دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی فشارهای سازمانی و ارزیابی پایداری در زنجیره های تامین - امرالد 2017

Abstract

Purpose – Firms are increasingly held accountable for the welfare of workers across entire supply chains and so it is surprising that standard forms of governance for socially sustainable supply chain management have not yet emerged. Assessment initiatives have begun to develop as a proxy measure of social sustainable supply chain management. This research aims to examine how social sustainability assessment initiatives instigate and use institutional pressures to drive third-party accreditation as the legitimate means of demonstrating social sustainability in a global supply chain. Design/methodology/approach – Ten assessment initiatives focused on assuring social sustainability across supply chains are examined. Data are collected through interviews with senior managers and publicly available secondary material. Findings – The findings show how the social sustainability assessment initiatives act by instigating institutional pressures indirectly rather than directly. Coercive pressures are the most prevalent and are exerted through consumer and compliance requirements. The notion of pressures operating as a chain is proposed, and the recognition that actors within and outside of a supply chain are crucial to the institutionalization of social sustainability is discussed. Originality/value – Studies on sustainable supply chain management often focus on how companies sense and act upon institutional pressures. To add to the extant body of knowledge, this study focuses on the sources of the pressures and demonstrates how assessment initiatives use coercive, normative and mimetic pressures to drive the adoption of social sustainability assessment in supply chains.

Conclusions

There is a shortage of empirical research on social sustainability in supply chains, including its antecedents (Marshall et al., 2015a). Within SCM, research often takes a deterministic perspective, suggesting that external factors have a significant impact on the sustainability choices a manager makes, through pressures to appear legitimate (Marshall et al., 2015a). This has led to a rise in institutional theory-oriented research on sustainable SCM, examining how institutional pressures impact the adoption of sustainable practices. However, more research has been called for on the “supply-side factors” of the diffusion process of new practices (Ansari et al., 2010). We have contributed to this literature through our empirical investigation of the role of social sustainability assessment initiatives in institutionalizing said assessments in supply chains.

We witness the assessment initiatives directly, but mainly indirectly via other actors and stakeholders, exerting pressures on companies to adopt social sustainability assessments in their supply chains. Specifically, depending on its position and resources, an assessment initiative will either target a company directly with coercive pressures or indirectly with coercive, normative and/or mimetic pressures through other actors in the supply chain or external parties such as the media. Based on our study, we propose that these institutional pressures thus form a chain of their own. This finding has important implications for how the institutionalization of (socially sustainable) supply chain practices should be studied in the future. Based on these findings, we offer three important future research avenues for sustainable SCM scholars (as detailed in Table IV). The proposed research directions contribute to shaping future social sustainability-focused SCM research. Our findings demonstrate the importance of opening up and examining the “black box” of institutional pressures exerted on supply chains, and understanding the different parties involved in shaping company practices. For example, our findings demonstrate the important role of consumers and media in the chain of institutional pressures for social sustainability; these parties are not often (explicitly) included in empirical research regarding the adoption of sustainability practices by companies. Furthermore, given the extensive use of simple proxy or grouped measures of institutional pressures in survey studies in the supply chain field (Kauppi, 2013), our findings suggest that researchers examining the adoption of sustainable SCM practices need to develop a more fine-grained understanding of how companies are being influenced through chains of pressures.