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1. Introduction
Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has attracted great attention from academics and practitioners in recent years (Tachizawa and Yew Wong, 2014). The popularity of the field can be measured in terms of the exponential leap in the number of published articles around the issue of sustainability in supply chain networks in the last five years. Seuring et al. (2008) have argued that the sustainable supply chain literature has so far failed to investigate the impacts of sustainable practices on social dimensions. From an environmental and economic perspective, Ashby et al. (2012) and Halldorsson et al. (2009) have argued that the word “sustainability” is over-stretched and it maybe that the level of attention is raised by unnecessary hyperbole surrounding sustainability in supply chains. Beske and Seuring (2014) have argued that a sustainable supply chain differs from a conventional supply chain. There is also strong evidence suggesting that sustainability in supply chain networks has helped organizations to achieve better performance (e.g. Tsoulfas and Pappis, 2006; Yusuf et al., 2013; Plambeck et al., 2013).
Despite the popularity of the SSCM field, it is quite evident from the literature that the concept of a sustainable supply chain is poorly understood from both theoretical and managerial points of view. There is growing body of literature related to SSCM, but, on the other hand, there are overlaps between green supply chain management (GSCM) or environmental supply chain management literature and sustainable supply chain literature, as well as other areas that have attracted significant contributions, such as environmental supply chains, ethical supply chains and responsible supply chains. Markman and Krause (2014), in a recent call for papers, have argued for more integrated theory building articles. Despite the popularity of the SSCM topics amongst researchers, there is still a need for critical review and a framework that will shed light upon the different definitions and perspectives and links, and will provide further research directions. To bridge this knowledge gap and driven by the endorsement of Markman and Krause, this study aims at achieving the following research objectives:
to review the literature of SSCM and develop a classification of literature based on previous scholarly works;
to argue for the use of world class SSCM (WCSSCM) and propose a theoretical framework...