In the sustainable supply chain management literature, the social dimension has been insufficiently investigated. The aim of this research is to analyse why and how focus companies implement and manage social sustainability in their supply chains. To do this, we adopted a multiple case study research strategy in six focal companies which had implemented 34 supply chain social initiatives. We draw from the constructs of motivation and supply chain engagement to develop a typology that improves our understanding of the complex interactions between the management of supply chains and their social sustainability performance. This research also explored a third concept, social relationship level, which helps us to understand which relationship levels focal companies often use to operationalize such initiatives. Results suggest that intrinsically motivated social sustainability initiatives in supply chains led focal companies to adopt supply chain structural collaborations, while extrinsically motivated social initiatives were more strongly connected with information exchange only. The involvement of primary stakeholder groups (e.g., consumers and suppliers) occurs usually in extrinsically motivated social initiatives, while the involvement of secondary stakeholders (e.g., NGOs and community) seems to be the norm for intrinsically motivated social initiatives.

Introduction

An increasing number of companies are considering sustainability as a key strategic issue (Burritt and Schaltegger, 2014; Gold et al., 2010; Hassini et al., 2012); as a consequence, the literature on the subject has been growing significantly (Bansal and DesJardine, 2014). The sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) perspective suggests that the focus on individual organizations tells us little about sustainability since sustainability issues can only be evident if the entire supply chain is analysed (Silvestre, 2016). This is because sometimes focal companies hide unsustainable operations in distant parts of the supply chain in order to avoid public backlash and loss of reputation (Chan and Pun, 2010). As supply chains (SC) become increasingly complex and difficult to manage, researchers have been searching for useful approaches to deal with this complexity. Sustainability and SSCM perspectives are primarily centred on the notion of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), which indicates that all three dimensions of performance—economic, social, and environmental—are interconnected and are equally important (Elkington, 2002). The social dimension, however, has often been neglected in SSCM studies (Abbasi, 2017; Ashby et al., 2012; Wu and Pagell, 2011), and it is therefore under-valued, under-explored, and under-theorized (Pullman et al., 2009; Silvestre, 2015a). Perhaps this neglect can be justified because companies find the social issues more challenging to address than the environmental ones (Ashby et al., 2012), or because sustainability in the broad TBL definition represents a theoretical construct with limited practical relevance (Brandenburg et al., 2014). The research presented here addresses the following question: Why and how do focal companies implement and manage social sustainability in their supply chains? A focal company is the member of the supply chain that provides leadership and exercises the greatest control over supply chain decisions and activities (Cooper and Ellram, 1993). This study makes a contribution to the field of SSCM by responding to the numerous calls to address social sustainability in supply chains (e.g., Ashby et al., 2012; Touboulic and Walker, 2015; Mani et al., 2018), and by providing empirical evidence on why and how focal companies actually implement and manage the social dimension in practice. The research explores these initiatives in the context of emerging economies, where empirical studies investigating drivers and outcomes of social sustainability adoption are still rare (Mani and Gunasekaran, 2018). In this context, pressing social problems exist (Yawar and Seuring, 2015) amplified by a higher level of complexity and environmental turbulence (Silvestre, 2015a). This setting is particularly important for studies on supply chain management since in the current globalized economy supply chains often operate in countries where governments and suppliers may have lower social standards than the ones operating in developed countries (Busse, 2016; McCarthy et al., 2013).