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Introduction
One need only contemplate the recent and rapid rise in oil prices, rising transparency and consumer awareness of where and under what types of working conditions products are manufactured, and financial reporting requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley to understand how these factors might affect a firm's supply chain and its economic bottom line. Until recently, most logistics and supply chain management research has examined issues such as the environment, safety, and human rights in a standalone fashion, without consideration of the potential interrelationships among these and other aspects of social responsibility ([21] Carter and Jennings, 2002). The work of [21], [22] Carter and Jennings (2002, 2004) and [106] Murphy and Poist (2002) begins to fill this void, by explicitly examining these standalone issues as a broader conceptualization and higher-order construct of logistics social responsibility (LSR) and purchasing social responsibility (PSR). Yet, this more recent social responsibility research contains an important omission - a failure to explicitly include what [14] Carroll (1979) refers to as an organization's economic responsibility.
The term sustainability, which increasingly refers to an integration of social, environmental, and economic responsibilities, has begun to appear in the literature of business disciplines such as management and operations. In addition, companies are beginning to rapidly adopt the term sustainability. About 68 percent of the Global 250 firms generated a separate annual sustainability report in 2004 which considered environmental, social, and economic issues, in contrast to the primary emphasis on environmental reporting in 1999; in addition, 80 percent of these reports discuss supply chain-related issues ([84] KPMG, 2005). Unfortunately, a review of the literature will show that the term sustainability has been inconsistently defined and applied in the extant research.
This lack of an explicit consideration of economic criteria in current models and definitions of LSR and PSR, and the failure to consistently define sustainability and to apply the concepts of sustainability to the field of supply chain management, lead to the following research questions:
RQ1. How can the term sustainability be defined and applied to supply chain management?
RQ2. Is there a relationship between the integration of the concepts of sustainability and supply chain management, and long-term economic success?
More specifically, do firms which engage in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices attain higher economic...