دورنمای موضوعی مطالعات در مدیریت زنجیره تامین (SSCM): بررسی نکات اصلی در توسعه ی SSCM The thematic landscape of literature in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM): A review of the principal facets in SSCM development

Introduction Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) addresses the management of the integration of economic and non-economic issues in a supply chain. Furthermore, SSCM explicitly integrates the social and environmental dimensions with economic considerations to the triple bottom line (TBL), and focuses on forward and reverse supply chains. The past two decades, in particular, have witnessed a growing interest toward this sub-discipline of supply chain management (SCM). As such, SSCM continues to be a topic of growing importance among scholars and practitioners. This is also reflected in the growth of scholarly literature on SSCM. However, only some attempts have been made to comprehensively review the developments in the literature, i.e. review the entire body of literature, and not just a specific SSCM aspect. Further, those comprehensive reviews are broadly based on either of the two complementary principal orientations for defining their scope: structural and conceptual orientations. As such, very few reviews focus on evaluating the development of the SSCM literature via a mapping of the investigated topics to various aspects such as sustainability issues, industrial contexts, methodological rigor, and definitions (cf. Ahi and Searcy, 2013; Carter and Easton, 2011; Winter and Knemeyer, 2013). Although some interesting variations exist, for example, Seuring (2013) and Brandenburg et al. (2014) primarily focus on outlining the dispersion of quantitative modeling approaches in SSCM, and develop guidelines for encouraging modeling-based research. The review by Fahimnia et al. (2015) is based on a bibliometric analysis for explicating aspects such as geographical locations of the scholars, author influence, and affiliation statistics and citations. These works serve as an illustration of a structural orientation toward the review. In addition to these comprehensive reviews strengthening the understanding of diverse structural aspects of the literature, another principal orientation that guides some comprehensive reviews is the objective to explicate the deeper conceptual issues inherent in SSCM. Specifically, these reviews either conceptualize the transformation inherent in the development of sustainable supply chains (Carter and Rogers, 2008; Seuring and Müller, 2008), or focus on propagating organizational level implications in SSCM through a multitude of organizational theories (Sarkis et al., 2011; Touboulic and Walker, 2015a). Nevertheless, very few attempts have been made to locate the overarching conceptual themes prevailing in the literature across a larger sample of studies. As such, Srivastava (2007) focuses on the literature primarily from the reverse logistics angle, and Abbasi and Nilsson (2012) undertake a thematic exploration of the SSCM literature. The authors, however, limit their scope to only consider the environmental dimension in logistics and transportation. Similarly, Ashby et al. (2012) explicitly drop the economic dimension from their review scope. This suggests that the SSCM literature still requires a comprehensive mapping of its thematic coverage. In addition, in order to further strengthen the conceptual foundation of SSCM theory, it is important to delve deeper into the construction of a thematic landscape with a fundamental focus.