چشم انداز زنجیره تامین در استراتژی های رقابتی و استراتژی های مدیریت زنجیره تامین سبز  Supply chain perspective on competitive strategies and green supply chain management strategies

1. Introduction The role of firms in the society and their responsibility in minimising the environmental impacts has received increasing attention. Green supply chain management (GSCM) has emerged as a way to combine environmental management and supply chain management (Srivastava, 2007). While firms are becoming more and more reliant on their suppliers to gain competitive advantages (Yeung et al., 2008), managers are increasingly forced to deal with social and environmental issues. Firms might be held responsible not only for their own but also for the environmental and social performance of their suppliers (Seuring & Müller 2008). As a response to pressures from various stakeholders, such as regulators, customers, competitors and NGOs, firms have introduced supplier evaluation schemes that integrate environmental and social criteria (Seuring & Müller, 2008) and required environmental audits or environmental certifications from suppliers (Vachon & Klassen, 2006; Lee et al., 2014). On the other hand, there are several strategic motivations driving managers to greener supply chain management, such as positive corporate image, increased efficiency and innovation leadership (Testa & Iraldo, 2010). Properly designed environmental standards can create innovations that lower the total costs of a product or improve its value (Porter & van der Linde, 1996). Sustainability can be a valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resource that may become a source of competitive advantage (Hollos et al., 2012). In addition, GSCM is a way to minimise the risk of potential losses stemming from poor environmental performance. For example, environmental incidents can intensify regulatory pressures (Reid & Toffel, 2009), damage the firm’s image, reputation and share price, and have customers boycott the firms or cancel their orders (Bansal & Clelland, 2004; Hajmohammad & Vachon 2016) In a global survey by McKinsey (2014), 43 per cent of respondents reported that their firm seeks to align sustainability with their overall business goals, mission or values. However, prior literature suggests that sustainable supply chain management is not at the core of every firm’s competitive strategy (van de Ven and Jeurissen, 2005; Hoejmose et al., 2013), and some firms might deliberately choose a late adopter approach (Pajunen et al., 2016). Firms need to balance environmental issues and sound business practices in a dynamic, complex and uncertain environment (Wu & Pagell 2011). Environmental and social sustainability is deemed particularly difficult because of their complexity, their interrelations with traditional business objectives and a longer time period (Longoni & Cagliano, 2015). Pajunen et al. (2016) studied Finnish firms operating in process and mining industries and found out that although sustainability was embedded in many firms’ values and communication, it is not reflected in the operational level. There is a need to increase the understanding of the relationship between competitive strategy and GSCM. Generic competitive strategies, such as cost leadership/differentiation framework by Porter (1980), could thus be used to extend the theory to discuss GSCM adoption.