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1. Introduction
To date, any corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues relating to supply chains have tended to be focused on labour standards in factory suppliers based in developing countries (see for example [23] Fabian and Hill, 2005) as experienced to their cost by firms such as Gap and Nike ([65] Zadek, 2004). In fact, supply chain CSR challenges are closer to home than might at first be acknowledged and warrant more detailed scrutiny than thus far received ([59] Spence, 2006). Here, we are also concerned with a perspective on supply chain CSR which takes the view from the dominant company in the chain, the retailer, particularly in relation to small suppliers.
In this paper we advance the theoretical understanding of CSR and the supply chain. We use the empirical example of the UK food retailer Waitrose to illustrate this conceptual development. We argue that CSR, defined as the "consideration of, and response to, issues beyond the narrow economic, technical and legal requirements of the firm to accomplish social (and environmental) benefits along with the traditional economic gains which the firm seeks" ([1] Aguilera et al. , 2007, pp. 836-837), is an inadequate concept for capturing the necessary level of social responsibility for the whole supply chain critical in today's complex and integrated economic context. We develop a new approach called supply chain responsibility (SCR). Supply chain responsibility is the chain-wide consideration of, and response to, issues beyond the narrow economic, technical and legal requirements of the supply chain to accomplish social (and environmental) benefits along with the traditional economic gains which every member in that supply chain seeks. Importantly, however, we argue that even in the best case examples, SCR has not yet been achieved in practice. Instead, current best practice is reflective of a corporate social watchdog approach that is focused on the socially responsible credentials of a single actor in the chain being pushed up the supply chain.
SCR is important for scholars, policy makers and business alike. For academics researching supply chains and business ethics, focusing on individual organisations truncates the possibility of understanding inter-organisational issues. Supply chain managers sit at an organisation's boundaries, acting as a critical interface with important stakeholders including customers and suppliers ([12] Carter and Jennings, 2002). For...