Sustainable supply chain management when focal firms are complex: a network perspective

The purpose of the paper is to generate an understanding of the prerequisites for sustainable supply chain management. A common tendency in the literature is to see sustainable supply chain management as something that is undertaken by a focal firm at the end of the chain. Even though many scholars point to the need for cooperative approaches, focal firms are still considered to manage supply chains from one fixed and coherent vantage point: the managerial outlook of the focal firm itself, understood as a structurally coherent, top-down controlled unit. Through an illustration from the Swedish retail sector, we argue that such a vantage point is problematic. We suggest a deeper analysis of focal firms and sustainable supply chain management in terms of a network perspective employed mainly in the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) literature. The adopted network perspective recognizes both internal and external complexity of sustainable supply chain management, implying, for example, difficulties to control entire organizations and the existence of multiple supply chains to manage. It is also suggested that sustainable supply networks may be a viable concept to use when dealing with sustainability issues related to production, since it relates sustainability in the supply chain to the more general responsibility context of firms. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.