Practicing sustainability in operations and supply Chain management

Abstract

Over the last decades, the exploration of sustainability in the context of operations and supply chain management (O&SCM) has become a significant field of research (Touboulic and Walker, 2015). This undoubtedly stems from the fact that the global organising of business operations is responsible for much of the environmental degradation and social exploitation that is witnessed in the world. Yet much of the research to date is still very much rooted in an observation-led paradigm and the field has primarily adopted a narrow focus on sustainability following an instrumental logic (Matthews et al. 2016; Montabon, Pagell, and Wu 2016; Gold and Schleper 2017; Silva, Fritz, and El-Garaihy 2022a), which overshadow the diversity of different possibilities to advance the practice of sustainability and drive lasting change. Practicing sustainability in supply chains (SCs) exceeds focus on a goal itself to consider how actors are performing and learning actions over time as a practice (Silva and Figueiredo 2020). This requires engagement with the reality in which these actors work and interact, and a thorough understanding of the specific and broader contextual dynamics in which they are embedded (Touboulic, McCarthy, and Matthews 2020). Developing sustainability as a practice is about understanding habitus of agents, which considers not only those aspects that are known but also requires defining emerging elements and meanings in order to drive action. It is important to highlight that this reality is changing over time and expectations on how to practice sustainability in SCs are influenced by some important trends in the broader context, such as political aspects or emerging international frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations (Fritz and Silva 2018; Fritz 2019). This Special Issue (SI) on practicing sustainability in O&SCM aimed at highlighting a diversity of approaches that not only show the importance of a practice-based perspective but also demonstrate empirically how to practice sustainability in SCs, including how change can be fostered at various levels, and what roles stakeholders may play within and outside the SC. The call for this SI was launched in 2021 in parallel with the 8 International EurOMA Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Forum conference organised at Excelia Business School, La Rochelle, France. The topic of the conference was ‘Practicing Sustainability in Operations & Supply Chain Management’, which was stimulated by a wish to move the field forward and specify what constitutes a sustainability practice and how to implement sustainability practices along the SC.