Corporate social sustainability in supply chains: a thematic analysis of the literature

Abstract

This paper maps out different research strands using thematic analysis on the literature pertaining to large companies’ efforts on social sustainability in their supply chains. The data corpus for this thematic analysis is a broad sample of the literature with articles from different journals and employing different research methodologies. Each of the high-level themes is identified at a level high enough to apply to research into not only social but also economic or environmental sustainability. These eight themes – stakeholder pressure; governance; contingencies; practices; partnerships; barriers and enablers; performance; and optimisation for performance improvement and trade-off – are then woven into a thematic map. We call this map the ‘4P’ model as it suggests that pressure and partnerships influence practices, which in turn impact performance. Researchers can use this thematic classification not only to position their research within the social sustainability literature but also to integrate research on economic, environmental and social sustainability.

Keywords:

• supply chain management
• sustainability
• sustainable supply chain management
• stakeholders
• review
• thematic analysis
• conceptual model
• integration

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Professor Alexandre Dolgui (Editor) for inviting them to submit this article to celebrate the 55th Volume Anniversary of the International Journal of Production Research. We also thank three anonymous referees whose suggestions have greatly improved the content and presentation of this paper.