It has been estimated that ecological resources used by humans require 1.7 Earths (Global Footprint Network, 2019) and by 2050, the use of materials including metals, fossils, biomass and non-metallic minerals is expected to be doubled (OECD, 2019). Facing such issues many countries, international organizations, and companies have started to look for alternative ways (e.g., investing in greener technologies) for improving efficiency of materials and mitigating their adverse effects on the environment and society, in both production and consumption (Zhu and Sarkis, 2004; Abdul-Rashid et al., 2017).
Almost every activity or process an organization undertakes to make a product or provide a service requires the transformation of material and energy inputs that generate some positive and negative outcomes. In the current globalized economy, material and energy inputs and outputs are sourced from and distributed to numerous countries and continents via long and complicated networks. Such networks usually are called supply chains (SCs), which according to Christopher (2011) can be defined as “a network of organizations that are involved, through upstream and downstream linkages, in the different processes and activities that produce value in the form of products and services delivered to the ultimate customer”.
While conventional supply chain management (SCM)—the process of planning, implementing, and controlling material and information flows up and down, implies a linear relationship of flows, integrating environmental and social aspects requires SC to be more circular and nonlinear (Sarkis and Dou, 2017, p. 6). This is often named as
“closing the loop” or “closed loop supply chain (CLSC)” and is considered as an important element that impacts firm performance (Sroufe, 2003; Nikolaou, Evangelinos and Allan, 2013) and is necessary for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) (e.g., SDGs 11, 12 and 14) (Visser, 2018).
The term sustainable development emerged from the report entitled Our Common Future, published in 1987 by the United Nations (UN) World Commission on Environment and Development. Sustainable development is usually defined as “a development which meets
the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs” (WCED, 1987). Later Elkington (1998) highlighted that sustainability should include three dimensions or pillars, namely, environmental, social, and economic aspects. Another frequent concept used to describe sustainability is the Triple Bottom Line (TBL or 3BL), where each aspect is associated with respective capital: environmental (profit), social (people), and economic (growth and competitiveness).
The integration of environmental concerns in SCM is usually described by the concept of Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) (Srivastava, 2007). Whereas the integration of both environmental and social dimensions in SCM is called Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) (Seuring and Müller, 2008). In this dissertation, I focus on SSCM literature as by definition it is a wider concept and it includes the GSCM literature, literature dealing with integration of social concerns in SC (Carter and Jennings, 2002;
Pullman, Maloni and Carter, 2009), and the CLSC literature (Govindan, Soleimani and Kannan, 2015).
Lambert and Cooper (2000) and Christopher (2011) argue that the competition has shifted from company to SC level. But SCs are getting more complex and so are their performance measurement and management. Such complexity hardens the strategic management that aims to explain the variations in performance (Madsen and Walker, 2016). In other words, SCs are essential to gain competitive advantages (Li et al., 2006).
The importance of measuring and managing SC performance is evident, by allowing deployment of strategies without excluding partnering firms and helping the chain to attain its goals (Paulraj, 2011).
While performance measurement and management play a critical role in permitting control and providing a communication mechanism to translate mission and strategy into smart objectives (Magretta, 2012), achieving sustainability requires the participation of each SC firm (Seuring and Müller, 2008). This means assessing social and environmental performance across the SC (Cuthbertson and Piotrowicz, 2011). However, measuring sustainability is challenging (Hassini, Surti and Searcy, 2012) and is a field in transition (Sroufe and Melnyk, 2019), moving from conceptual to empirical research (Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson, 2015).
There is considerable research dealing with a wide variety of theoretical and practical problems and solutions arising from the environmental and social integration concerns in SCM (Seuring and Müller, 2008; Huang, Huang and Yang, 2017). But SC sustainability performance measurement received less attention (Erol, Sencer and Sari, 2011) and relevant measurement tools or methods are not well-developed (Schöggl, Fritz and
1.1 Background 17
Baumgartner, 2016). Many studies have also revealed that the integration of social aspect of sustainability is less researched compared to environmental and economic aspects (Seuring and Müller, 2008; Dubey et al., 2017). However, the TBL approach requires the consideration of all three aspects and the inclusion of all SC partners to successful adoption of sustainability (Eltayeb, Zailani and Ramayah, 2011). A similar pattern is mirrored in studies dealing with sustainability performance measurement of SCs (Beske-Janssen, Johnson and Schaltegger, 2015).
Some of the main indicators used to measure traditional SC performance include costs, flexibility, speed, quality, and dependability (Gunasekaran and Kobu, 2007). When assessing environmental and social outcomes, such indicators are insufficient and should be complemented with other indicators that are able to measure environmental and social performance (Taticchi, Tonelli and Pasqualino, 2013). To bridge this gap, many scholars have proposed various indicators, especially for GSCM, as identified by Hassini, Surti and Searcy (2012) but these indicators are sparsely applied in real case applications (Qorri, Mujkić and Kraslawski, 2018). Additionally, the existing SC performance measurement methods are insufficient to consider interaction with partners and organization’s strategic goals (Beamon, 1999).
In this dissertation, I focus on the measurement and management of sustainability performance in SCs. A simple illustration regarding positioning of this dissertation is given in Figure 1. The research problem I investigate is interdisciplinary and integrates at least three fields of research: SCM literature, Sustainability literature, and Performance measurement and management literature. Overall, this study attempts to provide new insights and develop relevant tools that consider environmental, social, and economic pillars to measure sustainability performance and facilitate decision-making in strategic, tactic, and operational levels.
Figure 1. Focus of the research.
Supply chain management
(SCM)
Performance measurement
Sustainable Development
) Research
focus
Given the importance of SSCM and the critical role of sustainability performance measurement to achieve strategic goals and to reduce (eliminate) waste and pollution, in the following I present the rationale of this study, that is, why measuring and managing SC sustainability performance is important and which research gaps this dissertation addresses.