Examining customer pressure and green supply chain management in emerging market: An institutional logics perspective

Abstract

Employing contingency and configuration approach, this study explores the role of institutional logics in the relationship between customers' green expectations and firms' adoption of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices. The results of a survey of 310 supplier companies in China, an important emerging market, provide the empirical evidence for the coexistence of multiple institutional logics that are divergent from and almost incompatible with firms' GSCM practices. The multiple logics impose different and conflicting effects on the adoption of GSCM practices when responding to customers’ expectations. Thus, decisions about the adoption of GSCM practices are complicated and contingent on institutional logics. Despite advances in GSCM and rising customer expectations concerning sustainability and the environment, firms still struggle to engage suppliers. This study illuminates how multiple and competing institutional logics play a role in this area. Our results suggest that firms with predominantly cost logic are less likely to engage with GSCM compared to those with market or regulative logics.