PurposeBuying firms are increasingly exposed to sustainability risk arising from negative conditions or potential events in their supply base that might provoke adverse stakeholder reactions. Procurement managers at these firms can pursue multiple strategies to address this risk with suppliers, including acceptance, monitoring-based mitigation, avoidance and collaboration-based mitigation. This study aims to investigate how perceived risk, supplier dependence and financial slack resources contribute to the strategic preferences of these managers. Design/methodology/approachA vignette-based experiment with procurement managers is used to examine the factors affecting the managers' strategic preferences in managing supplier sustainability risk. FindingsThe empirical results revealed that the procurement managers' preference for avoidance or collaboration strategies was stronger when they perceived higher risk, but their preference varied based on the degree of supplier dependence. Specifically, when they perceived a high level of risk, procurement managers were more inclined toward a monitoring strategy with dependent suppliers and preferred an avoidance strategy when they dealt with independent ones. Financial slack was also an influential factor: managers with more slack at their disposal preferred to collaborate with suppliers to address the risk; on the other hand, limited slack shifted their preference toward an acceptance strategy, regardless of the level of risk. Originality/valueThis study helps to develop a more nuanced picture of how procurement managers make challenging and complex trade-offs when responding to supplier sustainability risk.

Activists strive to create industry-level change and institutionalize socially and environmentally responsible practices by engaging with high profile and legitimate firms. In doing so, they reach a broad audience of firms who carefully observe and evaluate the activists-target interaction. Drawing on legitimacy theory and using a vignette-based roleplaying experiment, this paper investigates how different characteristics of both the activists' campaign and the targeted firms' response jointly affect the likelihood that observing firms' decision makers will support the sustainability practice recommended by the activists. Specifically, we assess how observers' evaluations of both the legitimacy of the target firms' decision and the legitimacy of activists' recommendation affect their support for the activists' recommendations. Subsequently, we evaluate the ways in which different characteristics of the activists-target interaction (including activists' engagement style, their evidence quality, and target firm adoption decision) drive these two legitimacy evaluations. Our results highlight the importance of both target decision legitimacy and activists' recommendation legitimacy on the relationship between target's practice adoption and observer support for the practice.

Purpose Firms are increasingly accountable for their suppliers' social and environmental practices. Nonmarket stakeholders nowadays do not hesitate to confront buying firms for their suppliers' misconducts by mobilizing demonstrations, social media campaigns and boycotts. This paper aims to develop a typology of response strategies by targeted firms when they face such contentions and to empirically investigate why these strategies vary among those firms. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on social movement and stakeholder salience theories, the authors develop a set of hypotheses linking their typology of four response strategies to three key contextual factors – nonmarket stakeholder salience, nonmarket stakeholder ideology and the target firm reputation – and examine them using a vignette-based experiment methodology. Findings The results suggest that nonmarket stakeholder salience significantly impacts the nature of response (reject or concede), whereas the nonmarket stakeholder ideology is significantly related to the intensity of response (trivial or vigorous). Interestingly, the firms' reputation was found to have no significant effect on their response strategy when they faced stakeholder contentions. Originality/value This paper adds both theoretical and methodological value to the existing literature. Theoretically, the study develops and tests a comprehensive typology of response strategies to nonmarket stakeholder contentions. Methodologically, this study is original in leveraging a vignette-based experiment that allows establishing causal factors of response strategies following a supplier sustainability misconduct.

The challenge associated with balancing the three sustainability pillars – social, environmental and economic – has gathered a lot of management scholars’ attention over the past decade. Several events and tragedies have marked the need for academic research on the accountability of major organizations pertaining to their suppliers’ environmental and social practices. Such accountability is even going further upstream the supply chain to the second and third tier supply chain. Despite the popularity and development of the accounting field on matters of environmental or social challenges in supply chain over the past three decades (Bebbington and Larrinaga, 2014), scholars recently noted that applied research in the accounting field pertaining to these issues remain limited (Lee and Schaltegger, 2018). This is specifically the case for social issues in the global supply chain. Social sustainability has received less attention than the other dimensions of sustainability in supply chain research, as the majority of research is aimed toward environmental or economic aspects of sustainability (Seuring and Muller, 2008; Lee and Wu, 2014). Yet, social challenges in the supply chain particularly in developing economies continue to grow (Huq et al., 2016; Jacobs and Singhal, 2017; Sodhi and Tang, 2018).

In the past, corporate sustainability scholars advocated that, for many firms, environmental management could turn into a valuable capability conferring a competitive advantage. However, little attention has been paid to the role of the industry context and its influence on the relationship between environmental management and organizational performance. In this study, we examine the effect on this relationship of three contextual variables: munificence, dynamism and complexity. Drawing on longitudinal data from 336 firms representing 30 industries, we find that munificence enhances the degree to which a firm can leverage its environmental management capabilities to improve environmental performance. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

This paper reviews the empirical research pertaining to sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) published in the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR). The review allows an assessment of IJPR’s contribution to the empirical SSCM literature and its shortcomings. One of the key shortcomings was the relatively small number of papers that address the social dimension of SSCM. An avenue for potential and fruitful research is proposed building on the notion of network capital. Research questions that can lead to the application of network capital are presented to spark more research on the social dimension of SSCM for prospective contributors to IJPR.

One of the key responsibilities of every organization is to ensure that the employees return home at the end of the working day in the same state as when they punched in to work. This focus on employee health and safety (hereafter referred to as 'safety') has been evolving over the years to become a fundamental aspect for many organizations, particularly in industrialized countries. It has also gained in importance for supply management with buying organizations being held accountable for the safety performance upstream in their supply chain.

Many regions throughout the world have adopted some form of carbon market mechanism, such as carbon trading (cap and trade) or taxes. As the outcome of the Copenhagen accord, the European Commission has set the new carbon emission target at 30% by 2020, up from 20%. In the United States the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recognizes the issues of 'climate change-related risks', and asks companies to disclose 'material climate risks'. Even in large carbon emitting countries that have not signed or are opting out of the Kyoto accord, administrative areas are adopting market-based incentives to reduce carbon emissions from various industries. In December 2011, Canada opted out of the Kyoto protocol; however, in 2008, the Canadian province of British Columbia implemented a carbon tax, starting from $10 per tonne of carbon dioxide, then increasing gradually to the current price of $30 per tonne. It has been very effective in tackling the root cause of carbon pollution—the burning of fossil fuels. Since the tax came into effect, fuel use in British Columbia has dropped by 16 per cent while in the rest of Canada, it has risen by 3 per cent. A recent survey by Statistics Canada shows that within just six years of implementation, British Columbia's policy has been an environmental and economic success. In 2012, the province of Quebec (Canada) announced that it had joined California's existing carbon trading scheme by imposing a cap on energy intensive industries' greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., mining, cement, utility and manufacturing industries).

As we discuss in this book, business sustainability requires firms to develop and to adopt an integrated supply network which is committed to sustainability in order to mitigate risks and to create business value. In particular, environmental sustainability becomes a critical factor in management of the supply chain and the supply network because of the environmental impacts created along its network. While climate change now seems inevitable, there are increasingly high levels of uncertainty about the magnitude of its impacts. One thing is very clear: climate change will have a multiplier effect on supply chain risks. For example, in the autumn of 2011, an unusually intense monsoon season in Thailand caused floods which inundated more than 1,000 factories in the central region of the country. This flood severely disrupted the global supply of computer hard drives due to the concentration of assembly plants in the region. The global computer manufacturers who are the major buyers of hard drives (for example, Acer, Hewlett Packard, and Lenovo) were forced to cut their fourth-quarter sales between 5% and 10% due to delayed delivery, assembly, production and increased prices.

This manuscript examines the impact of supply chain uncertainty on environmental management spending in manufacturing plants. Building on the attention-based view of the firm (ABV), the basic premise is that with increased uncertainty in the supply chain, managers’ attention to environmental management lessens which in turn leads to (i) fewer resources devoted to green issues within the plant and (ii) a bias to use resources toward less disruptive pollution control approaches rather than pollution prevention approaches. Data from a survey of 251 Canadian manufacturing plants was used to test the link between the level of uncertainty in the supply chain and environmental management decisions. The results indicate that supply chain uncertainty does not have a substantial impact on the level of environmental spending in a plant but has a substantial and significant impact on the allocation of the spending between pollution prevention and pollution control. More particularly, as supply chain uncertainty increases, organizations shift their resources away from pollution prevention to favor pollution control approaches.

This study takes a conceptual theory building approach to develop a framework for managing supplier sustainability risk—the adverse impact on a buying organization from a supplier's social or environmental misconduct. Using anecdotal evidence and the literature, we present four distinct risk management strategies that supply managers adopt: risk avoidance, monitoring‐based risk mitigation, collaboration‐based risk mitigation, and risk acceptance. Drawing on agency and resource dependence theories, we study how the interactions of two key risk management predictors—that is, the supply managers’ perceived risk and the buyer–supplier dependence structure—affect supply managers’ strategy choice. Specifically, we propose that a collaborative‐based mitigation strategy, involving direct interaction and solution development with the suppliers, is selected by supply managers in a high perceived risk‐buyer dominant context. In a low perceived risk‐buyer dominant context, however, a monitoring‐based mitigation strategy is preferred. When the buyer and the supplier are not dependent on each other and there is a low perceived risk, the supply managers accept the risk by taking no actions, whereas in a high perceived risk‐independent context the supply managers would avoid the risk by terminating the relationship with the supplier. We conclude the study by describing the theoretical contributions and managerial implications of the study as well as the avenues for future research.

Managers are being challenged by multiple (and diverse) stakeholders, which have variety of expectations and informational needs about their firm’s supply chains. Collectively, these expectations and needs form a multi‐faceted view of stakeholder accountability, namely the extent to which a firm justifies behaviors and actions across its extended supply chain to stakeholders. To date, sustainable supply chain management research has largely focused on monitoring as a self‐managed set of narrowly defined evaluative activities employed by firms to provide stakeholder accountability. Nevertheless, evidence is emerging that firms have developed a wide variety of monitoring systems in order to align with stakeholders’ expectations and leverage accountability to stakeholders. Drawing from the accounting literature, we synthesize a model that proposes how firms might address accountability for sustainability issues in their supply chain. At its core, the construct of sustainable evaluation and verification (SEV) captures three interrelated dimensions: inclusivity, scope, and disclosure. These dimensions characterize how supply chain processes might identify key measures, collect and process data, and finally, verify materiality, reliability and accuracy of any data and resulting information. As a result, the concept of monitoring is significantly extended, while also considering how different stakeholders can play diverse, active roles as metrics are established, audits are conducted, and information is validated. Also, several antecedents of SEV systems are explored. Finally, the means by which an SEV system can create a competitive advantage are investigated.

Organizations are increasingly exposed to reputational risks arising from their suppliers’ malpractices in regards to social and environmental issues – in this paper such risk is termed supplier sustainability risk. However, only a few of these organizations take commensurable actions to manage this specific type of risk within their supply chains. Drawing on agency and management control theories and integrating the related literatures, we develop a contingent conceptual framework that explains why strategies differ from one focal firm to another when managing supplier sustainability risk. Specifically, we highlight the interacting effects of supply managers’ perceived risk, level of supplier dependence on the focal firm, and level of slack resources available to supply managers for implementing the appropriate strategy on the their choice among four available risk management strategies: risk acceptance, risk mitigation (monitoring-based vs. collaboration-based), and risk avoidance. We conclude the paper by pointing out the theoretical contributions and practical implications of the study as well as the avenues for future research.

The present paper investigates the potential benefits of a strong safety culture (SC). Specifically, we build on the organizational support theory to explore the direct and indirect effects of SC on firm performance. Partial least squares method is used to analyze the data collected from a survey among 251 Canadian plants. The results show that SC is associated with several performance indicators all linked to sustainable development (i.e., environmental, financial, and safety performance). Importantly, our findings also suggest that the relationships between SC and environmental/safety performance are mediated by the actual level of implemented environmental/safety practices within plants. We conclude the paper by highlighting the study's limitations and contributions as well as theoretical and managerial implications.