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Introduction
Sustainability has emerged as an important issue affecting firms and society. Globalization and the rapid development of third world economies are putting significantly increased pressure on the earth’s natural resources. Increased transparency and the free flow of information have enabled faster awareness of what is happening around the globe with businesses and their suppliers and customers. Business and societal stakeholders (e.g. governments, consumers, activists, environmentalists, employees, etc.) are demanding that businesses uphold a higher standard. These demands create pressures on companies to provide not only economic benefits but to also address environmental and social concerns, also known as triple bottom line (TBL) or corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Sustainability came to the forefront of attention when the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987). This raised the importance of sustainability in business and paying attention to environmental and societal concerns along with economic performance. The term TBL was coined by John Elkington (1999) and made popular through his book Cannibals with Forks: Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. The operationalization of sustainable business models requires a paradigm shift from a focus solely on maximizing profit to one that addresses social and environmental performance goals as well (Dyllick and Hockerts, 2002; Stormer, 2003). One way in which firms recognize the importance of sustainable business models is through their supply chain.
Supply chain management is in the frontline of sustainability in business as it provides a valuable opportunity for the firm to incorporate the objectives of TBL performance into its decision making processes. Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) extends the basic concept of supply chain management by broadening performance to consider sustainability dimensions as in the TBL. SSCM can be defined as in Seuring and Müller (2008a) as “the management of material, information, and capital flows, as well as cooperation among companies along the supply chain, while taking goals from all three dimensions of sustainable development into account” (p. 1700). Thus, SSCM involves the wider set of performance objectives identified by the TBL approach - economic, environmental, and social (Seuring and Müller, 2008b; Carter and Easton, 2011). The TBL explicitly...