Making Sustainability Sustainable

• Date: 01 April 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12103
• Author: Frank Montabon,Mark Pagell,Zhaohui Wu
• Published date: 01 April 2016

MAKING SUSTAINABILITY SUSTAINABLE

FRANK MONTABON

Iowa State University

MARK PAGELL

University College Dublin

ZHAOHUI WU

Oregon State University

The vast majority of research and practice regarding sustainable supply

chains has followed an instrumental logic, which has led firms and supply

chain managers to place economic interests ahead of environmental and

social interests. Evidence that firms are attempting to become less unsus-

tainable is mounting, but compensating practices such as offsetting a sup-

ply chain’s negative impact on the environment and society do not create

truly sustainable supply chains. This conceptual study seeks to move the

field from the question of how can firms merely diminish environmental

or social problems to how supply chains can become truly sustainable. To

that end, we review the major weaknesses in previous logics and develop

an Ecologically Dominant logic where environment and social interests

supersede economic interests. To encourage a wider adoption of our per-

spective, the study illustrates how the Ecologically Dominant logic can

advance practice and research. We do this by providing examples drawn

from practice and our previous research and by offering propositions to

encourage future research.

Keywords: sustainability; sustainable supply chain management; environmental

issues; social responsibility; human judgment and decision making

INTRODUCTION

Previous research on sustainable supply chains has

generally been framed using an instrumental logic

that asks how can a supply chain benefit from addressing

environmental or social issues (Gao & Bansal, 2013; Gar-

riga & Mel

e, 2004) as compared to how can a supply

chain become sustainable. This can be observed in the

multiple literature reviews on the link between being

more sustainable and economic performance (Barnett

& Salomon, 2012; Golicic & Smith, 2013; Orlitzky,

Schmidt & Rynes, 2003). The relationships of interest

in these reviews are explicit tests of an instrumental

logic where one construct, becoming more environ-

mentally or socially sustainable, influences another,

such as profits or some other type of economic perfor-

mance. For example, Klassen and Whybark’s (1999)

seminal article explores how environmental technolo-

gies impact manufacturing performance. Gao and

Bansal (2013) defined the instrumental logic as treating

the social and environmental aspects discretely and

sequentially “as if such issues are emerging distrac-

tions” (p. 241) and they explain that this logic has its

foundations in stakeholder theory, which places the

firm in the center of a stakeholder network and views

these stakeholders as either enablers or inhibitors of

the firm’s primary goal of creating wealth. The key to

the instrumental logic is that economic performance

is the goal, not sustainability.

This emphasis on finding shared value, win–win

outcomes or determining when it pays to be green

has certainly moved the field forward, and our intent

is not to dismiss the progress that has been made in

the last 30 years. However, previous research has

noted that an instrumental logic dominated by eco-

nomics, especially as manifested as profit, is antitheti-

cal to humanity’s well-being (e.g., Shrivastava, 1995).

In this paper, we offer an alternative logic, which we

call Ecologically Dominant (ED), that we argue can lead

April 2016 11

to truly sustainable supply chains. This study is aimed

primarily at researchers with the idea that if the logic

that guides research changes, then changes in practice

will follow.

The instrumental logic has two significant weak-

nesses and motivates this study to offer an alternative.

First, this logic is backward looking in that it studies

existing unsustainable supply chains to determine

what they are doing to become less unsustainable

(Pagell & Shevchenko, 2014). In extant research, sus-

tainability is mainly addressed from the perspective of

what can existing firms do to reduce their harm while

maintaining or increasing their profits. Research of

this nature cannot lead to truly sustainable supply

chains because it addresses trade-offs by prioritizing

the profits of existing firms over other sustainability

outcomes including the survival of society and the

environment. Second, while sustainable supply chain

research is ostensibly aimed at the entire chain and all

of its stakeholders, the reality is that it is usually con-

ducted from the perspective of a focal firm. This

means that research to date has mainly investigated

sustainability-related performance measures of the

focal firm while generally overlooking other members

of the chain and the communities in which the sup-

ply chain operates.

The Ecologically Dominant logic presented in this

study is explicit in its priorities when trade-offs are

encountered and is aimed at creating a truly sustain-

able supply chain, not at reducing the harm from a

single focal firm. This logic is illustrated in Figure 1,

which shows that economic and social issues are

nested inside environmental issues. When trade-offs

are inevitably encountered, the priority is to protect

the environment, then society and only then to con-

sider profits.

This study prescribes a new logic for conducting

research because using the current sustainability logic

will lead to the same, unsustainable results. The domi-

nance of economic measures is a norm that drives not

only the vast majority of practice, but also the pre-

ponderance of research, which in turn guides the

development of theory (Matthews, Power, Touboulic

& Marques, in press). Changing that norm is a critical

step toward sustainability.

Davis (2015) argues that the primary constituency for

organizational research has been managers, but should

now shift to society. Similarly, the primary constituency

for the current instrumental logic is the individual firm

in an existing supply chain, whereas the primary con-

stituency for our new logic is future society at large,

although we recognize that supply chains will be imple-

menting our logic. Managers have a fiduciary responsi-

bility to protect their firm’s survival and maximize

profits. Supply chain researchers do not. One of our

motivations for this study is to change the nature of

research on sustainable supply chains. Such research

may lead to regulatory policies and firm decisions that

cause some firms to go out of business to be replaced

by sustainable new entrants, that profits are redis-

tributed among chain members, or that other stake-

holders beyond a focal firm in a supply chain need to

be given priority. If this were to occur, it would under-

standably be unsettling for the manager of an existing

unsustainable business. However, we offer the Ecologi-

cally Dominant logic not to attack such firms but to

encourage research on true sustainability.

To recap, we see significant weaknesses in current

sustainable supply chain research, namely that it is

focused on a focal firm’s profits now rather than the

entire supply chain’s future impact on the environ-

mental and society. We offer an alternative Ecologi-

cally Dominant logic, which by being very explicit in

its trade-offs overcomes these weaknesses. This is a

normative or prescriptive logic that describes what

should happen to create truly sustainable supply

chains.

The Ecologically Dominant logic is developed based

on by the principals of Whetten (1989), Sutton and

Staw (1995), and Weick (1995). We theorize by

building on previous concepts and making use of pre-

vious findings to first explain why existing logics do

not lead to sustainability. From there, the new logic is

developed by combining conceptual theorizing with

rich narratives to develop propositions embedded in

the Ecologically Dominant logic and supported by

empirical data from cases.

1

The elements of sustain-

FIGURE 1

Ecologically Dominant Logic

Economic

Social

Environmental

Note: Adapted from Griggs et al. (2013)

1

For details on data collection please see Pagell and Wu (2009)

and Wu and Pagell (2011).

Volume 52, Number 2

Journal of Supply Chain Management

12