Environmental sustainability: a value cycle research agenda

Abstract

This article considers how adopting an environmentally sustainable agenda impacts on the management of an organisation's supply chain and highlights areas for future research. The article argues that the current fragmented/functional approach to sustainability and the conceptualisation of the supply chain as a bounded unidirectional flow of value does not provide the holistic approach that is required to meet the sustainability needs of tomorrow's business. A value cycle paradigm that facilitates the development of a multi-disciplinary research approach is developed and used to examine the extant literature for the principal issues that will need to be addressed. Future research concerned with developing environmentally sustainable business models must focus on the identification and management of the information flows at the interfaces between the customer, marketing, design, operations, logistics and external agents in the supply network. New networks required to support more sustainable forms of consumption will necessitate a fundamental reassessment of how and where value is added, consumed and recovered. In contemporary businesses, environmental sustainability is becoming a strategically important objective requiring holistic multi-disciplinary approaches. The extent to which the sustainability agenda extends conventional business models is demonstrated providing insights into areas of the value cycle that require further research.

Keywords:

• environmental sustainability
• value cycle
• supply chain management
• information flows

Notes

Notes

1. Previous references to a ‘value cycle’ have been mainly confined to the literature in the areas of marketing or systems development and relate to extending the value chain to after sales service or improving CRM.

2. The order of the activities normally depicted in Porter's value chain have been reorganised to emphasise the role of Marketing as a catalyst and initiator in new product development cycles.

3. The feedback loops identified in the cells were informed by an analysis of the literature undertaken in the preparation of this article. The cells have not been validated empirically.