طرح زنجیره تامین پایدار در کسب و کار اجتماعی: ارتقاء نظریه زنجیره تامین Sustainable Supply Chain Design in Social Businesses: Advancing the Theory of Supply Chain

INTRODUCTION A significant conceptual and practical challenge is how to integrate sustainability into global supply chains. Many highly publicized issues fall outside the realm of the profit and loss statement but are critical for the survival of the firm and the survival of populations. Consider, for example, that, according to the United Nations, the availability of clean water is lacking and negatively impacts about 783 million people around the globe (UN Water 2013). Another telling example of the global sustainability challenge is that of consistently rising temperatures due to climate change where countries signed the Paris Treaty committing to a global action plan that puts the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change (European Commission 2015). These two examples illustrate that the time for academics and practitioners to consciously rethink supply chains (or reshape value chains) has come (Howard-Grenville et al. 2014), as unpurposeful design could have negative environmental, social, and economic implications (Varsei and Polyakovskiy 2016). Accordingly, questions regarding how to redesign supply chains to manage risk and improve sustainability have been moving up the supply chain management research agenda (Bode and Wagner 2015; Durach et al. 2015; Wieland et al. 2016). It is challenging for managers to think about, and even more so to invest in, long, uncertain payback periods. These managers may also believe that certain areas of the world are not critical to business survival, and the issues that relate specifically to those areas are the problems of governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs; Fawcett and Waller 2015). But businesses increasingly have to recognize that there are significant trade-offs inherent in doing business that involve many other stakeholders and outcomes that focus on triple bottom line (TBL) sustainability objectives (Elkington 1998) rather than profit or cost outcomes. Governments and NGOs are part of doing business around the world and are therefore part of the network of stakeholders that share in TBL success. In contrast to such traditional economic foci in business, social businesses offer insights into a laboratory of sustainable supply chain designs (SSCDs). Social businesses strive to address multiple objectives, economic and social, and/or environmental simultaneously and pursue impacts that address stakeholder issues holistically (Lyons 2013) on both the demand and supply side (Thake and Zadek 1997). Social business models aim at value creation by addressing economic, environmental, and social elements, by promoting equitable relationships among stakeholders, and by adopting a fair revenue model (Boons and Luedeke-Freund 2013). Social business models can be deployed by firms of varying sizes and start-ups (e.g., Pura Vida Coffee; Wilson and Post 2013) or established firms (e.g., the Grameen Danone collaboration; Yunus et al. 2010). The current sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) research mainly addresses the economic and environmental dimensions of the TBL, but suggests, “[a] comprehensive analysis of sustainable business operations should consider all three TBL dimensions simultaneously” (Wu and Pagell 2011, 589). There is a clear need for further research into the issues of “how to create [emphasis added] truly sustainable supply chains” (Pagell and Shevchenko 2014, 44–45). Similarly, it has been emphasized that as “stewards of knowledge creation and dissemination, it is necessary to conduct in-depth, nuanced research to help decision-makers understand how to think, design, and deliver differently (Fawcett and Waller 2011)” (Fawcett and Waller 2015, 238).