Social sustainability tensions in multi-tier supply chain: A systematic literature review towards conceptual framework development

As many unethical practices and violations of social norms originate from higher tier suppliers and their sub-suppliers, it is of paramount importance to ensure social sustainability in the entire supply chain, especially for higher tier suppliers. This has led to a considerable increase in interest among the researchers and academicians working in the domain of social sustainability. This article reviews 129 research papers published in different journals and attempted to identify drivers, issues, barriers, tensions, practices, and performances related to social sustainability in multi-tier supply chains. The prevalent theories and governance mechanisms of social sustainability in multi-tier supply chains have also been presented. The commonly used theories are stakeholder theory, institutional theory, resource based view theory, transaction cost economics theory, grounded theory, and resource dependence theory. It is observed that most of the papers have presented drivers, barriers, issues, and practices in generic ways by conducting exploratory case studies using single case or multiple cases; there is a distinct lack of multi-tier perspectives devoted to the context of emerging economies. The tension, an important aspect of implementation of social sustainability practices, has not been addressed adequately in the extant literature for multi-tier supply chains. This review also proposes a conceptual framework of social sustainability linking drivers, issues, barriers, tensions, practices, and performances. Finally, future avenues of research on social sustainability have been outlined. (c) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This review article summarizes the current research on social sustainability in multi-tier supply chains, including drivers, issues, barriers, tensions, practices, and performances, and suggests potential research directions.