With sustainable development, a widely recognised necessity, stakeholders expect environmental and social responsibility to be considered in business operations. Sustainable initiatives have been integrated into various perspectives of supply chain management (SCM) (Beske and Seuring, 2014), and their implications have been the focus of many studies (BeskeJanssen et al., 2015; Carter and Jennings, 2004; Sarkis, 2012). However, current studies claim that “a company is no more sustainable than the suppliers from which it sources” (Miemczyk et al., 2012, p. 478), so sustainable SCM performance depends on the level of relationship governance and control of multi-tier suppliers. To address the complexity of contemporary global value chains, increasing studies have endeavoured to investigate social networks within sustainable SCM (Beske and Seuring, 2014; Miemczyk et al., 2012). Network relationships support a high level of collaboration and integration between players (AdensoDiaz et al., 2012; Creazza et al., 2010). Individual ties underlie inter- and intra-organisational relationships, influencing corporate strategy and the “adoption of change” required for sustainable SCM (Johnston and Linton, 2000, p. 465). Social networks are multifaceted. Different regions could embrace a variety of social constructs and expectations, such as wasta in the Middle East (Abosag and Naude, 2014). In this regard, this paper focuses on the investigation of guanxi networks – social networks in Confucianist cultures. Guanxi has been widely studied in marketing and management disciplines for its contribution to build mutual trust and reciprocity among people (Gao et al., 2014). In SCM, guanxi networks appear broadly in association with topics such as buyer–supplier relationships (Chen et al., 2011; Giannakis et al., 2012), supply chain integration (Cai et al., 2010) and knowledge sharing (Cheng, 2011). However, current studies have not yet fully captured the underlying mechanisms of sustainable SCM from a social network perspective, even though guanxi networks are showed to improve collaboration with suppliers in green SCM (Luo et al., 2014).