Supply chain, sustainability, and industrial policy - the case of the UK offshore wind energy supply chain

UK policy makers and local authorities increasingly make a recourse to supply chain terminology when promoting sustainable development. Through a case study of the offshore wind industry in the UK, this paper shows that this recourse is based on artificial definitions that muddle the local-global dynamics of clusters with the economies of scale of global supply chains: these are two related but distinct concepts. We propose a different, meta-organisational, supply chain level of analysis which is more relevant and informative when considering and supporting investment in sustainable technologies

Sustainable operations modeling and data analytics

This editorial introduces the unique attributes of this special issue in the era of climate change, modern slavery, and big data. This special issue envisages the depth of penetration of sustainability, from strategy to the operations level, to understand the extent to which sustainability has attracted researchers and practitioners in dealing with various facets of operations management. Overall, it is encouraging to notice the research developments in all facets of operations management except process type, layout type, forecasting, and queuing. Out of three sustainability dimensions, this special issue received substantial contributions on economic and environmental aspects. All the contributions had at least two sustainability components in their decision models as well as newer analytical solutions. At the end, this piece outlines future research challenges and potential research opportunities

Sustainable operations management: A typological approach

This paper discusses the nature of sustainability and sustainable development as they relate to operations management. It proposes a typology for sustainable operations management that is based on the life cycle stages of a product and the three dimensions of corporate social responsibility. The aim is to show how this typology development could provide a useful approach to integrating the diverse strands of sustainability in operations, using industrial ecology and carbon neutrality as examples. It does this by providing a focused subset of environmental concerns for an industrial ecology approach, and some research propositions for the issue of carbon neutrality.Peer Reviewe

Three Essays on Sustainable Operations Management

This dissertation consists of three essays on sustainable operations management. The unifying theme in this work is the focus on sustainability-related risks originating from an organization’s internal operations or its supply chain, operational-level initiatives for managing such risks, and the determinants and subsequent outcomes of those initiatives. The first essay focuses on safety and environmental risks and looks into the role of a safety-oriented culture in effectively managing them. Building on the safety culture literature and organizational support theory, a conceptual model is developed suggesting that a safety-oriented culture enhances an organization’s financial performance and sets the stage for successful implementation of environmental and safety practices, which in turn, result in improved environmental and safety performance. The hypothesized relationships are empirically examined and validated using the data collected through a survey of 251 Canadian plants. The second essay is a conceptual paper focusing on supplier sustainability risks which materialize when buying organizations face their stakeholders’ negative reactions to their suppliers’ misconducts related to natural environment or society. The purpose of this paper is to explain the underlying factors of buying organizations’ operational-level responses to such risks. Drawing on agency/management control and resource dependence theories, a contingent conceptual framework is developed that explains how three major factors ─ i.e., supply managers’ perceived risk, dependence structure of buyer-supplier relationship, and the slack resources available to supply managers ─ interact to affect supply managers’ choice among four risk management strategies: monitoring-based or collaboration-based sustainable supplier development (risk mitigation), supplier phase-out (risk avoidance), and taking no actions (risk acceptance). This framework also suggests that these contingent risk management strategies improve buying organizations’ financial performance directly or indirectly through enhancing their organizational reputation. Finally, the third essay presents a vignette-based experiment conducted with a sample of 200 U.S.-based supply managers to empirically test and validate a set of propositions put forth in the second essay. Specifically, this study investigates and confirms the effect of three factors, i.e., supply manager’s perceived risk, supplier dependence on the buying organization, and slack resources available to supply managers, and their interactions on supply managers’ choice among the four risk management strategies

Sustainable operations of industrial symbiosis: an enterprise input-output model integrated by agent-based simulation

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a key for implementing circular economy. Through IS, wastes produced by one company are used as inputs by other companies. The operations of IS suffers from uncertainty barriers since wastes are not produced upon demand but emerge as secondary outputs. Such an uncertainty, triggered by waste supply-demand quantity mismatch, influences IS business dynamics. Accordingly, companies have difficulty to foresee potential costs and benefits of implementing IS. The paper adopts an enterprise input-output model providing a cost–benefit analysis of IS integrated to an agent-based model to simulate how companies share the total economic benefits stemming from IS. The proposed model allows to explore the space of cooperation, defined as the operationally favourable conditions to operate IS in an economically win-win manner. This approach, as a decision-support tool, allows the user to understand whether the IS relationship is created and how should the cost-sharing policy be. The proposed model is applied to a numerical example. Findings show that cost-sharing strategies are dramatically affected by waste supply-demand mismatch and by the relationship between saved and additional costs to run IS. Apart from methodological and theoretical contributions, the paper proposes managerial and practical implications for business strategy development in IS

Building a competitive advantage through sustainable operations strategy

This paper addresses an important gap in sustainability and technology management studies: the strategies for sustainable operations. Based on analysis of cases from automotive, textile, chemical, and food processing industries, the authors discuss the responses companies take to environmental and social pressures when aiming at increasing profitability. Our findings show that adaptations of traditional operations strategy frameworks can be useful when developing and assessing sustainability strategy for operations. Lastly, we also offer definitions for ‘sustainable operations strategy’ and ‘sustainable technology’ as those are not yet established in the literature. We consider the contribution of this article to be linked to the development and evaluation of sustainable operations strategies, which will invariably include the choice and use of technologies

Food waste: challenges and opportunities in sustainable operations

The call for papers for this Special Forum resulted in a very competitive selection of 37 being submitted. After several rounds of blind review, six papers were selected for this Special Forum. They clearly illustrate the challenges of carrying out research into sustainable operations and food waste reduction. They examine a variety of units of analysis and theories, which are embedded in different geographical contexts, and use a variety of analytical methods. What they all have in common is that they reveal just how applicable research aimed at finding solutions for reducing food waste is. In this Introductory article, we summarize the contributions of each of these six papers to the literature