Supply chain collaboration for sustainability: A literature review and future research agenda

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Abstract

New technology is altering business strategies and innovation capabilities while increasing the possibilities of production and process innovation. Supply chain collaboration undertaken for the sake of sustainability is currently speeding up this process of change; a growing pool of research is exploring the links between sustainability collaboration and company performance on economic, environmental, and social metrics. It is a good time to review the literature to reveal what has been studied and what are the gaps in the current body of knowledge, and also to comment on what the future research agenda should include. For these purposes, the authors conducted a systematic literature review and a quantitative bibliometric analysis. Results indicate that research about supply chain collaboration for the purpose of sustainability is gaining growing attention in the business field; however, environmental and economic considerations still dominate the research, while there is a lack of consideration about social concerns such as child labor and personal development. In addition, the collaboration partners under investigation have mainly been the company and its customers and suppliers, whereas competitors and other horizontal collaboration partners have received little attention.

Introduction

Supply chain collaboration has become a strategic issue for companies that wish to achieve their economic, social, and environmental sustainability targets. Most researchers define supply chain collaboration as a partnership process in which no less than two independent parties work hand in hand to mastermind and execute supply chain operations for the fulfillment of common goals and mutual benefits (Cao and Zhang, 2011). This collaboration process may include governments and university/research institutes, which define development policies and contribute to the relevant R&D activities, respectively (Lee et al., 2010). Meanwhile, collaboration among multiple businesses for environmental improvements should be a key issue for a sustainable supply chain management (Lu et al., 2007).

The studies on supply chain management highlight the importance of coordination among companies. Soylu et al. (2006) point out that supply chain collaboration is a common way for companies throughout the supply chain to share the information, make strategic alliances to improve performance, and reduce overall costs and inventories. The ultimate objective for supply chain collaboration is to increase a company’s competitive advantage (Soylu et al., 2006; Cao and Zhang, 2011).

Nowadays, companies must address external and internal concerns to become more environmentally and socially responsible while maintaining their responsibilities toward economic sustainability. Industrial practices increasingly emphasize that collaboration is a feasible means of balancing these three priorities. Such collaborations have expanded over time to include all the relevant parties of an industrial value chain. As the academic literature examining supply chain collaboration and sustainability is still in a relatively infantile stage (Linton et al., 2007), the time to undertake an in-depth analysis of the research to date is now. Such an analysis will allow academic and industrial practices move forward in tandem.

This paper focuses on the subject of sustainability and supply chain collaboration from a broad perspective that includes economic, environmental, and social aspects. The research objectives of this paper are to summarize the current state-of-the-art in the field of sustainability and supply chain collaboration research, as well as to identify what future research would best benefit the field. Thus, the research questions in this paper are:

  • What are the state-of-the-art and existing trends in the research on sustainability and supply chain collaboration?

  • What gaps exist in the research, and what may be done to contribute to future research?

To address these questions, we scoured different databases to collect articles that fit the research objectives. Then we provided a comprehensive analysis of the current literature in supply chain cooperation and collaboration for the sake of sustainability and conducted a triangulation analysis of the literature to improve understanding of the current research situation. A systematic literature review and quantitative bibliometric analysis have been applied to improve the results of the analysis.

In this paper, we take a broad strategic perspective of sustainability and supply chain collaboration from both qualitative and quantitative views. There are some significant features in this review: i) it explicitly includes supply chain collaboration practices in terms of their ability to effect sustainability, ii) it considers sustainability from a broad viewpoint that includes not only economic aspects, but environmental and social factors as well.

Following the introduction chapter, the paper presents an overview of the review methodology. It then provides a classification scheme for the selected articles based on content analysis, and then illustrates the results of a bibliometric analysis that indicates the leading individual contributors and leading organizations in this field. We elaborated a conceptual framework that can help researchers to assess the relationship between sustainability and supply chain collaboration. From there, the paper provides a research agenda for the purpose of contributing the existing knowledge of industry and academia on the relationship between sustainability and supply chain collaboration.

Section snippets

Methodology

To address the research questions, we performed a thorough review on the literature relating to supply chain collaboration for the purpose of sustainability. The literature review team, made up of two senior researchers and two PhD students, held discussions and cooperated in all facets of this literature review. The four researchers performed independent work first, and then entered a panel discussion at every research step. This study followed the process recommended by Krippendorff (1980),

Results

This section summarizes the trends in the literature in terms of the distribution of publications over time, the journals at which papers were published, and the kind of supply chain collaboration explored by the papers. The content analysis reveals that the most frequently discussed issues about sustainability and supply chain collaboration in the current literature can be divided into three broad aspects: internal collaboration, vertical collaboration, and horizontal collaboration. Vertical

Synthesizing the framework

The results of the content and bibliometric analyses indicate the practices of supply chain collaboration for sustainability, as well their effects on a company’s sustainability performance. In order to fulfill our research purpose, we further identified and categorized the important factors of supply chain collaboration for sustainability. Based on the topic areas discussed previously in this paper, Table 7 describes in further detail the sub-dimensions of supply chain collaboration for

Future research agenda

Based on the qualitative and quantitative analyses provided in the study, this section identifies areas that deserve further research attention and build the future research agenda for sustainability and supply chain collaboration. In particular, we focus on what research questions need to be answered concerning how firms can develop more economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable business practices through supply chain collaboration.

The content analysis of papers according to the

Conclusions

This paper applied a triangulation research method to explore the current body of literature on supply chain collaboration for the purpose of sustainability. We found that most articles in this special field emerged in the 21st century. Using content analysis, we categorized the existing literature on the diversified topics, methods, and changing research focuses over time in this research area. The field contains several influential and closely collaborating authors. Prior research has

Limitations

There are still some limitations in this study. First, we have not discussed the various effects of each practice of supply chain collaboration on the performance of sustainability, since the different measurement systems adopted by each article would have resulted in inconsistent findings. Another limitation of this review is that this paper focuses on literature related to the limited keywords in the operations management field. Given the complexity of supply chain collaboration for

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