مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Because of the world’s rapid economic and industrial growth, today’s global business environments necessarily focus on supply chains and operations management. Managers of traditional supply chains have had to become flexible to the dynamic, changing requirements of their customers while still maintaining profits. That new approach is called “responsive,” (Roh et al., 2014), and responsive supply chains typically include green supply chain management (GSCM) techniques, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), reverse logistics, or other strategies. Historically, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widely accepted as an important supply chain approach that emphasizes both competition and sustainability. In fact, CSR includes the three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social concerns. Pressures from both internal and external stakeholders have urged industrial managers to adopt CSR practices into their supply chains, and the potential benefits are noteworthy. Adopting CSR practices may increase the market share and sales revenue of a firm, and it may improve customers’ perception of the firm (Salam, 2009; Xu et al., 2013). In recent decades, the rise of CSR depends on the global political economy (Luning, 2012) and has become a popular research topic, but an exact definition of the concept is still under debate (Devinney, 2009; Mcwilliams et al., 2006). Because of the lack of a clear definition of CSR, companies emphasize and practice it differently (Oberseder et al., 2013). Thus, the next research focus has been to establish the role of CSR and to identify, in particular, what stakeholders expect from a company that adopts CSR practices.

Some current literature explores the importance of stakeholder involvement in CSR implementation. First, we must recognize that in many firms, stakeholder perspectives are not considered; decisions are left solely to managers. Researchers disagree on the value of including stakeholders’ views. For instance, Trapp (2014) argues that more benefits emerge for the company when stakeholders are involved in the decision to adopt CSR strategies. On the other hand, Costa and Menichini (2013) state that stakeholders sometimes do not know how a company might specifically implement CSR practices. We can affirm, however, that adopting CSR practices is likely to ignite relations between the firm and its stakeholders and will likely improve the company’s competitive advantage.

Supplier selection is one of the toughest decisions industrial managers make, because the amount spent for procuring materials may reach 75% of the company’s initial capital costs, and inefficiencies in the supplier selection process will damage the firm’s profit margin (Cheung et al., 2009; Xu et al., 2013). In a conventional supply chain, supplier selection is generally based on some common criteria such as quality, cost, durability, or the supplier’s environmental management system. Currently, few studies consider the role of multiple stakeholders in the supplier selection process; those that do focus on either green or economic criteria. Some work that considers the supplier selection process (Xu et al., 2013; Baskaran et al., 2011; Baskaran et al., 2012) will include a discussion of CSR perspectives, but those studies are limited to the multi-stakeholder approach and examine CSR issues, not practices. Hence, to fill this literature gap, this study considers the supplier selection process based on the CSR practices with the concern of multi-stakeholder perspectives. To address the research gap and to achieve the aim of the paper, three research questions are framed as follows: RQ1: Why are CSR practices really needed for this study? RQ2: What are the most influential CSR practices that will be involved in the supplier selection process? RQ3: How do multiple stakeholders influence the supplier selection process?