared interest to the two disciplines, which should lead to valuable research (Petersen and Autry, 2014). The main contribution of our study is a future research agenda that connects across the two, and additional, disciplines. It proposes open gaps, new research paths, and broader debates that could be better integrated to this area, with the aim to aid scholars in their research efforts. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we outline the theoretical background of the research area. In the following sections, we describe the research methodology and present the results. Last, we propose areas for future research and discuss the managerial implications and conclusions of our study.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

Since the early 1990s, a growing body of academic research addressing various environmental, social, and ethical issues in supply chains has been produced. Increasingly over the past several years, research in the SCM discipline has been conducted under the umbrella concept of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) (Carter and Rogers, 2008, Seuring and Müller, 2008). In Carter and Rogers's (2008) framework, SSCM is seen as encompassing three dimensions, social, environmental and economic

Methodology

A systematic review methodology was used in this study, in order to systematically collect as much of the available evidence as possible and to analyze it in a robust way (Cooper, 2010, Denyer and Tranfield, 2009). A research protocol was developed in an early stage of the study to increase replicability, transparency, reliability and internal validity. It detailed how the data would be collected, analyzed and reported. Next, criteria were established for the selection of journals and the

Analyzed articles

The distribution of the 195 articles per stream, journal, and year is shown in Table 1. From the articles, 63 percent appeared in the SCM and 37 percent in the business ethics (BE) stream. In the former stream, three journals, SCM:IJ, IJPDLM, and JPSM, accounted for nearly three quarters (72 percent) of the articles. In the latter stream, the JBE alone published 89 percent of all articles, which can be attributed to the fact that the journal publishes considerably more volumes and issues than

Future research

Based on our findings, we propose a future research agenda that connects across the two, and additional, disciplines. We first discuss the theoretical implications of our study. We then propose five broad areas for future inquiry.

Managerial implications

Large firms are connected to a multitude of sustainability issues, many of which have no clear boundaries or occur in far-away locations. Tomorrow's sustainability landscape will be increasingly difficult to navigate due to population growth, shifting consumption patterns, uncertain growth projections, and increased disruption risks. Because of this complexity and unclear or competing priorities, managers often struggle with the practical aspects of embedding sustainability into organizations

Conclusions

This study has provided an in-depth examination of the state of scientific inquiry into sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in supply chains in two fields that have evolved almost completely independent of each other over time. Through an extensive review and comparison of literature published in 12 leading SCM and business ethics journals from 2007 to 2013, we contrasted the research approaches used and areas investigated by scholars.

Our results suggest that research

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the comments and guidance provided by the editor, George Zsidisin, and reviewers, which resulted in a greatly improved paper. We are also thankful for the feedback on this research by Finn Wynstra, Craig Carter, Lisa Ellram, Guido Palazzo, and participants of the IPSERA 2012 conference, among others. The first author acknowledges Grant funding from the Foundation for Economic Education (Liikesivistysrahasto) and the HSE Foundation.

Anne Quarshie is a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University School of Business, Department of Management Studies. Her research focuses on sustainable supply chain management, humanitarian operations and logistics, and cross-sector interactions. Prior to her academic career, she worked for several years at Fairtrade Finland, where she managed relationships with Finnish retailers and food and beverage manufacturers.

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    Anne Quarshie is a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University School of Business, Department of Management Studies. Her research focuses on sustainable supply chain management, humanitarian operations and logistics, and cross-sector interactions. Prior to her academic career, she worked for several years at Fairtrade Finland, where she managed relationships with Finnish retailers and food and beverage manufacturers.

    Asta Salmi is a Professor (Strategic Management of Networks) at Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), School of Business and Management. She received her doctorate in International Business from the Helsinki School of Economics. Her research focuses on international business networks and their dynamics, cross-sectoral cooperation, international purchasing, and sustainable supply chains. Asta Salmi is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, and she has published in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Studies, International Business Review, and Industrial Marketing Management.

    Rudolf Leuschner (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Supply Chain Management at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the end-to-end supply chain and the integration of its three primary flows: product, information and financial. Other interests include logistics customer service, supply chain strategy, and generalizability of research and replication, with a specific focus on meta-analysis. His work has appeared in the Journal of Supply Chain Management and the Journal of Business Logistics. He is also a co-author of Supply Chain Management: Processes, Partnerships, Performance.

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