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Introduction
We have known that supply chains can have a considerable impact on the environment (Shi et al. , 2012; Svensson and Wagner, 2012), and significant strides have been taken to address this fact (Simpson and Power, 2005; Tachizawa et al. , 2014). The practices with greening supply chains have shown continual improvement. However, irresponsible business activities remain a risk to others in the chain. A good example is the most recent and perhaps memorable incident that occurred with Apple Inc. The employees of Foxconn, a manufacturer of electronic devices for many firms including Apple, threatened mass suicide for the poor working conditions in the facilities. As a result, Apple was implicated in the sweatshop conditions (Guglielmo, 2013), merely by association and their reputation was threatened. This example serves to represent supply chain reputation risks where chain members' irresponsible actions have the potential to impact other parties.
There are many other examples of this type of risk such as Deepwater Horizon's questionable activities resulting in the worst oil disaster in the history of USA. Because of Deepwater, British Petroleum (BP) paid the price monetarily (Gilbert and Scheck, 2014) and with respect to their reputation, the impact continues. In the USA, the release of the screenplay "Deepwater Horizon" is anticipated for September 2016 - IMDb.com , Inc., an amazon.com company, already listed the movie as the "Most Popular Feature Film released in 2016" in the "Drama" category (Anonymous, 2015).
Although a close collaboration between chain members can often lead to positive outcomes for all parties involved (cf. Wagner and Alderdice, 2006), it is the dark side to it (Juhasz, 2012) that deserves the most attention. The "Horsemeat Scandal" in Europe (see Anonymous, 2013a for the timeline of events) impacted many organisations along the supply chain. Even large retailers fell victim to the phenomenon, with IKEA withdrawing their product from 14 European countries (Pollak, 2013) and Tesco investigating and revising their list of approved suppliers (Stones, 2013) in an effort to rebuild their reputation and trust with their customers. Tim Smith, Group Technical Director at Tesco, emphasised:
We want to leave customers in no doubt that we will do whatever it takes to ensure the quality of their food and that the food they buy is exactly...