Inside the Buying Firm: Exploring Responses to Paradoxical Tensions in Sustainable Supply Chain Management

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12170
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Author: Miriam Wilhelm,Chengyong Xiao,Dirk Pieter Donk,Taco Vaart

INSIDE THE BUYING FIRM: EXPLORING RESPONSES TO

PARADOXICAL TENSIONS IN SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY

CHAIN MANAGEMENT

CHENGYONG XIAO , MIRIAM WILHELM , TACO VAN DER VAART , AND

DIRK PIETER VAN DONK

University of Groningen

An instrumental perspective still dominates research on sustainable supply

chain management (SSCM). As an alternative, this study presents a para-

dox perspective and argues that sustainability and other business aims are

not always compatible, particularly in an emerging market context. Often,

paradoxical tensions originate in conflicts between the socioeconomic

environment of emerging market suppliers and their Western customers’

demands for both cost competitiveness and sustainability. We argue that

Western buying firms can play a key role in moderating such tensions, as

experienced by emerging market suppliers. Specifically, we explore how

purchasing and sustainability managers within buying firms make sense

of and respond to paradoxical tensions in SSCM. We conduct an in-depth

case study of a Western multinational company that sources substantially

from Chinese suppliers. While we found strong evidence for a persisting

instrumental perspective in the sensemaking and practices of purchasing

and sustainability managers, we also observed an alternative response, pri-

marily by sustainability managers that we labeled as “contextualizing.”

Contextualizing can alleviate the tensions otherwise present in SSCM by

making sustainability standards more workable in an emerging market

context, and it can help individual managers to move toward paradoxical

sensemaking. We outline the value of paradoxical sensemaking in bring-

ing about changes toward “true sustainability”in SSCM.

Keywords: supplier sustainability; paradoxical tensions; emerging markets; buying

firms

INTRODUCTION

Attempting to achieve sustainability in supply chains

involves multiple tensions (Hahn, Pinkse, Preuss, &

Figge, 2015; Montabon, Pagell, & Wu, 2016). Ten-

sions can surface between short-term profitability and

long-term environmental integrity (Slawinski & Ban-

sal, 2015; Wu & Pagell, 2011), between cost efficiency

and sustainability (Busse, 2016; Ruwanpura &

Wrigley, 2011; Yu, 2008), and between competing

stakeholders’ interests (Chung, 2015; Thornton, Autry,

Gligor, & Brik, 2013; Wu, Ellram, & Schuchard,

2014). Despite this, research in the fields of corporate

sustainability and sustainable supply chain manage-

ment (SSCM) has predominantly followed an instru-

mental perspective, which takes for granted the

dominant role of economic concerns over social and

environmental goals (Gao & Bansal, 2013) and con-

tinues to view the relationships among environmen-

tal, social, and economic goals in terms of either win–

wins or trade-offs (Van der Byl & Slawinski, 2015).

However, there have been recent conceptual

attempts to provide alternative perspectives to this

instrumental view on sustainability by conceptualizing

sustainability and other business targets as equally

important, but not easily unifiable, aims (Hahn et al.,

Acknowledgement: The authors would like to thank the Co-Edi-

tor-in-Chief Dr. Brian Fugate, Associate Editor, and three anony-

mous reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback on

the earlier versions of this paper. The authors are also very grate-

ful for the insightful comments and feedback provided by Prof.

Dr. Christian Busse (University of Oldenburg). Data collection

of this study was partially funded by National Science Founda-

tion of China, under the grants of 71371178 and 71390331.

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Journal of Supply Chain Management

2019, 55(1), 3–20

©2018 The Authors Journal of Supply Chain Management Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

January 2019

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

2015; Matthews, Power, Touboulic, & Marques, 2016;

Montabon et al., 2016). Some proponents of this

emerging perspective even consider sustainability and

other business aims as constituting a paradox—contra-

dictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultane-

ously (Hahn et al., 2015; Lewis, 2000). Paradox

scholars encourage managers to accept and embrace

contradictions, rather than attempt to resolve the ten-

sions between them (Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009;

Lewis, 2000; Smith & Lewis, 2011). This however

requires managers to apply paradoxical rather than

adversarial sensemaking on sustainability issues.

Unfortunately, empirical research that systematically

explores to what extent managers actually develop

paradoxical sensemaking when it comes to sustain-

ability is generally scarce and lacking in a supply

chain context.

Given that Western buying firms have been strongly

criticized for being a major source of the sustainability

tensions experienced by suppliers (Huq, Stevenson, &

Zorzini, 2014; Lund-Thomsen & Lindgreen, 2014), we

have taken a closer look “inside the buying firm” to

try to understand how managers within buying firms

deal with contradictory aims in the context of an

emerging market. The responses of managers inside

the buying firm can have a profound impact on how

suppliers experience sustainability tensions (Jiang,

2009; Lund-Thomsen & Lindgreen, 2014). One

should also acknowledge that a buying firm is not a

monolithic entity, and different functional groups,

such as purchasing and sustainability management,

may pursue their own interests and consequently

develop different responses to these tensions. As such,

it is important to distinguish between these functional

groups as their sensemaking and behavioral responses

might indeed differ (Hahn et al., 2015). We thus ask:

“How do purchasing and sustainability managers

within the buying firm make sense of and respond to

paradoxical tensions in sustainable supply chain

management?”

To answer this question, we have conducted an in-

depth case study at a large multinational company in

the consumer electronics industry (referred to as COS-

MOS) that sources substantially from China. Our

extensive fieldwork reveals a mixed picture. We found

that the dominant response by both purchasing and

sustainability managers is still the intentional, or

unintentional, suppression of sustainability ideals to

achieve cost targets, reflecting the dominance of an

instrumental logic in the practice of SSCM. However,

we also observed that sustainability managers devel-

oped alternative responses by contextualizing standards

to make them more “workable” for emerging market

suppliers and to alleviate the tensions in sustainability

implementation. Even though contextualizing might

not lead to genuinely radical changes toward “true

sustainability” (Montabon et al., 2016; Pagell & Shev-

chenko, 2014), it is an important response as it allows

managers to develop paradoxical sensemaking capabil-

ities (Hahn, Preuss, Pinkse, & Figge, 2014; Smith &

Tushman, 2005), which is a precondition for tran-

scending organizational contradictions (Osono, Shi-

mizu, & Takeuchi, 2008).

This study makes several contributions to the litera-

ture. First, recent developments in the study of corpo-

rate sustainability (Gao & Bansal, 2013; Hahn et al.,

2015; Van der Byl & Slawinski, 2015) and supply

chain sustainability (Markman & Krause, 2016; Mon-

tabon et al., 2016; Pagell & Shevchenko, 2014) have

highlighted that sustainability research has yet to

focus on the tensions present within supply chains.

This study fills this gap by applying a paradox per-

spective that focuses on how purchasing and sustain-

ability managers within a buying firm actually make

sense of, and respond to, sustainability tensions. Our

study is among the few that have empirically investi-

gated, at the functional level, managerial responses to

sustainability tensions within a firm seeking to

address sustainability in its supply chain. As such, it is

one of the first to investigate paradoxical tensions

beyond the specific context of business–NGO partner-

ships (Sharma & Bansal, 2017) and hybrid organiza-

tions (Jay, 2013).

Second, we also contribute to research on organiza-

tional paradoxes more generally. Conceptual frame-

works on organizational paradoxes have often ignored

the political, institutional, or social context in which

the paradox is embedded (Hargrave & Van de Ven,

2017). This might be particularly relevant for the sus-

tainability paradox as this “requires a system’s view of

organizations and the environments in which they are

embedded” (Slawinski & Bansal, 2015: p. 545). In the

context of SSCM, emerging markets constitute a diffi-

cult environment as formal and informal institutions

are often not sufficiently supportive of social and

environmental sustainability (Huq, Chowdhury, &

Klassen, 2016; Jiang, 2009; Parmigiani & Rivera-San-

tos, 2015). By incorporating the socioeconomic envi-

ronment and the systemic power distribution that

shapes sustainability tensions, we provide insights for

managers as to how sustainability tensions can be

dealt with in such environments. Related to this, and

third, we question the prescriptive nature of the para-

dox literature, which assumes that paradoxes can be

productively dealt with once managers apply paradox-

ical sensemaking and accept contradictory elements

rather than trying to resolve the tensions between

them. We show that paradoxical sensemaking, particu-

larly in the context of sustainability in emerging mar-

kets, is still the exception rather than the rule and that

managers need time to develop such cognitive capa-

bilities. We argue that contextualizing requirements

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